Twins in Cattle- A Blessing or a Curse???

poor number 10 here is not too happy about being locked up in this corral all of her friends are out there eating their hay and she's in here by herself we've got a good reason for locking her up though and that's what we're going to be talking about today on farmer tyler ranch [Music] yes number 10 had herself a set of twins a couple days ago twins i have such mixed feelings about them on the one hand i feel like i should be happy because i get a bonus calf but on the other hand twins come with a lot more work and a lot more stress and it's not impossible to get her to raise both of them but it's definitely not easy i'm gonna throw some hay to her so that she settles down or at least feels a little bit happier while we're talking and then i'm gonna tell you guys a little bit about how i deal with twins [Music] before we get too far into this though i feel like i need to go into a little bit of cow psychology to help explain why twins are such a challenge especially with beef cattle this starts with the fact that twins are actually quite rare in cattle unlike sheep or goats where twins are common or almost more normal than singles most beef producers will never have a set of twins i must have a twin gene in my herd because i seem to get one or two or as many as five sets of twins every single year because twins are so rare and this is now i'm just kind of going off of my own theories here but i feel like a cow's brain just isn't wired to take care of two because most often what happens is she'll she'll plop out her set of twins and usually one twin is stronger than the other that one will get up and start nursing and the mother and the stronger twin will just sort of walk off and leave the weaker one behind most likely what's going to happen is the twin that gets left behind is just going to end up dying because it never gets a chance to nurse and that is why if you can catch twins fast enough and get mother and both twins locked up in a small pen you actually stand a pretty decent chance of getting her to raise both the key is getting them in here quickly when i got these guys all penned up the calves were still wet she hadn't even had a chance to clean them all off yet and what that does is it doesn't allow her to get up and ditch one of them i've got her in this small working corral here so that no matter how far she goes she's never more than 30 feet away from either calf what that will result in is that both calves will at some point fight to nurse and even if she does shoe one off usually what what happens eventually is the calf wins that fight because they've got a lot more motivation to nurse on her than she has to not let them nurse if you've been with the channel for a while you might remember that in the past i've dealt with twins in several different ways this goes back to buddy our original bottle calf that we ended up taking back to the house and raising on the bottle well the reason for that is that i didn't get to buddy soon enough his mother had already had a chance to pick her favorite and go off and leave him and when i found him out at the winter pasture he was he had already been abandoned you may also remember the year after buddy was born we had another set of twins that was out of a first calf heifer i decided to pull a twin off of her because her milk production was so light there was no way that she was gonna have enough to feed both calves in that scenario the calf was raised on a bottle as well but for different reasons it should be noted that it's you don't always have to intervene there have been scenarios or cases in my own herd when older cows have given birth to twins and they take to them no problem they'll raise both of them out in the field and i don't have to do a thing there's a chance that number 10 would have done that but i've found that that is so rare for that to happen that you're really just better off locking them up for a few days until you know that everybody's nursing and everybody's healthy and then turning them back out that leads me to the million dollar question how do you know if they're both nursing a lot of us don't have enough time to just sit out here all day long and observe them to see what they're doing although that would be the best way to verify that both calves are eating but there are some other things that you can look at and check to give you a very good idea as to whether or not everyone's eating and before i go any further it is of critical importance to be very confident that both calves are eating within 24 hours if you surpass that window then you you put the calf at a lot higher risk for health problems they need to get that colostrum within 24 hours really the sooner they can get it the better but 24 hours is the absolute cut off the first thing that you would probably want to look at is just the overall demeanor of the calves are they lively are they alert are their ears perked up if the calves look healthy and alert then odds are they're going to have a good nursing instinct and you know they will probably try to go nurse off of mom and eventually figure it out these calves were both up on their feet running around they were really healthy good looking calves and they were both making attempts to nurse and she wasn't really fighting them off once we got them up here in the corral so i didn't feel like i needed to go get a bottle and try to feed them that way i was pretty sure that if i just stayed out of their way that they would figure it out on their own probably a good bit of insurance would be to come in here with a bottle and bottle feed them colostrum you could even milk it out of mother and give it to them that way but the chance that you take here that and and why i i don't opt to do this unless i'm really unsure is because if you start feeding them with the bottle then you can imprint on them and now they think you are mom and the big danger being that then they won't even try to nurse off of her after raising buddy the bottle calf in our backyard when i put him back out in the pasture i thought that he would probably go around try to steal a drink off of other cows because that's often what calves do but he never even made any attempt to do that and it dawned on me that he had never he'd never seen another cow i mean except for the day he was born but i don't think he remembered that but he would have not known to go nurse on a cow he's never seen another calf nurse so you know they can lose that and that's that's the real chance that you take if you start intervening with the bottle you don't want to become mom i mean unless that's your your plan all along but in this case we want mom to do the work because she makes enough milk i think she can feed both of them within that initial 24 hour period probably the best way to tell if they've been nursing well there's a couple number one you want to look at the cow's bag after you've got a trained eye you'll be able to tell if a calf has been nursing on it or not generally what this looks like is number one one of our teats is going to look like it's almost been polished because it's got that calf saliva they clean it up while they're nursing and you know sometimes that really stands out the other thing is you're going to notice those teats are a little bit shriveled compare all four quarters and if one of them is significantly smaller than the others whereas they were all the same size right after birth you could be pretty sure that that one quarter got nursed on the other way is looking at the calf's belly now especially when they're standing up this is a lot more easy to notice we're going to use this little sleeping white face as an example so where i would look is kind of right in front of her hip but behind her rib cage now you can see that her side it's pretty much flat right on back and that's good if she was real sunk in right here like there was a big divot that you could see then i would be a little bit more nervous for her it's a little harder to tell while they're laying down so we'll stand her up here in a minute and get a better look it's better if she gets up on her own but i might have to sort of nudge her that direction here here we go [Music] [Music] i know that the camera angle is really bad right now but she is nursing on that hind teeth i don't want to stand up or move or really make a lot of noise because i don't want to interrupt this process but i can see that she's latched on right now so that's awesome all right well that is what i was really hoping to see this morning i was kind of hoping to see both of them do that but the black one has got enough other good things going for it that i'm i'm pretty darn sure that he's nursing too what i also notice is that while the white face one is nursing i can tell that she's no rookie she knows exactly what to do she you could see she walked straight for that bag which tells me she's done it before and i think that i can worry a lot less about these two this last trick is usually a little bit easier to observe and that is is the caffeine is in the bathroom if nothing's going in nothing's coming out a question that i get asked like every single time i show twins on camera is about free martins and i think a lot of per people have heard this term and might have a general idea of what it is or what it means but some people have no clue what it is and of those that have heard of it i think a lot of people don't really understand sort of the mechanics behind it so i'm going to try to explain it the best i can in the simplest terms possible because that's the way my brain works i think what most people understand about free martin twins is that the female will not be reproductively viable when she is of age that is almost true but there's a little bit more to it than that this phenomenon really only occurs when one twin is male and one is female if you have two male twins obviously they'll both be fine as far as bulls if that's what you want to raise them for if you have two heifer twins there's no problems there they can both grow up and reproduce and do everything just like a normal calf can the free martin issue only occurs with mixed gender sets of twins and let me explain why while the twins are in utero basically what happens is it's like they share a blood supply the blood from the male calf is going to have testosterone in it that will essentially screw up the way the females reproductive organs develop so you can see if you have two females obviously testosterone is not going to be present free martin is is not a thing but when you have the male calf and the female calf that's how that works there is a 10 chance that just the way they are conceived or the way they are in your uterus i'm not really sure exactly the science behind this but there is a 10 chance that they won't share blood supply like that and that she will grow up to be just a normal female cow most people don't want to take the 10 chance and they will just automatically flag a heifer that's part of a set of mixed gender twins as non-viable she won't reproduce and and i mean odds are she won't so this is not one that we'll be keeping honestly it's probably not one that will look good enough to keep come weaning time because you got to remember since mama is raising both of these calves she's not going to be able to give as much milk to both as she would be able to give to just one when they're young this isn't a huge issue because they don't eat as much but as they get older and their appetites increase she's gonna have a really difficult if not impossible time keeping up with that milk demand there that little heifer calf is standing over by the barn they're pooping right now so that's an awesome sign how do you know that you're a livestock person you can discuss those topics and it's not weird now that i'm about 99 sure that both of these twins are nursing and mother has accepted both i'm not going to turn them out just yet i want to wait until they're both strong enough and old enough to kind of be up on their feet more often than not i want them to be to a point where if she does happen to run off and leave one it's got enough strength and enough energy to go find her to get that meal if they should so choose it's really no more work for me to just throw a little bit of hay for her here every morning that's not a big deal and if it helps ensure the survival of both of these twins then it's well worth it so enough about twins i think that's about everything i know about them so if you have any other questions feel free to ask but that's pretty much the gist of it [Music] bye

Channel: Farmer Tyler Ranch

Views: 36,461

Keywords: Calves, Twins, Cattle, Cows, Raising twins, Beef cows, Farmer Tyler ranch, Sonne farms, Our Wyoming Life, Just a few acres farm

Id: 1K28CFm2JMg

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022