Farmers Surprised After 15-Year-Old Angus Cow Gives Birth to Quadruplets

It was a unusual and surprising morning for the Borderland Cattle Company near Rockglen when their 15 year old Angus cow had a rare quadruplets birth. Owner Glenn Ching has never seen quite like it as it is "unusual and surprising for a cow that age to be able to carry twins, let alone carry them full term."

"Then on the afternoon of the 7th, she had a third calf and then early in the evening, about two hours later she had a fourth calf, which from my understanding is a 11.2 million to1 chance of this happening," he narrated. He says the cow ended up with a pair of heifers and a pair of bull calves born over four days.

"The calves were all born sight unseen, unassisted and the cow is doing really well for what she's went through. She's lost some body conditioning but we're giving her fairly heavy supplements and the calves are all healthy and bouncing around and doing great."

Upon reviewing her calving records, they found that the cow never even had a set of twins before.

Support for the calves

Glenn notes that the calves will more likely be put on nurse cows or adopting them out, as their mother cow can no longer tend to and keep up with them due to old age.

"We won't leave the calves on her just because she's too old and she won't be able to take enough nutrients in to be able to keep up with these four calves. So I think for her sake, we're going to, you know, put some on a nurse calf or adopt some of them out," he said.

"I've had a couple of people contact me about possibly, you know, buying some of the calves and adopting them. They've got cows that have lost calves or whatever. We kind of talked about it, and decided it's so unique. I would really like to see these calves grow up here and see what they look like this fall."

According to Glenn, they've had typically a few sets of twins every year but never triplets let alone quadruplets.

Surprising but not uncommon

Last year, a 7-year-old Washington cow also gave birth to quadruplets. Washington hay broker and rancher Scott English said that seeing a set of twin calves isn't an uncommon occurrence during calving season, but having quadruplets is truly surprising. In fact, it's so rare that quadruplets only occur in 1 out of 700,000 births, and four live, healthy calves only 1 in 11.2 million.

In Glenn's case, "one set was in one embryonic fluid fed by one placenta and the other set of calves were in a different embryonic sac fed from a different placenta. So when the first set came out, the other two were still all attached in their own little world inside the uterus, and, you know, stayed for another four days until they were ready to come out," he explained.

Upon weighing, the calves reached 64, 60, 70 and 72 pounds.

Angus cows are renowned as a carcass breed and used widely in crossbreeding to improve carcass quality and milking ability.