Calving season can be a stressful and dramatic time on the ranch. There’s a lot of new life but there is often death as well.
Every once in a while, however, something happens that seems like a miracle.
Just ask Chris Paulencu with Green Acres Cattle Company, a seedstock operation in central Alberta’s Lamont County. Thanks to a rare feat of science and a little faith, he and his wife, Amber, witnessed an apparently doomed first-calf heifer and her newborn survive in spite of overwhelming odds.
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In mid-March, Chris was regularly checking the first-calf heifers.
“At the midnight check, there were two heifers that were really close. One had her tail up so she was in active labour.”
Paulencu put one of the heifers in the barn, but the other one ran back to the herd.
When he checked again at 4 a.m., the heifer in active labour had not made any progress while in the barn. Meanwhile, the other one was in a perilous state.
“I found her calving on a hillside with her spine parallel to the downhill slope so she couldn’t get up. The calf was already out and born with a sac on his face.
“I noticed she was prolapsing. I ran there and I grabbed the sac, which was frozen on its face. The calf was pretty well dead, but I rammed my fingers in his nose and kind of hit him in the chest and boom, he took a breath and I grabbed him, ran him to the barn and stuck him in the calf warmer box.”
Then Paulencu headed back to the heifer, which by then was showing a foot-long prolapse. He pushed her into a sitting position and attempted to push in the prolapse, but the second he touched it, the heifer sprang to her feet and ran away.
“I said ‘OK, great.’ I got her going towards the barn; all I had to do was swing one gate. But I was too slow and she beat me and ran back to the cows.
“By this time, (the prolapse) is no longer hanging a foot. It’s hanging down by her feet. And I’m going, ‘Oh boy. I gotta call my wife’.”
By the time Amber arrived, the prolapse was dragging. They improvised a way to keep it off the ground using Chris’ jacket and the heifer’s tail.
“We tied the prolapse up and tied her tail through it to hold it up to keep the pressure off of her vaginal walls,” he said.
They got her moving toward the barn when Amber had what some might consider an unconventional idea.
“She said ‘stop, let’s just say a prayer here’ so we’re like ‘Father, just please look after this animal in her time of need’.”
Then things took a dark turn. The cow’s uterus literally sheared off.
“She took two steps after that and plop! Everything is on the ground. And that’s certain death. I walked up to the cow and I patted her on her back and said ‘Sorry, mama, I failed you.’
“I went to fire the tractor up because I had to butcher her. I’m not going to waste her.”
Once he returned to Amber and the cow, however, he got a pleasant but mysterious surprise.
“She’s still up. She still looks normal. And I said, ‘well, her eyes aren’t sinking, her ears are up, so this is weird. It’s been probably 10 minutes. She should be dead’.”
The couple walked the heifer to the barn, where they witnessed a heartwarming moment.
“She’s mooing and mooing, so we take the calf out of the box. She takes the calf right away and starts licking it off. That calf gets up and it starts sucking.”
Paulencu spared no time calling a vet.
“I talked to two different vets. They’re like, this is unheard of. I said, ‘I know, this is crazy. No one will believe me.’
“And so they’re like, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re looking at?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know exactly what I’m looking at. I’m holding a full-length uterus in my hand right now. And they’re like, ‘That’s unreal’.”
He later decided to call a teacher he studied under at Lakeland College.
“She specializes in the reproductive tracts of female cattle and she’s the one that trained me how to artificially inseminate cattle.”
To his surprise, the instructor had seen such a thing before.
“She said what happens is when they run, if the uterus is twisting over on itself it’ll twist off the artery feeding it blood. And then it just falls off and they live.
“It was just crazy how it happened.”
Every rancher knows the future of that cow once the calf is raised. But her memory will live on through that lucky calf, now registered with a name of its own.
“We run purebred cattle, so everything gets put into a registry and they get named. Our herd prefix is GAC for Green Acres Cattle. So now that calf’s name is GAC Mr. Miracle.”
