In Sickness and in Health

This video shows you the arrival day of the recently rescued calves. The boy was not trustful of humans but took an easy and friendly liking to our gentle giant ox Madhava. The baby girl was born that day and was a bit weak. Two weeks later, the boy no longer runs away from us, and the baby girl approaches us for her bottle and now runs around. You will witness both of them grow and play through videos and photos as time passes on.

The boy has received the name Baladev (Krishna’s brother’s name) and the girl has received the name Subhadra (Krishna’s sister’s name) from their first lifetime adopters. A second lifetime adopter gave Baladev the second name Dauji, (Krishna used to lovingly address Baladev by that name). We are very thankful to all adopters. Their support helps care for their cows, especially when they have medical problems. So far, Baladev and Subhadra are in good health, and we have every reason to believe they will live healthy lives.

In Sickness

You may remember the rescued cow Meenakshi, rescued eight years ago. Last year, she passed away after battling complications arising from being born with water on her brain. Her hospitalization ended up costing a little over $3000. Now we have rescued Padmaganda hospitalized for several weeks. The cost of his hospitalization will be a little over $3000. We feel fortunate to be only about 20 minutes from the prestigious University of Florida (UF) Large Animal Hospital, where doctors and interns come from various areas of the world to learn. Access to this facility results in our cows receiving the best of care.

Educational institutions like UF train vets to work within the dairy, meat, and breeder industries. In these industries, the owners of most male cows sell them to the veal factory at an infant age or the meat industry, where they are fattened up for slaughter at a few years old. The owner of a dairy cow sells her for meat when she becomes exhausted, which is usually around 4 or 6 years old. Therefore, the vets do not have much experience with older cows, the age we bring to them from our sanctuary.

Padmaganda‘s medical story started when we noticed the right side of his cheek was protruding and continued to grow. The vet said it may be an abscess or tumor and would require surgery. Before surgery, the growth burst and fell off. When the vet saw his face, she was happy to say the infection appeared contained. She thought it was probably an infected tooth.

When Padma went to the hospital, they took x-rays and found an abscessed sinus duct. They operated and found the tooth was okay and put a stint into the sinus duct. They also took a culture to find which bacteria caused the infection. The culture results showed the doctors they must treat the bacteria with an oral antibiotic and two antibiotic injections per day for approximately two weeks. Therefore Padmaganda is staying at the hospital so the doctors can https://iscowp.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/cowdung600-1.jpgister the shots and clean his abscess. We do not have the apparatus here to contain him and give him a shot nor the ability to go in his mouth and clean out the abscess. The last report we had was that Padma was doing well, and the surgical site tissue looked very pink and healthy, filling in well.