By Connor Lynch
CENTRE WELLINGTON — A late evening call to a Mennonite farm at Centre Wellington saw firefighters and OPP sloshing through liquid manure to rescue a calf.
It wasn’t clear exactly how the calf had gotten in, said deputy fire chief Jonathan Karn. But when firefighters arrived on scene at about 9 p.m., the calf was well and clearly drenched in manure, at the bottom of a 10-ft. deep pit that was less than one-foot filled. Karn said the escaped calf had likely blundered around the yard before slipping past the plywood cover on top of one of the farm’s three manure pits.
Karn said it wasn’t the firefighters’ first rodeo rousting a four-legged animal. A few years before, they had a similar situation with a horse, though that required the use of a loader to get it free. The firefighters had also taken a large animal rescue course.
Wellington OPP posted footage of the rescue on their Twitter page. The video looks quite dramatic, though Karn said the actual rescuing of the calf only took about 10 minutes. One firefighter went down in a ladder, put some wide straps around the calf, and the team hauled it out.
It was messy business. Said Karn: “There wasn’t even 12 inches (of manure) in the pit, but the guys had lots of liquid manure on them. The cow had been lying in it.”
