Driving to work today, I passed a field of cows when something stuck out and caught my attention. It appeared to be a deer with its head up under a cow getting a drink of milk. I’m not entirely sure it was a deer. It could have been a calf, but I think I saw some white around it’s tail (we have whitetail deer here) but due to the angle, distance and short time I couldn’t tell if it had a long or short tail. It’s fur was certainly deer color, plus all the cows were black.
Is it udderly ridiculous for me to believe it was a deer?
Cows generally will not tolerate nursing by a calf from a different cow in the same herd. They are even less likely to tolerate nursing by a completely different species. (They tolerate if from humans because: 1. cows have been taught to do this all their lives. 2. that human feeds them every day.)
Correct as far as it goes but if the cow has lost a calf it wouldn’t surprise me too much especially if it is a borderline area where cows and deer mix at feeding time.
It did look like a Jersey calf except all the cows were black. The mystery creature was certainly brown and it had it’s head under a black cow.
I have seen a few deer in nearby fields. It’s a wooded area next to a river, so I imagine deer do feed near the cows.
I drove by again today and all the cows were gone. I think the deer knows I’m onto it and ate them to hide the evidence. Or they were on the other side of the hill.
It’s always possible that it was just eating grass under the black cow and it just looked like it was having milk. And I’m content thinking it was a calf, I was just wondering if deer commonly did that and I guess they don’t.
Calves aren’t neccessarily the same color as their mother. Many breeds are predominantly or wholly the same color, but not all. And not all calves are purebred. Like Springtime said, it’s not uncommon to cross-breed, especially for the first calving.
I suppose there is a remote possibility that it was an orphan fawn that, with a little human intervention, was ‘adopted’ by a cow that had lost her calf, but it seems more likely that it was light brown calf with a black mama cow.
As an aside, I’ve had experience with ‘tricking’ a cow into accepting a calf that wasn’t hers. Cows ID their calves by smell. So you have to make her nose, and the calf’s butt smell the same. The proceedure for doing this? Spray a cheap perfume onto her nose and the calf’s rear a couple of times a day for several days. The cow gets used to this ever present scent and finds it on the calf, so she begins to associate the calf with herself. Makes for an interesting few days around the barn.