Udder surprise for farmer after five calves born from one cow

A County Tyrone man has joined a tiny group of farmers around the world who can say their cow gave birth to five calves.

Noel Moore, who has been farming in Killen, just outside Castlederg, for 50 years said he has seen a lot of surprising things in that time.

However, he said the emergence of a fifth calf from one of his cows would never be topped.

The odds of a cow giving birth to quintuplet calves is several million to one and has only happened a handful of times over the years, on farms in Mexico, Iran and in County Kerry in 2019.

The story was first reported in the Ulster Herald.

Moore told BBC News NI he went to milk the cows last Saturday morning and noticed the mother "was very heavy".

"I knew there was more than one calf in her," he said.

"I knew there was something off with her, so I thought I'll milk first and then see how she's doing.

"When I came back again she was really uneasy, so I knew there was more, so thought I'd get the vet out to look at her."

He said after the vet got the first calf out, she told him said there was another to come.

After the fourth calf had been born the vet said she would just check the cow in case there was another one.

"I said, there'll definitely not be another one, there'll be no more than four, definitely not.

"I said there couldn't be another calf in her, there couldn't be five in her."

But he was wrong and a short while later the last calf arrived.

"I couldn't believe it, even the vet was shocked at it," Moore said.

Sadly, while the five calves - two male and three females - are all doing well, their mother has since died.

"She put all the energy into the calves, the calves are in good shape, but it took it off the mother," Moore said.

"She had an easy calving, the vet said the calves were easy to get out, it was just the stress of carrying so many calves."

Breigin Lagan, the vet who delivered the calves, said it was an unexpected call-out but "a career highlight".

"I definitely wasn't expecting that many to be delivered," she told the BBC's Evening Extra programme.

"Certainly suspicious for twins, and when we delivered two they were a little bit on the finer side, so we went in to check again and there was the third one."

Lagan has never delivered more than two calves before.

"When I'd gone in for number four nobody could quite believe it and then number five which was even more unbelievable," she added.

Lagan said it was not natural for a cow to deliver multiple calves.

"It takes an incredible toll - even twins is a lot for any mother, so we would often be present at the delivery of twins because a lot can go wrong.

"To have five of them come out so thriving is unusual."

Dr Gwen Rees, junior vice president of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), said a cow giving birth to five calves at one time is "exceptionally rare", adding that she has never heard or spoken to anyone who has had five calves from the same cow.

"I believe it has happened internationally before.

"Twins are not that uncommon - you get twins in about 1%-5% of calvings."

However, triplets, she said, can be "pretty rare".

"It would be something people would be telling their neighbours about down the pub because it's that rare.

"Anything above that, I haven't spoken to anyone that it's happened to, but I'm aware that it is possible, so it would be an extremely rare event to have five."

Rees said these would be "much higher risk pregnancies".

"To have five live and apparently thriving calves at the end of it is exceptional, because the risk is, with the more calves the cow is carrying, the smaller each one is going to be, so they're more at risk of health problems and they need a lot more care after they've been born."

She said it would be high risk for the cow as well as the calves.

"The strain on the cow - she is going to have support all those calves right up until the point that they are born, so she will have been losing a lot of nutrients and you pretty much can't feed a cow enough food at the end of a pregnancy to feed that many calves, so they will be using their own energy.

"So it is a high risk for the cow as well and it is a real shame that she's passed away, but she would have been at risk of that because of the number of calves I imagine."

Moore is now getting used to being something of a celebrity farmer.

"I'm getting a pile of publicity about it any way - I never thought I'd come across that," he said.

He said during his 50 years of farming he had "seen a pile of things" that have surprised him, "but nothing like that".

Asked if he thought he'd ever see anything like it again, he said: "I can't see it, I think it'll just be a one-off."