Spend any amount of time raising cattle and eventually most people will end up with a bottle calf. It’s a typical occurrence. The cow, maybe a first-calf heifer, doesn’t accept the newborn or maybe she isn’t giving enough milk.
In George Puhrmann’s case, his cow had twins in July and decided that one was all she needed, abandoning the other. George and his wife, Heather, took the discarded twin, a heifer, to the barn to take on as a bottle calf.
What they didn’t expect to happen was the comical event that followed. The Puhrmanns brought the calf into the barn lot where their 24-year-old mule, Thunderbolt, was being kept. Species aside, for the mule it must have been love at first sight as she promptly claimed the newborn calf as her own. They tried initially to separate the pair but Thunderbolt’s grief was made well known. “She’ll paw and bray,” George said of the mule.
The mule’s mothering abilities go beyond mere attachment. “She’ll hang her head over the calf when you feed her. To make sure we’re not going to do anything bad,” Heather laughed.
“What happens is I’ll give her (the calf) the bottle and then immediately after she’s done with the bottle, she goes and tries to nurse on the mule,” George said. “What’s funny is that the mule lets her.” Mules may be sterile but this mule’s maternal instincts are still going strong.
When it comes to claiming babies that are not her own, Thunderbolt is a repeat offender. When the mule was younger, the Puhrmanns had another incident with her. “She was out in the field with the cows and she stole a calf. We had to separate them,” Heather said.
When George isn’t feeding his bottle calf and fending off Thunderbolt, he’s a part time professor at Drury University in the Waynesville, Mo., area. Right now he teaches American government, political science and sociology.
The Puhrmanns have lived on their Texas County farm near Licking, Mo., since 1985, after George retired from the United States Air Force.
“I grew up on a row crop farm in Iowa. We milked cows,” George said. He knew that raising cattle was in his retirement plans.
The Puhrmanns own 275 acres and then rent an additional 40 acres where they run 55 mixed breed cow/calf pairs.
The couple tends to favor the Angus/Charolais cross for their herd, but have experimented with Salers, Shorthorn and Santa Gertrudis in the past. For management purposes the couple likes to wean their calves at about seven months of age.
One of the challenges the Puhrmanns have had to deal with this year at weaning time has been the abundance of acorns in their area. The ground they normally use to separate calves was heavily wooded. They rotated pasture to keep the animals out of the woods, along with putting additives in their ration. “We put a little bit of lime in their salt mix,” Heather mentioned that this helps the cows to better digest the acorns to prevent compaction.
Heather’s knowledge of livestock came later in life than that of her husband’s. Much of it came from extensive reading and maybe some trial and error.
Both admit, with some humor, that the upcoming challenge of weaning bottle calf from mule will be a unique one for both of them. What to do with the pair? “I don’t know. Unless we get another one that she might want to adopt,” Heather said, laughing.
