While exciting events have occurred at times at Medicine Spirit Ranch such as bull fights, marauding feral hogs, and flash floods, but never before have we experienced frank thievery. And bovine sneak thievery at that!

Not long ago I posted a blog piece describing five black baldy cows who had calves by their side purchased to restock our cattle herd. The calves were the product of black baldy cows and apparently black baldy bulls or Angus bulls. While small, the calves appeared healthy and who would have suspected skullduggery from any of them.

Black baldy calves mixed in with our smoky calves (crosses between black baldy mothers and Charolois bull)

One calf stood out from the rest because she was brown rather than black and had no white patch on her face as is typical for a black baldy. I dismissed these coloration differences because the calf appeared healthy and had a good mama. Who would have thought the behavior of the calf in addition to its appearance would differ from the usual?

The little brown milk thief. And he looks so innocent!

For readers unfamiliar with cow behavior, to see a calf suckling on a cow other than its mother cow is unusual. This is especially so for non-milk cows. When seen, this behavior is referred to as allosuckling. An underweight calf might attempt to suckle an unrelated cow, but typically will promptly be shaken off by the seemingly offended lactating cow. While on rare occasion a non-mother cow will suckle an orphan calf, in my experience this behavior is unusual, and I’ve never seen this behavior for a normally developing calf with an accepting and nurturing mother. We have in the past needed to bottle feed calves whose mothers did not produce sufficient milk, were ill, or died.

The milk theft I witnessed has now become a recurring crime, confirming my suspicions of outright calf sneak thievery. Both occasions transpired while I was in the process of feeding range cubes, informally called “cow candy”. While the mama cows hurried forward to enjoy their protein feed, the little brown calf, eyeing her opportunity and with nefarious intent and gleam in her eye, sneaked between the hind legs of a cow who was not her mother. There she attached herself to a teat. Presumably, the cow in question was sufficiently distracted to not check the identity of the alien calf.

After witnessing this unusual cow behavior for the first time, I wondered if the calf had been abandoned or was failing to obtain sufficient milk from her mother. However, this seemed not to be the case., as the calf was observed to feed normally from her mother. My further enlightenment occurred about a week later when I saw the sneak thief latch onto yet another mother while again feeding range cubes. A quick inspection of the little brown sneak thief found her to be both healthy appearing and not starved for milk.

Who me, steal milk?

Even stranger was the sneak thief’s selection of which cows to suckle. One would expect the calf to select one of the well bonded cows in the purchased herd from which he came. Instead, the alien calf on both occasions selected a cow from our original and unrelated herd. Admittedly, cows from our original herd are experienced and gentle mothers, perhaps helping to explain their tolerance for the interloping, little milk thief.

And as Yogi Berra has been quoted as saying, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

Tagged: allosuckling, an unusual ranch observation, animal behavior, Cattle Ranching, Creative Nonfiction, Medicine Spirit Ranch, milk thief, Yogi Berra quote