In the human world multiple births are quite common and on the rise. This trend can be mainly attributed to advances in the science behind conceiving and artificial insemination. However, multiple births are few and far apart among other animal species where more than one baby happens to share a womb.
For cows, having twins or triplets is extremely uncommon and quadruplets are even more rare. In fact, veterinarians have pegged the odds of a cow giving birth to four calves at one in 11.2 million.
To put that into perspective, in 2013 the chances of conceiving triplets or more was 1:837 for human couples and it’s estimated that more than 90% of quadruplets born are because of fertility drugs.
That’s a huge difference and so when one cow gave birth to four baby calves in De Kalb, Texas two years ago it was a newsworthy event. The owner of the pregnant cow, Jimmy Barling, was completely taken aback and astounded when he witnessed her push out the three healthy little bull calves and one heifer. He said that “ We knew she was pregnant, but we didn’t know she was going to do this. This was a shock. This blew our minds.”
Mr. Barling’s granddaughter ended up naming the quadruplets Eeny. Meeny, Miny, and Moo. While they were all born relatively healthy, they were on the small size which is to be expected. The normal average weight for a newborn calf is around 75 pounds and they each weighed in at considerably less than that, with Meeny being the smallest at about 25 pounds.
After the birth the three male calves were re-homed with neighbors because their mother was unable to nurse all of them properly at the same time. Moo, the only female, ended up staying with her mom and all four calves are reportedly doing very well. You can check them out in the video and see pictures of how adorable they looked like shortly after being born. They’re so little and cute!
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