Yep, us girls need a good spa treatment every now and then! And this is not any different for our cows.
At our farm we have a hospital pen, this is the area/pen at our farm where our girls with special needs stay if they are feeling blue. Normally the ladies will only be in there for a week, but sometimes they stay longer, depending on how or what kind of issues they have.
Because we want to pamper these girls a bit, they already feel “left out” because they had to move to a different part of the barn and leave their girlies and BFF's, we had a big and I mean BIG automatic brush installed!
Cows like to groom. They want to feel clean, and this brush is the perfect way to do that. Whenever a cow pushes the brush it automatically starts to swirl. Not only does it swirl, it also goes up and down, to the left and to the right. It is pretty nifty! Sometimes they line up or are waiting in little groups until the ‘leading’ lady is done so they can take her place. And sometimes these silly girls go really nuts and while one will have her buttocks scratched, another one has her head up against it... at the same time...!
In the beginning we didn’t know if this brush was going work out. We had read about it but never seen it in action. But the brush is amazing! It seems that because of the cows curiosity always wins it over being scared of the big yellow thing, so every girl gives it a shot eventually... And they love it!
In the 3 years that we have the brush up and running, it never broke. And so a couple of weeks ago, when I was bragging to a real nice gentlemen about that the brush was, “Soooo GOOD and it NEVER broke! Next day… what did it do…. It broke! “Yeah I jinxed it!” So i am not gonna say that again!
It took us about 2 weeks to fix the thing and you should have seen the looks on our girls! They were NOT happy with us! After we put it back up we had not 3 or 4 girls waiting in line but 6 or 7! They were soooo content!
I wish we could have those brushes in every pen/group on the farm and so all the girls could groom themselves, that would be fantastic! But those brushes are worth almost as much as one and a half cow! So we are still dreaming about putting one in every pen… What we are doing now is putting a little brush in at the end of every pen. It is like two little brushes were you sweep the floor with, in an L shape, upside down (should have taken a picture…) and we hung it up at the right height.
Now the girls can still have a perfect shine on their coats, and feel mighty clean, even if they are not in the hospital pen!
