They are very curious. As they can't just pick something up to examine it, they do the next thing which is to sniff it and then taste it. At that point it's on a one way trip down the gullet!
Other times they try to eat things they shouldn't like "hedge apples" which are the "fruit" of Osage Orange, a.k.a. hedge trees. These apples will start falling to the ground during late summer and early fall and for whatever reason cattle like to eat them. After they lay for a while they get mushy and there is usually no problem but early on they're hard and can get lodged on the way down or on the way back up when they chew their cud. Usually it takes a stiff hose to clear the blockage and after a day or so things are fine.
I wonder if this occurs more with small animal vets--"pet vets"?
I know of a number of large animal vets that retired and enjoyed many years of retirement. Perhaps being in the large animal practice where decisions are made on economics and not emotions helps them survive. Those vets also did small animals but it was probably more of a sideline for them.
There's some crazy in equine vet work - the racing side can be a bit brutal with some exposure to criminal elements (not extensive but in places it can be hard to avoid) and the crazy horse lady types can drive vets to drink; these are people that love horses, collect horses, but can't afford to feed them or bear to see them put down, etc.
In general though large animal rural vet work is smoother sailing than the small stuff (from conversations I've had thanks to a farm background and to having developed a bit of animal history recording software for agistment | stud records some decades back).
I admit that I've never noticed that. They seem to lay whatever direction seems comfortable. In winter time the will lay east-west to catch the most warmth and will often roll on their side to really catch some rays.
While we had vets put magnets down cows over the years, my parents were too frugal to let me have one!
There are two primary ways steel gets into the feed supply. A silage chopper can pick it up and cut it into fine bits or a hay baler picks up a stray end of wire and running large bales into a tub grinder to more easily mix feed stocks into a total mixed ration will chop the stray wire (and other parts) into moderately short bits.
Many feed wagons have strong magnets under the discharge chute and grinder/mixers (used to grind grain and supplements) have likewise strong magnets just before the material enters the hammer mill. Despite that some bits will slip by due to the volume of material passing over the magnets as it comes out of the feed wagon.
We do have the vets administer magnets to the heifers we keep at around 9 months of age. One has to watch to be sure they don't work them back up and spit them out! A couple of years ago we had some that did that.
Symptoms of hardware is usually a cow "off feed" meaning she is not coming to the bunk to eat with the rest but usually stands apart and in acute cases will become hunched back. A veterinarian can usually diagnose it with a stethoscope as I think the breathing becomes labored in more acute cases.
> Many feed wagons have strong magnets under the discharge chute..
Even though I understand it's 1/r^2 this summoned a vision of a cow magnetically stuck to the discharge tube at her neck, with the head pushed up and mooing unhappily.
It's 1/r^4 for magnetic dipoles, where both have fixed a fixed dipole moment. So it's 1/r^4 between two permanent magnets.
Where one object is a permanent magnet and the other is some unmagnetized ferromagnetic/paramagnetic piece metal, then the dipole moment of that piece of metal also depends on the distance. Assuming it's proportional to the magnetic field of the other dipole (~1/r^3) then the force is going to be ~1/r^7 for this pair of objects.
But magnetization is famously path-dependent, so now I'm tending to believe the force will be closer to 1/r^7 when moving on the direction of the magnet, but 1/r^4 when moving away. And not exactly any of those functions.
That's too bad. My parents were farmers and my dad brought some home one day, even though we no longer had cattle when we lived on our ranch. He thought I'd like to play with them, and he was right! Even my friends who weren't from farm families thought they were cool. I'm going to order some for my kids. These were the classic ones in the 1980's: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_disease#/media/File...
My grandparents had a dairy, and growing up, I remember these on one of their filing cabinets. When I saw "cow magnets," I knew exactly what to expect.
I probably didn't state that all that well. If I had really wanted one I'm sure I would have been provided one. It's equally quite possible that since they had to be obtained from a veterinarian that it never occurred to me to ask for one.
OTOH, I did destroy a couple of old radios to get the speaker magnets. If I could go back in time I'd grab those old radios before I'd have a chance to destroy them. Back then they were just that--old radios--with no value and certainly not worth fixing. Sigh...
I recall this being very contentious when the rail banking act was enacted back in the '80s. At that time the right of way that became the Katy Trail in Missouri was in dispute but the adjacent land owners lost.
More recently and closer to home, Union Pacific abandoned part of its Valley Subdivision from Lincoln,NE to Marysville, KS and successfully railbanked the entire route. Adjacent landowners fought it to no avail. Today the trail has three segments--Lincoln to Beatrice, NE, Beatrice to the Kansas/Nebraska state line, and from the state line to Marysville, KS.
As I understand, railbanking is a way for railroads to abandon a route while protecting the right of way for possible future railroad use. In the mean time the trails make use of the right of way and maintain it.
That's what rail banking is - the railroads want to keep the property (it's somewhat valuable though weirdly shaped) but more importantly want to keep the ability to run a line (which is potentially insanely valuable, because running a line where one hasn't been before is a hell of eminent domain and negotiations).
Railbanking is a good way to let the land be used while not forcing the railroad to "pretend" it is still an active line.
IMHO, it's a good idea. Running new contiguous multi-state rail lines suffer from a host of unique problems -- not least that the more uncooperative last-link property owner holdouts are, the more their property becomes worth.
Good use case for a public-private bargain, where the public gets the utility of a trail (and potentially a functional railroad, if needed in the future) and private gets to keep the most valuable land utilization rights (ability to convert back to railroad).
One of my historical fascinations is watching the co-evolution of rail and telecommunications line networks, since both have similar needs.
> One of my historical fascinations is watching the co-evolution of rail and telecommunications line networks, since both have similar needs.
There's a lot of cross over. One history of Sprint evolved long distance service as a way to make money off Southern Pacific's internal phone services, that were mostly run in rail right of way. I've heard of specialized fiber laying train cars that trench, lay fiber, and cover it up as the car moves along the track.
Communication and transportation routes are broadly compatible.
I didn't even think about this possibility(!) -- but yes, it would make tremendous sense for fiber optic companies to route fiber optic cables along railroad tracks (both currently used and converted to other use, i.e., hiking/walking/biking paths) as the land rights are already established -- that is, there is no need to buy out homeowners/landowners en route; no need to engage in "eminent domain" lawsuits with property owners, etc., etc. -- and because the cables typically would go underground, that is, they wouldn't interfere with the natural scenery; the Nature above...
I'm sure many companies are already engaged in this pursuit -- but I like the idea of getting not just one, but multiple social value-adds from given pre-purposed tracts of land...
Thanks for the memory jog. There is fiber optic running along the line from Marysville to Beatrice so that may have been a consideration for railbanking the line.
Yes I remember watching video interviews of folks in Missouri who said it should have reverted to them instead of being made available for a linear park.
There were a number of regular season games on Thursday night carried exclusively by Amazon Prime. I watched them through my Roku devices and the quality was not great but then there can be up to three TVs streaming through their respective Roku devices at once here and our download bandwidth is limited to 25Mbps.
The one playoff game that was carried exclusively via Peacock was the wildcard game between the Dolphins and Chiefs. I also watched it through the Roku devices and I thought the picture quality was fine, better than Amazon Prime had been.
Would I have ponied up $5.99 if it weren't the Chiefs as they're the local team? I don't know. Perhaps next year I'll have to make that decision if they carry another playoff game that has teams I don't care that much about.
Many years ago attending the first company technical seminar that one was taped to the door.
Sometime in the late '80s the local daily began carrying the Far Side and the very first one had Popeye on the witness stand saying, "I yam what I yam."
Slow orders abound on US freight roads. This time of year maintenance of way crews are being cut off to protect budgets and only the bare minimum of maintenance is being done until after the first of the year when the crews will be brought back.
Since the implementation of Positive Train Control (PTC) there is live data but the RRs don't make it publicly available. Real time GPS data is transmitted to the Computer Aided Dispatching (CAD) system and combined with consist data they can determine where any one car is located at any time.
By the time I left the company several years ago that data was being restricted to only certain employees. As noted below, hasmat is likely the reason this kind of data is not publicly accessible. It is shared in a limited fashion with shippers, etc.
Speaking of consists, I was impressed a few months ago when I saw a mid-train locomotive for the first time, then last week I saw a BNSF train that was a mile long¹ with a single locomotive at the front and a second at the back which I’ve never seen before.
Other times they try to eat things they shouldn't like "hedge apples" which are the "fruit" of Osage Orange, a.k.a. hedge trees. These apples will start falling to the ground during late summer and early fall and for whatever reason cattle like to eat them. After they lay for a while they get mushy and there is usually no problem but early on they're hard and can get lodged on the way down or on the way back up when they chew their cud. Usually it takes a stiff hose to clear the blockage and after a day or so things are fine.