Ciaran Fitzpatrick spends a lot of time looking at the wrong end of a cow.
The 35-year-old Irish immigrant to Nova Scotia spends that time trying to make cows’ walking, feeding and milking lives more comfortable.
“I enjoy doing it and I take a lot of pride in my work,” said Fitzpatrick, who trims dairy cows’ hoofs.
“It’s all about cow comfort and helping them walk,” said Fitzpatrick, who moved to Canada and to the Shubenacadie area in January 2017.
“A woman, I fell in love,” he said of the motivation for his transatlantic relocation.
The love of his life is fiancee Seonaid MacDonell from Enfield, who had migrated temporarily to work with a friend in Australia.
The two met in Adelaide, Australia, and are considering a future wedding in County Cork, Ireland, where Fitzpatrick grew up.
Fitzpatrick trained and worked with horses in Australia and a month after his arrival in Canada, he went to work at the van de Riet family dairy farm in Shubenacadie, primarily to do the milking.
“He has large animal experience which is great,” John van de Riet, 60, who runs the farm with his son Joey and Joey’s wife, Sarah, said of Fitzpatrick. “We were looking for an employee and he was looking for a job and it turned out by some chance we met through a mutual friend and it worked out really well.”
Fitzpatrick took an interest in dairy cows’ hoof maintenance and he said he is “very lucky” to have apprenticed under Simme Altenburg, a longtime Stewiacke hoof trimmer whom Fitzpatrick deems one of the best in the province.
“The cows are making so much more milk now than they ever did and the stress comes out in their feet. "
- Ciaran Fitzpatrick
From there, Fitzpatrick purchased a pair of portable metal-framed hoof-trimming stalls, one that can sit on the back of his truck for jobs in other parts of the province and one that is a permanent fixture in one corner of the van de Riet cow barn.
Fitzpatrick tells the story of a recent hoof-trimming job at a nearby farm where a five-year-old boy asked him if he was trying to make the cow beautiful.
While his work might not be considered a labour of cowsmetics, it does behoove dairy farmers to keep their cows’ hoofs in good trim.
“Cows never really evolved to walking on cement 365 days a year,” Fitzpatrick said. “That’s where trimming comes in, to keep them walking balanced and flat.”
John van de Riet said a cow’s cloven hoof is a living thing that continues to grow. The hoof is made of keratin, a hardened protein that is similar to the human fingernail, although the hoof is much thicker than a nail.
Van de Riet said a cow with a sore or infected foot would lie down more to avoid pain, not take its short trip to the feed bunk to partake of grass or corn silage, corn grain and canola meal. The foot problem would then turn into a milk-production problem.
“This is preventative maintenance,” Fitzpatrick said of the hoof-trimming trade. “The cows are making so much more milk now than they ever did and the stress comes out in their feet. You have to keep the hoofs short, functional and maintained.”
To do that, Fitzpatrick ropes a cow — one of 122 in the van de Riet cow barn — and pulls, pushes and cajoles it into the hoof-trimming stall. The cow’s head goes through the front of the stall and locks in, and a belly strap prevents the animal from falling down.
Fitzpatrick has rigged up motors atop the trimming stall that replace a manual crank in raising the animal’s strapped rear legs one at a time for the trim, along with a front leg from the opposite side of the cow.
Fitzpatrick uses an angle grinder with six knives in it to grind down the hoof and reveal any irregularities or bad nail parts. Then he uses large hoof-nippers to clip a centimetre or two off the front of the hoof, more if the hoofs are not regularly trimmed. Finally, he applies his hoof-trimming knife to cut out any bad nail from the hoof.
All told, 10 minutes for corralling the cow that weighs some 1,400 pounds, getting her into the trimming stall and completing the job.
On a road trip, Fitzpatrick said he charges $15 per cow and he can trim about 40 cows in a day, an average of six or seven an hour, “if they behave..
“Some can be a little rude, when they don’t want to enter the hoof-trimming chute, they can take their time or try to turn or sometimes they just stand on all four and they are very hard to push into the chute.”
Fitzpatrick also uses hoof blocks, a fitted plastic piece almost like a cast a person might use with a broken bone in the foot, that slips onto the healthy claw or the healthy part of the cloven hoof to raise the other injured claw off the ground and allow it time to heal and repair.
Benefiting from word-of-mouth advertising among dairy farmers, Fitzpatrick has travelled as far afield as western Cape Breton to trim hoofs. The van de Riets, who Fitzpatrick credits as having been very supportive of him and his fledgling hoof-trimming business since he came to Canada, have a trimming schedule in their barn. Fizpatrick said each cow gets trimmed about three times a year.
“There are only a certain amount of factors that you can control in the life of a cow and we want to make sure that they are so comfortable and that nothing is going to shorten their life,” said Sarah van de Riet, with toddler Acre, her youngest of three children in tow.
The cows feet and their mobility are one of those controllable factors, she said.
“I want my clients’ cows to walk well,” said Fitzpatrick, who lives across the road from the van de Riet farm.“It’s beneficial to me, it’s beneficial to the farm and it’s beneficial to the cow.”
