TAPPEN, N.D. – Holy cow! A Black Angus cow in Kidder County had an extremely rare, unheard-of-before five calves in mid-April – quintuplets.
The cow was not AI’d – she had been naturally bred from one of the herd bulls on the ranch.
“She had 20 hooves in her,” said Jonni Kramlich, who owns and operates the cow/calf operation with her husband, Clint. “Three of the five calves are alive and thriving well, and the mother cow is recovering from her ordeal.”
Jonni said when the cow was pregnant, they noticed that she was growing bigger by the day.
“She was as big as a house by the time she had the calves, and I just assumed she was having twins or a very large single calf,” Jonni said.
This year during calving, the Kramlich family has had a couple of twin births, but they have never experienced more than twins born to a cow.
On Monday, Jonni and Clint saw that the “big” cow had birthed a heifer calf on her own outside in the corral. But they saw a nose sticking out of her and assumed she was having twins. They managed to get her in the barn, bringing her live calf.
“I went ahead and pulled the second calf,” Jonni said. That calf was also a heifer and was alive, as well. Now, they had twin heifers.
They thought the cow was done calving.
Jonni’s father-in-law, however, was in the barn and joking around and saying, “We ought to see if there’s another one in there.”
Jonni didn’t think there was, but Clint went ahead and checked the cow. He felt a third calf in the cow.
“Clint pulled that one, and that one was a bull, and he was alive,” Jonni said.
Now, they had triplets.
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Jonni’s father-in-law continued to joke, and they wanted to be sure, so Clint checked the cow again. He found a fourth calf. Clint pulled that one out and it had been born backwards and unfortunately, it was dead – a bull.
But they were totally stunned. They were shocked that the cow had quadruplets, and there were three living triplets – happy and moving around.
“Three of the four were alive. We were really surprised she had had four calves, so we left her alone after that,” she said.
The cow’s milk had not come in yet, possibly due to the stretching of her body with the calves, so Jonni bottle fed one calf. The other two got new moms, who were happy to have them.
The next morning, Jonni and Clint came back in to check on the mother cow. Clint went ahead and checked her, just to make sure everything was okay. He felt another calf – a fifth calf.
They pulled the calf. It was also backwards and a bull calf, born dead. But that meant, the cow had had quintuplets.
Quintuplets were completely unheard-of, and Jonni and Clint were amazed.
“We couldn’t believe it. We had never heard of anything like it,” Jonni said. “To have triplets is a pretty big deal, but five is just crazy.”
They named the three live calves Quin, Quinny, and Minnie.
The mother cow is now up and eating hay. She is still weak, but she’s doing okay. Of course, she is pretty famous. A cow on a North Dakota farm bred naturally gave birth to quintuplets.
A few cows in the U.S. have had quadruplets, but there have been no cows in the U.S. that have had quintuplets, at least reported. The statistic for a cow having quadruplet calves is one in 11.2 million.
There are no stats for quintuplets. Maybe it is one is a few billion – who knows?
“The cow is weak, but she is up and chewing hay,” Jonni said. They don’t know if she will be able to have more calves in the future. This was her third season of having calves.
The BBC reports a cow in County Limerick gave birth to two sets of quintuplets, a set of quads and a set of twins within four years. A cow in Mexico reportedly had one set of quintuplets in its lifetime.
This calving season, the Fisher ranch near Saint Anthony, N.D., had triplet calves.