Harvey 1 - 2

This involves talk of death and the means of death and if that will upset you, please don't read further.

Harvey 1 was a little bull - I wrote a post when he died and since then haven't felt the need or desire to say anything else (which is strange - so many big things involved: life, death, what it all means).

But then the vet's bill arrived. I thought the cost would probably be more than I expected, but it's more than I expected to expect.

First, though, thank God there was a vet to call, and he was available, and he had chemicals which allowed an apparently painless death. All of that goes without saying, I hope, but I'll say it anyway in case it's not obvious.

As it turned out, I should have called him earlier. But I didn't know what was wrong with Harvey; he'd been fine the day before. I couldn't decide whether he was sick, or in pain, or stiff in the joints because of the cold night, or what. He was just lying there, not even mooing, just kicking his legs in spasms now and then. I kept hoping he'd sit up. Cattle seem to lose all motivation when they're lying down, but as soon as they sit up again, they often recover very quickly. (By "lying down" I mean being flat on their sides on the ground. It's quite unusual; they generally sleep sitting up.) Harvey just lay there and struggled all day and got increasingly frustrated and tired. The vet said he probably had a virus which is common in "runts" - I hate that word, but that's what he said - and it was unusual that Harvey had lived as long as he had. (I'm still not sure it was right to have saved his life in the first place, so hearing that he'd lived longer than physically forecast was not the good news you might think.)

Anyway, there were a number of options for killing him:
1. Euthanasia by vet.
2. Death by shooting - there is a pet food manufacturer in the district which sends people out to kill and dismember cattle, but I was afraid they wouldn't come out on a weekend, and I was scared Harvey wouldn't be quite dead when they started cutting him up. Also, a gun shot would scare most of the neighbours.
3. Death by shooting - asking one of the unscared neighbours to do it. Dangerous, though, because the bullet might ricochet off the skull and kill the neighbour. Also, it would have been very hard to ask something so awful of said neighbour, who loves animals.
4. I tried to find a means of suffocation on the Web, and couldn't. I was okay about doing this at first, steeled to be practical and focused, but after a while the horror of even the search terms started to sink in and I gave up. People who assist in cases of human euthanasia must be made of really really strong stuff (known as "love", I think).

Option 1 / vet was the right choice. I'm not questioning that now, just whingeing about the price of it:

- euthanasia: $40
- travel: (about 40 kilometres/40 minutes in total) $92
- after hours visit (4pm Saturday afternoon, 2 hours after I rang) $152

Total cost = $284