Yesterday, only 5 days after we bought Casper and his brothers at the Enumclaw Livestock Auction…. Casper passed away. We featured Casper in our very first blog post on Dragosfarm.com.

At the Livestock Auction, we bought Casper for only 50 dollars. He was my very first pick, and he seemed strong and such a good boy. I guess some people would say that we shouldn’t be so upset about the loss because he was relatively cheap and left us very quickly, but Casper meant so much more to us than money can depict.

Casper had the kind of spirit and sweetness that we all aspire to have. It might be silly, but I saw more God in Casper than I ever have witnessed in a church. Cows have an energy very similar to horses, they have souls and they have hearts that connect with ours as intelligent mammals.

He loved to be pet and loved, he could sit all day getting his face rubbed. Casper and my husband grew very attached because Casper needed a lot of extra attention.

Casper loved to be loved on, but he wasn’t eating. We had to try and coax him to take a bottle for days. Then that stopped working. Then we gave him a feeding tube and that stopped working. The day Casper died, we woke up and found him in his barn laying on his side taking in short breaths and lightly mooing. My husband ran to the feed store for supplies to try and help him. Casper and I waited in his barn with his head on my lap. I sang him songs and told him stories. Even with the supplements my husband rushed home for him, he was gone within an hour or two. We tried to make him comfortable.

I am deeply saddened at the loss of Casper because we planned on giving him the best life here on Dragos Farm, a beautiful life. It feels deeply …unfair? ….that Casper would be taken from us so early in his journey here on the farm. We weren’t even sure that we would ever use him for meat, he was so beautiful and mellow we just wanted to have him here for a long time. We did our best to help him and that’s all we could do. We have been told that this is very common with dairy cows, they sometimes are born week and scour.

We are learning a lot working this farm. There is so much life we are growing. There is so much life we are creating. With so much life in the mix, of course there will be lessons in death. It’s been a long while since I cried so hard. We truly love our animals on Dragos Farm and respect their lives and sacrifices they make for us as well. It almost seems silly that we are mourning the loss of Casper, when in reality he was purchased as a beef cow… but we thought we would have more time with him. We thought he would eventually make a sacrifice and be respectfully used to feed our family.

He just left us on a cold day and is now buried in an icy field. There was so much left unsaid, so much we could have learned from each other. It is ironic that his name was Casper, because he will haunt us for sometime… our first true loss on the farm.

Thank you for reading,

Tiana