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Somebody’s Got To Do It

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maryjane	Posted - Sep 11 2014 : 4:56:55 PM Like Mike Rowe says, “Somebody’s got to do it.” Here’s a 15-year-old (actually the daughter of the instructor of an AI class I took recently) learning to do AI (artificial insemination). ‘Nuff said. Father-daughter AI team. There were about 15 of us taking the class. Sometimes we learned from each other. Inviting, right? The instructor definitely had AI finesse. Threading the semen-loaded, metal “straw” through the folds of the cervix without causing injury to the cow is VERY tricky, almost impossible at times. If you’ve ever tried to re-thread a piece of elastic through a waistband using a safety pin and hit the seam of the garment, you know what I’m talking about. At least when you’re sewing, you can see what you’re doing. Not so with AI. Just close your eyes and gently move the probe again and again (up, down, sideways), never pushing if you feel any resistance at all. Probe. Move a fraction of an inch. Probe. Move another fraction of an inch, on and on, until you've threaded maybe 18 inches into the opening of a cow. Meet my favorite cow that I got intimate with. Oops, wrong end. I would have taken her home in a heartbeat. Discussions regarding technique ensued. And then, THIS ... such a gas, AI. What a blast. Straight from being sh!@ faced to face-fed. Once you take the straw of semen from the super-cold tank of liquid nitrogen, you want to keep it warm by tucking it down your front. This technique was designed for, well, you guessed it, women. Actually, our instructor said that women are better at AI than men. Maestro at work. With his baton. Somebody’s got to do it. Now that I’ve taken WSU’s three-day AI class (it was hands-on the very first day and I worked on 14 different cows), I’m anxious to begin examining my own cows (rectally). Your top hand (in its rectum) guides your other hand. It also “tries” to move and elongate the cervix (MUCH easier said than done). I was taken aback at how totally different one cow’s organs were from another’s. And working on the bigger cows was difficult because when they tightened their muscles (objecting to the intrusion) it would cut the circulation off in your arm. Threading that probe through the cervix and into the uterus for deposit of the semen isn’t easy. At all. In fact, a couple of times I thought, THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. It can’t be done. That’s when you’d call the instructor over and he’d slowly go in and out with the probe (nothing quick about it) until he was SOMEHOW through the cervix and inside the uterus, and then he’d take his arm out of the rectum and have you go in with your arm to feel the probe below surrounded by the thin-walled cervix in order to teach you how it felt once you did get through the maze. If you use bowling as an analogy, how often do you get strikes? AI is that kind of precision. Dead center every time. Get it perfect and the probe goes into the uterus. Otherwise, nada. A bull’s penis doesn’t go into the uterus, but because they deposit a billion times more sperm (repeatedly, over the course of several hours), one of them makes it through. But with only a precious single straw or two of collected semen, you can’t deposit the semen anywhere but in the uterus.
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NellieBelle	Posted - Sep 11 2014 : 5:35:57 PM AI is amazing. Just watching the men when they come to AI my gals, I just find it so interesting. They have all been good to explain the procedure, and they've had some difficulty a couple of times with Sienna. I just find the whole thing fascinating. I think it's wonderful MJ that you could take the class and now AI your own cows. Thank you so much for sharing your course pictures etc. with all of us.