Keeping one cow / Being the experience of a number of practical writers, in a clear and condensed form, upon the management of a single milch cow

by Various

GARGET.

Of one thing I am very careful, and that is, not to allow the inflowing milk, previous to calving, to harden in the udder, and in all my long experience, in owning cows, I have never had a case of garget. When I was a boy about twelve years of age, my father purchased a very large milker for those days. I noticed that the right hind quarter of her udder was much smaller than the other, and yielded a correspondingly less quantity of milk. After she had been dried off, and the time approached for her to calve, I observed that this same quarter of her udder became very much more distended than the others. Her whole udder was very much distended, but this quarter excessively so. As her period of calving was delayed, and her udder became more inflamed, producing, evidently, great pain to the cow, I asked the privilege of milking her, and was denied. At the same time I was given to understand that it was the worst possible thing that could be done for the cow; that it was necessary that her udder should become thus distended, in order to give it the capacity to contain the flow of milk after calving; that should she be milked before calving, the yield after calving would be very much lessened, etc. By the time she calved, her udder was one indurated mass, and that particular quarter of it so much inflamed that she could not bear to have the calf touch it. In the course of time, however, by copious applications of cold water, and various liniments, the inflammation was reduced, but that particular section of the udder, which had been sufficiently distended to hold her whole yield, was shrunken to its old dimensions, and was no larger than when I first saw her. When the time approached for her to drop her next calf, I took the responsibility of clandestinely milking her, so that when she calved there was no inflamed udder, there was no fussing with liniments. Its four quarters were now evenly developed; the only difference was the former shrunken quarter was larger, if anything, than the others, and, throughout the season, the yield of milk, from the same keeping, was essentially increased over the yield of the previous year. I never disclosed the secret, however, until I was grown up. But I acquired a very useful lesson which I applied in my practice long before the theory that it was best to milk a cow previous to calving was generally adopted by owners around me.