Some animals could only give birth to one offspring at a time, and if you don’t know, farm cows belong in that category.
What you should know about pregnant cows.
View this post on Instagram
Cows will be pregnant with an offspring for an average of nine months, and they could only usually yield one calf. Giving birth to twins is pretty rare already, occurring only about 10 percent of the time. If they happen to have twins, it becomes a very challenging job for the farmers, because usually, twins result in one being weaker than the other.
Thus, farmers need to intervene immediately if they want to keep both calves alive and healthy. Although, there are a few instances when a cow can raise both calves without any problems.
Now that you know how rare twin calves occur, how about three, or maybe even four in one birth?
A cow in Minnesota surprised farmers, Deb and Chuck Beldo, after it gave birth to four calves, two male and two female calves. It’s already unlikely for a cow to give birth to two or three calves, and it’s already considered a miracle how this one cow had four.
In fact, it was reported on the news that only 1 in 700,000 cows bears quadruplets. Moreover, all calves are born healthy, and you could see them actively run around the field.
However, keeping them all alive is a massive challenge.
As I mentioned before, keeping twin newborn calves alive is already proven difficult, how much more if you’re taking care of quadruplets? Apparently, when Chuck was interviewed about the chances, he told the most shocking statistic, estimating about 1 of 11.2 million to keep all four calves alive.
However, despite this massive challenge, the farmers are willing to bet a dime that they could defy the odds just as their cow had.
Since a cow could only cater to one calf at a time, these farmers work harder to make sure all are healthy
It’s almost impossible for one cow to breastfeed all four of her calves at the same time, which is why these farmers are doing the best they can by feeding them using a milk bottle. They feed these calves every after four hours and monitor them as much as possible.
However, these cows are growing fast, and time would make it harder for them to handhold these calves during feeding. Fortunately, they were able to install bottle holders to make feeding effectively efficient for these growing calves.
The only common reaction that people could say is “Holy Cow!”
News about this rare birth blew up, especially after Deb’s post got a lot of attention on Facebook, racking up over 109,000 shares. This occurrence just made “Holy Cow” a lot more sense.
This isn’t the only rare case of cows giving multiple births.
There is a much rarer case wherein a cow from County Limerick had given birth to a total of sixteen cows in the span of only four years. That means every birth this miracle cow had yielded more than three cows every year.
In fact, the breeders confessed that their cow managed to give birth to five calves in two consecutive years, which is also the Guinness World record of the most one cow could give birth in a single delivery.
Check out the video about the cow and her quadruplets below!
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
