Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves, stressed by the change in circumstance and diet, are prone to getting sick. Calves are weaned for a couple of reasons: to free their mothers to have more calves (9534 had already been inseminated again in June), and to get the animals, now five or six hundred pounds, ready for life on the feedlot.
