(Photo provided by Roberta Mielhausen)
The birth of a two headed calf on a farm in Lion’s Head this week caught a local farmer by surprise.
Farmer Jeff Mielhausen says he was not there for the birth of the animal itself, it happened sometime in the evening. He says he had previously seen the mother cow up by herself just before dark, “a mature cow has a birth no problem, so I went out in the morning to check on the cows and found the cow first, she had prolapsed the calf out and she was still alive but in distress.”
Afterwards, Mielhausen went looking for the calf and upon finding it, he thought it was initially dead, but when an ear twitched, he noticed the animal had four ears.
Through a Facebook post following the birth, wife Roberta noted that the animal was “Alert and bawling (out both mouths) and blinking simultaneously.”
Mielhausen says this incident is an extremely rare thing for the calf with two heads to be alive, but he has heard of other calves being born with two heads.
He says they were not able to provide nutrients to the calf and it had to be euthanized.
Mielhausen notes they often try to stomach tube a calf that is having problems when it doesn’t suck right away, but when he attempted to do so, he was unable to, and the vets found they also had the same issue, “if you try to force the stomach tube in, you can get into its windpipe and you basically drown the calf, so I didn’t want to do that.”
Mielhausen says the one head on it, which he refers to as the first head, where it was supposed to be, it had a cleft lip and the palate of its mouth wasn’t proper, “if you can’t get nutrients into it, it is going to suffer very badly, so the last step was to euthanize it.”
Mielhausen says he hopes the phenomenon does not happen again.
According to the Journal of Veterinary Clinical Science in 2020, animals born with this condition sometimes die within a few minutes or hours of birth.
Other recent cases of calves born with two heads include a case in China in 2020 and one in Kentucky in 2016.
(Correction: An earlier version of this story noted the calves in China and Kentucky were last reported alive. The calf in Kentucky reportedly lived for several days, the lifespan of the calf in China is unclear).