Robert Smith walked out the gate that separates the house from the cow yard, and three or four doe-eyed, baby-faced calves immediately came to lick his coat, nibble his pants and lift their faces up to be rubbed and snuggled.

These are Robert and Joy Smith's babies as are the giant, friendly Jerseys behind the yard.

The Smiths bred the babies themselves, but the older ones are rescue cows. They are Jerseys that had problems that made them unfit for a large dairy operation — a split hoof, a dysfunctional udder, a persnickety digestive system — and would have made them candidates for slaughter.

The Smiths bring cows home, heal them, tame them and sell them to people who want a family cow for their own fresh milk.

They stumbled upon this calling pretty much by accident. Robert has been an electrical designer and engineer, and more recently a mechanic. Joy has been a massage therapist and a baker of fine confections. A few years ago, they decided they wanted a cow for the health benefits of raw milk and cheese.

So they started looking for a Jersey. But information on buying cows was scant. And dairy farmers who had healthy, producing cows weren't interested in selling them for less than an arm and a leg.

Then the Smiths got a break. A local dairyman had a cow with a touchy stomach. When the cow ate the hot rations the other cows ate, she bloated.

The cow's life was threatened by the ailment, and the dairyman, who has some 500 cows, hadn't the time or resources to give her a special diet. If the Smiths could save her, he said, they could pay him $500 later.

So Bonnie came to Questa.

At first, she wouldn't eat or drink.

"She was an only cow. She was scared," Joy said.

"There was no herd here," Robert added. "It didn't smell like cows here."

After a couple of days of coaxing and worrying — they offered Bonnie every treat they could think of — she began to eat if they sat with her. So for some time, whenever they wanted her to eat, they had to go out and lean against her, stand by her, just hang out.

"If we left," Robert said, "she'd stop eating."

A few months later, the dairyman called again. There was a pregnant cow, he said, a "very special cow" with a hoof problem. Would the Smiths like to take her for free and give the calf back to the dairy when it was born?

What they didn't know was that Fresca, their "very special cow" came from a kind of royal Jersey bloodline.

And that began what has become the Smiths' way of life. They have taken in about 15 cows from the dairy. Some had medical conditions, like damaged hoofs. Others had only three working udders instead of four. Some had injured themselves in the dairy milking room and refused to go back in there. One was blind.

Some of the cows they keep, but most they train them to become family milk cows.

At the dairy, Robert said, cows are trained to run from human voices. There is virtually no human contact. People shout to herd the cows into the milk room, hook the cows up to machines and then herd them back out.

The cows the Smiths rescue have to be taught to trust people.

"Some cows are only willing to be milked under certain circumstances at first," Robert said. "Like some will only be milked in the middle of the yard."

"In the dark." Joy added.

"In the rain." Robert said.

Robert ties them to a tree and starts touching them.

"They pull away," he said, demonstrating by scrunching up his face and moving his head away from an imaginary hand. "Then, one day, you see a switch flip, and all of a sudden, they know you're a good guy and they move toward you."

Meanwhile, Joy still milks the cows twice a day. Fortunately, she discovered as a child at her father's Michigan farm that she had a gift for milking. She wet-milks, which means she uses the milk from the cow to lubricate the udder, which makes for less friction. And she can generally strip a cow — get all the milk — in about 10 minutes.

Every cow is different. Some begin to trust the Smiths when they see how the other cows react. The blind one took some real ingenuity on Robert's part. She was terrified of the Smiths. She would line up for milking, because the other cows did, but otherwise she didn't want the couple anywhere near her.

So one day, Robert went up next to her while she was eating and began to communicate in cow. He used his hand like a mouth and began crunching at the feed with it. Slowly he got closer to the blind cow and finally bumped her nose with his fist — a cow way of saying hello. Then he began stroking her face upward, the way cows lick each other. And he won her over.

The Smiths have had a huge learning curve. There are, they discovered, some cows they can't help. And the thought of taking cows to be slaughtered because they're beyond healing causes tears to spring to Robert Smith's eyes.

Fresca was one they didn't think was going to make it.

"She had been so bombarded with antibiotics, she had totally lost her ability to heal herself," Joy said. "She almost died about five times."

"Everything that happened to her was a catastrophe because her immune system wasn't working," Robert said.

Further antibiotics proved useless. So they began giving her massive doses of vitamins and homeopathic remedies. And slowly, her immune system recovered. Now they use almost exclusively natural treatments on their cows. The cows' diet is organic as well, bought from farms that don't use chemicals.

Between taking in the cows and selling them, the Smiths completely domesticate them. The cows can be led on a rope, milked from either side, come when they're called. Jerseys, the Smiths said, are smart. After about six months with the Smiths', the cows' personalities start to emerge.

When a cow is ready, and the right family comes along, the Smiths sell it, usually for around $3,000.

The females they always sell for milk. The males for breeding. They also raise some bulls for beef.

They've also developed training videos on topics such as milking and breeding, and run a 24-hour consulting service for the cows they've sold.

When a cow's water breaks at 2 a.m., the owners still call Joy for help. And she helps, because that is her baby.

"Some are really easy and some are a real rodeo," Robert said of the cows they've taken in. "But you know eventually this is going to be a great relationship."

ON THE WEB

• For more on the Smiths see http://handmilking.com.