Caring for Milk Fed Veal Calves Video

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Veal farmers watch each calf carefully to be sure it is healthy. As well as checking the computer records every day to see if any animals are not drinking their milk, farmer Otto hand checks his animals every morning.

Transcript:

Otto-Well these cows are 12 weeks old. Ever yday in the morning the first thing we do when we arrive at the barn is come into the room and see how the cows are doing head wise. We go in, check each of them. We have a computer printout everyday which gives us a little bit of information about how the cows are drinking. The cows that don't drink very well, we look for those numbers. You will see each calf has a number. That is an individual number that only that calf has so when we come to the room and we look for that number I'ts because we are trying to figure out what is going wrong with that calf. Sometimes the ear tag's missing, sometimes it is because the calf is sick, sometimes it's because he really didn't want to drink, he wants to take a break in the drinking. But we do that every day in the morning and the afternoon.
They are lovely animals. They like to play. That is mainly why we come to the room twice a day. Because we want to give them the sense they are not alone. That there is someone behind them, there is somebody that loves them. We play with them, we try to be friendly with them so they feel good in their own. They feel good in this environment.
What I like the most is the way that the animal lives, you know they react to you. Like these guys. You see very well they are not scared of you. They react to you. They have different personalities, some of them are very outgoing, some of them are very shy, but most of them they like to be active during in the day and I think that is one of the advantages of the group housing. The calf can be active and can be social. They are very social animals. That's what we see too. They are used to being in groups, they are used to lying in groups, they are used to drinking at the same time, in the same group. So they are social animals. And that is what we try to develop in the group housing environment, giving them the more natural way to grow.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• OFAC
• Canadian
• veal
• farmer
• Ontario
• agriculture
• farm
• business