Pop’s herd was predominantly Holstein with a few brown cows like Jerseys or a Guernsey thrown in to up the butterfat count. For those who know little about cows, (like, ah, everybody?) within the Holstein breed, both sexes of calf produce horns. A calf can be born any time of the year and a breeding female will come into heat every 21 days, so the farmer has a choice of spreading out the calving season or concentrating it. Most farmers stagger their breeding so as to not diminish their milk production in any given quarter. But, that said, there are distinct advantages to having a group of calves the same age and born in late winter. Late winter calving means when the calves are weaned, or taken off their mother’s milk, they will have sweet pasture grass on which to forage.

Another advantage of having calves of the same age is that they can get their doctoring done in one vet visit. By doctoring I mean getting vaccinated, ear tagged, and, or course, getting dehorned.

If you study old oil paintings of cows, and the Dutch loved to paint cows and Van Gogh did a number of paintings of cows, you will notice most, if not all, of the cows in the fields have horns, not just the bulls. The Dutch love to paint cows because they have so many, and they love cheese, especially “olde” cheese and it’s a thing with them. “Holstein” the breed, was husbanded by the Dutch two thousand years ago by breeding the black Batavians (German) with the white Friesians (Dutch). But cows with horns are dangerous to themselves and the farmer and the farmer’s kids, so over time the practice of removing the horns developed. It is a painful process for farmer and calf, but the younger the calf is, the less painful, and if the horn bud can be removed before it attaches to the calf’s skull with the attendant connection of blood flow and nerves, the better off everyone will be. So, there was that day on the farm, once a year, or twice a year, when calves were dehorned.

I can’t call it an exciting time, even though exciting means with an attendant increase in energy, for sure, but there was also the hurt and the absorption of hurt, so, exciting would be too indifferent a term to describe the event of calf dehorning. A period of agitated stress might be closer to the truth.

While the calves are still manageable, they were brought into one of the box stalls, or pinned against a wall with my father holding the calf against the wall or box stall fencing with his legs. My brother, or I, held the head holster, and the vet held the dehorning iron. The iron was more like a prod, electric, and plugged into one of the overhead outlets screwed to the beams holding up the haymow -- an electrical system out of the reach of cows and the disaster of a head butt or speeding hoof -- the outlet and beam covered in whitewash and fly specs. The electric dehorning rod was like a soldering iron except the end that got hot had a metal heating element with a slightly concaved bowl to fit over the nub of the horn button on the calf, and the vet pushed the red-hot rod down onto the head, onto the horn, and burned the horn away. The smell alone was enough to turn one vegan and the smell was more of burning hair than flesh, but it was also cartilage and bone, and skull, whatever it was, with nescient nerves and blood vessels, and the calf would make a wail like the end of life and its eyeballs would roll back in its head and the tongue would extend like a monkey’s paw for a coin and it was a terrible thing. Burning the second horn would often result in the collapse of the calf and the relief of some shock to the system. But it was soon over, and the young jumped up shortly and shook their heads as if discovering something new.

That evening the calves would be fed mother’s milk from a bottle, or galvanized pail with a nipple attached, and the pain would be gone, and they would be safe to enter the herd.

I have read that gene splicing, or the replacement of the appropriate gene part from a Black Angus to a Holstein, ends the growing of horns in Holsteins, as Angus have no horns, and it seems to work, which is an endorsable practice of gene splicing, rather than, say, putting a human brain cell into a shark’s head. What was the movie? Samuel Jackson gets eaten?