Hannah Mays, 11, of Mequon, says that caring for her calf Lacros, whom she calls Daisy, is fun and has really taught her a lot of trust and teamwork.
“[Calves] are actually very affectionate,” Hannah told The Chronicle in a telephone interview this week.
Hannah and Lacros won the Junior Grand Champion award at the Ozaukee County Fair in July. A member of the Lindenwood 4-H Club, Hannah also earned a blue ribbon and a merit award for her veterinary science project comparing the rat and the human brain.
A member of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun and an incoming sixth-grader at Steffen Middle School, Hannah has been interested in animals since she was a little girl, said her mother, Stacy Mays.
When she was in third-grade, she learned about 4-H from her horseback riding teacher. And when the family looked into it, they found that it offered “an incredibly well-rounded education with lots of opportunities to explore things [Hannah] is interested in,” said Stacy.
“It’s not just animals; it’s also volunteering in the community, learning about computers, art, sports…. It’s such a great fit for [Hannah] and she was very excited about the opportunities the 4-H program offered,” Stacy said.
Another aspect of the program that Stacy appreciates, she said, is that 4-H offers kids the opportunity to continue working in areas they are interested in, gaining proficiency and depth of knowledge for 10 years, if they wish. And if they want to, they can also try new things every year.
Hannah is participating in the 4-H dairy, veterinary science, woodworking and food and nutrition programs.
“The culmination is when the kids present their projects at the county fair and they are judged,” Stacy said. Standards for judging become more challenging as the kids grow and their skills increase, she said. For some projects, they may go on to compete at the state fair.
In the calf competition, judging is based on the structure of the animal and the way the animal is shown, Stacy said. “Hannah’s calf was the champion of all of the calves and young cows under 2-years-old.”
Daisy is owned by the Schoessow family of Farmdale Farm in Mequon. This is the third year Hannah has helped care for a calf and she says she hopes to become a large animal veterinarian when she grows up. “I’m really into animals and I want to save their lives,” Hannah said.
This summer, Hannah worked with some very small animals for her veterinary science project. “I have two rats, Cookie and Wafer, and I decided it would be cool to see what their brains look like as compared to ours,” she said.
Hannah looked at rat brains on the Internet and found “they have the same exact parts as humans do but different parts are bigger and smaller than the human brain.”
She illustrated what she had learned about the similarities and differences of rat and human brains on a poster, which she “cut in half and on one side it has a picture of me and a human brain, which is color coded, and the other side has a color picture of one of my rats with a [diagram] of his brain,” Hannah said.
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