In January the local ranchers will begin to calve a crop from their high-value embryo-producing cows. These cows produce ova that are fertilized in utero, then washed out and implanted in other cows who gestate them to completion. (Yes, it is also done to humans but with slightly less dependable success.) The birth of cattle is now enmeshed with technology, calendar, and sales in much the same way as religion and especially Christmas.
Jack Holden, who used to be my neighbor across the street, now lives in the country nearby. His family is a powerful dominant one that owns many of the businesses in town: service station, real estate company, feedlot. They participate in politics and the patriarch writes funny locally printed books. “The Prairie Star,” an ag newspaper for which I used to work, has a section called “Producer Progress” and Terri Adams, the reporter, interviewed Jack, standing tall and handsome in his cow yard alongside his blue heeler dog. “All the cows have been hauled home.” (They graze on leases all summer.) “We’re feeding them and making sure everything is buttoned down. We’re making sure the windbreaks are in good shape and the fencing done.” Now he’s going to do embryo transfers.
Maybe you didn’t know that calves in their beginning stages are often swapped around these days. Jack puts in “40 to 50 embryos a day, some for their operation and some for a customer.” The article doesn’t say where they come from (I guess Jack’s cows) or how they get where they’re going. My mental image is of a big box marked “bovine embryos” at the post office, the way chicks or bees are shipped. Probably not.
I had never heard of the Stevenson Sputnik operation in Russia which is one destination for Holden Hereford heifers with embryos installed. A veterinarian named Kate Zimina accompanies and supervises the shipping. (This is the kind of work for which my niece in Oregon is preparing.) Zimina is helping Jack get his cows on the Whole Herd Inventory and to register his 2011 calves with the American Hereford Association. Cows also go to Nebraska and Texas.
Jack doesn’t have a freezer full of bull semen (well, maybe, but it’s not in the article). He’s got BULLS. One gives them 130-day gain tests and sells them through catalog photos. They weigh 1,200 pounds and more and average a 3.75 pound gain DAILY during their first hundred days. When the calves begin to come next week, there will be 250 head with 80 of them embryo transfers. It used to be that one rarely saw a rancher at rest who wasn’t scribbling figures on the back of an envelope with a pencil stub, but now he (or she) hunches over a computer to crunch numbers. Every rancher contracts with labs where technicians hunch over a workbench to check genomes, nutrition, parasites. The hard physical labor of ranching is now overlaid with delicate technical work. The weather is still a variable that cannot be controlled, no matter how much hunch and crunch.
Birth is not so different for prosperous human beings who live in a country where medicine is technically managed. We lose touch with the births elsewhere that persist in the face of all odds, embryos disadvantaged from the moment of conception and gestated in wombs compromised by drugs or starvation or violence. Even just unhappiness, which is a real biochemical state. They come burdened, crippled and mutated, but they still come.
How remarkable that a human being is started inside another human being, attaches, complicates and swells up, and then at some point -- hopefully not too early and not too late -- is squeezed out into a culture that may or may not welcome it and complete its growth. Yet the babies come in spite of plague, drought and war, in the midst of natural disasters and dire predictions. How come there are no horsemen for birth? All they get is a stork?
Attending a birth is a remarkable experience. The mother is gripped and wrenched and split -- some more easily than others -- and finally the baby comes out the same place the father sent the seed in. It is slimy, curled-up, bloody with its mother’s blood, smeared with mother’s shit squeezed out by the birth, still attached in her by a lifeline like those on the spacesuits of astronauts. “Boil water!” they cry in the movies about the arrival of pioneer babies. (All babies are pioneers.) After seeing the mess once, it’s easy to understand why.
A cow can’t boil water so it just licks and licks and licks with her big rough washrag of a tongue until pretty soon the mess begins to look like a living being and tries to stand up. Brain swirling, eyes rolling, ears hanging down, knees buckling, but they just keep coming, the same as the original zygote just kept coming. (And the original sperm.) In a while calves get things coordinated and find the milk bag. Aaaah. First taste is best taste. Colostrum. The best medicine.
A new cow starting now. Or maybe at conception. Or maybe at re-implantation in a second cow. Which beginning? (Ask the Pope. He’s even in charge of the beginning of the World.) It makes a difference. If a calf or person is delivered by C-section or induced labor, is their birth “untimely?” Will it make a difference in their life-trajectory through the world? The stars are aligned a little differently, the beef market is up or down a little more, the rancher is in a better or worse mood so is more or less patient or skillful.
Maybe the weather turns bad and the calf is frozen to the ground despite all the licking. The cow -- where is the cow in all this? The bull doesn’t matter. He’s over. For now. The coyote, the wolf, being born in their burrows -- no help from any humans -- growing up together, delighted to eat a calf. The grasses -- some born from inseminated seeds like animals and others just budding and splitting and reaching out for a little more space and sun and water -- only to be bitten off or cut off to be cow food. The rancher’s wife giving birth to a child who will directly or indirectly eat that calf, that cow, that bull, that grass.
And now the camera pulls away -- this is like Google Earth moving from street to the universe -- so that we see all the continents and all the seas, all full of birth and death in their intertwining, and we are humbled. That star over there -- what’s its name? When was it born?
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