Waharoa farmer Anne Barbour found it easy to forgive her first calving cow of the season for being a bit shaky on her feet after the mum produced a hat trick of new arrivals.
The dairy cow marked the start of the calving season by delivering heifer triplets unaided in the early hours of Wednesday morning last week.
"It really knocked the stuffing out of her," Mrs Barbour said.
"She was a bit off-colour the day before so we put her in the paddock and she delivered naturally overnight. We just came out in the morning and there they were."
The calves were healthy and would be checked by dairy researcher Dexcel to see whether they were identical triplets and worth including in herd research.
Do they look identical to you?
3 comments:
Young calves are fun, especially when you feed them fresh skim-milk with molasses, from a bucket. Then let them suck your fingers when the milk's gone.
Incidentally friesians have unique B&W patterns - put a million of them together [if you can] and you would not see any identical markings.
Actually multiple births in cows are generally a bad thing - usually one or both are born sterile.
The coat patterns on calves, kittens, puppies etc are believed to be influenced by conditions in the womb as well as inherited genes. Maybe the calf on the bottom got kicked more often or had more pressure - it must be really crowded in there! The Massey twin herd has shown for a long time that the calves may be genetically identical but look different.
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