An unlikely pairing
NATURE is forever baffling us with her oddities and to prove it a Brahman cow has adopted an orphaned brumby foal out on Packsaddle Station near Mt Garnet.
The cow has allowed the foal to become her ‘calf’. And guess what the foal’s been named? Lucky, as in lucky to be alive.
“You’ll never see anything like this again,” station owner Rob O’shea told me this week. Mr O’shea is 65 now and has lived on Packsaddle since he was
18. This is a first for him
“Lucky was only one month old when its brumby mother died. It walked into a dam with the cattle that were coming in for water. I saw it and thought that ‘poor little feller’ will die, but then I saw it started to suckle on a cow that didn’t have a calf,” he said.
Mr O’shea said the cow bellows for Lucky when it gets too far away from her and that it will whinny back. The relationship is the same as a real life cow and calf. He said Lucky sleeps with the cow and spends time ‘hanging out’ with the calves in the herd just as though it was bovine and not equine.
The cow is protective of the little orphan and looks after it like it was her own calf.
“A brumby stallion came into water at the dam the other day and the cow ran over and horned it. She chased it away. She must have thought it was going to kick or bite the foal,” Mr O’shea said.
Mr O’shea said the cow now looked as though she was in calf and that when she gave birth he would wean the foal.
Dr Ally Reid is a veterinarian out in the beef cattle heartland of Cloncurry. What does she make of a cow adopting a foal? She said you don’t see a lot of cross-species mothering like this and cow’s milk is not suitable for foals…but,
if the foal got all of the immediate nutrients it needed from its natural mum in the first 6-12 hours of its life, it’s possible it will survive on the cow’s milk. How did the cow happen to have milk, you might well ask? As another vet, Dr Sallyanne Potter, said it would “probably be impossible for a dry cow to lactate. “Initiation of lactation requires progesterone and estrogen, that is, pregnancy. Possibly she had a calf that died early and the foal was in the right place at the right time,” she said. Dr Potter said it was also possible that if the cow was in a fairly advanced stage of pregnancy and the udder was developing, she might release milk.
In any case it proves the point that nature moves in mysterious ways. And all we can say is we want the little brumby foal to survive and go on and win the Melbourne Cup. What a great story that would be. Lucky wins the cup!