Mystery Calf

It showed up last Sunday (Mother's Day) in our corn field.  A golden calf.  And it wasn't ours.  And it wasn't the neighbors.  Hmmm.  The neighbor thought he'd seen an ad in a paper about a missing calf.   We don't get the paper so I did a quick Internet search and found the ad.  I called the number and talked to the farmer.  Yes, it was probably his calf.  It had been on the loose for at least three weeks.  We could tell that it was WILD.  We made a brief attempt to get the calf in with our cows but that didn't work.  This wild calf was shying away from all fences.  Fast forward a day or two.  The owner stops by.  He can't round up the calf until that coming Saturday.  The wild calf is eating/destroying our corn field.  It only shows up at dawn and dusk, otherwise it is hiding out in the trees by our crick.
We did look into a tranquilizer option but that wasn't going to be practical or financially smart.

By now, Seth has our cows locked up by the house and doesn't want a wild calf around them, spooking them.  The owner mentioned that we could buy the calf, if we could catch it.  No way do we want it.  Then the farmer made another offer:  if we could shoot it, we could keep the meat.  That sent me to the phone to make a few phone calls to see if this would be a practical.  Our local meat locker only gave us a couple options:  bring it in live or bring it in gutted and bled out.  Knowing that the first option was out, we started looking into the 2nd option.  After a few phone calls to those in the know, we put together a plan that came about last Thursday, the 17th.  Our shooter showed up EARLY (5:55 AM).  Lucky for us, the calf wasn't too far from our pasture.  And without going into too much detail, the calf was shot with one shot, gutted and bled out.  Then Seth drove it to the locker.

No, there are no pictures.  There are just some visions that do not need to be on the blog.
I'm pretty sure that this is one thing that was not on my master to-do list: an on-the-farm slaughter.  Some things are just better left to the professionals.  Many thanks to those who helped us out with this.  We do hope to be generous with this unexpected blessing of meat.