Sonar🐮Meets The Herd!🥹
Introducing a new animal to an established herd can always be a bit stressful, especially when you have an animal as special as Sonar, who is not only little and can get hurt easily due to his size alone, but his condition leaves him with no ability to see what’s coming to protect or defend himself. So when introducing him to the rest of the herd, it’s vital for us to do slow introductions so they can ease into getting to know each other before actually letting them into each other’s space
As soon as Sonar was settled in here at the sanctuary we started letting the other cows visit with him on opposite sides of the fence so they could get to know each other daily.
Through the fence allows them to see each other and get to know each other without any major risks. These through the fence visits have seemed to always go pretty well. The whole herd seems interested in him and remain gentle in their interactions, while Sonar would get so excited he would try to run through the fence to get to them.
Cows are often known to be good “adoptive” parents as they will generally tend to let other cows, especially calfs, right into their herd letting them be part of their family.
( just like how they adopted Rosie right into their herd!)
However, letting the new adopted member of their family nurse from them is a whole other situation, and it will either happen, or it won’t.
There are alternative methods to trying to make this happen as opposed to our slow introduction method. For example we could put one of the mama cows locked in the cattle headgate that we have where she won’t be able to move around at all, so that we could let Sonar come up from behind, giving him the opportunity to latch on without the mom walking off or pushing him out.
While this could of course make things “easier” or “quicker”
Using this method of forced interaction is not how we prefer to do things. While yes it’s true, the mom would be stuck standing still making it a million times easier for Sonar to be able to nurse from her, but that forced feeling would only cause stress to the mom and all it takes is one perfectly placed kick while he’s under her and Sonar could be extremely injured.
It can also cause her to become defensive every single time that she sees Sonar, because she will relate and connect Sonar to being pushed and stuck in the cattle gate, leaving a negative association between the animals forever.
Letting them do it on their time, in their way, is the best way for things to happen naturally, the way that they should.
While we are still hopeful that one of these mama cows will let Sonar Nurse from them, we know there is a pretty strong possibility that that will never happen. We of course, have no problem continuing to bottle feed Sonar ourselves, but in a perfect world, it would be such a dream if he could nurse from one of them and feel like he has a mom
So we will continue to do these slow interactions daily, but of course Sonar’s safety is our top priority and if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen and that’s ok
This coming week we will also start introducing him to a couple of the other animals that could potentially be a seeing eye buddy for him, fingers crossed that we can maybe match him with one of the other animals here!
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https://alyssasanimalsanctuary.org
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