A calf that has been born with two heads stuck togethereach with its two eyes, its nose, its mouth and its tongue, has managed to survive more than 48 hours despite this serious malformation on a livestock farm in the province of Zamora, although the prospects for its survival are not good.
In the first moments was breastfed by his mother and later fed from bottles by the rancher Miguel Fuentes Garrote, who explained his surprise when observing the animal.
The case of polycephaly has occurred in a gextensive beef cattle farm in Piñuela district of 63 inhabitants in the Sayago region, southwest of the Zamora province.
“In the almost 48 years that I have been a rancher I have never seen anything like this, some calf without an ass yesbut nothing like this,” added this 64-year-old cowboy, who has verified that this birth has become quite an event in the area.
Of the hundred breeding females on the farm, the one that gave birth to the calf with two heads is a cow that has had “about fifteen births and has always raised all the calves“No one has died,” says its owner proudly. It is also a “very strong” cow with character, which last Tuesday around five-thirty in the afternoon gave birth without help.
“I saw the calf already standing, which had suckled,” but after a while it fell and did not get up. Although she tried to get closer to himthe wet nurse’s temperament meant that she could not help him and it was on Wednesday morning when, with the help of a tractor shovel, she managed to rescue the strange specimen.
Fed with two bottles
Since then she has fed him from bottles, sometimes up to two at a time, one for each mouthand initially everything went well until this Thursday afternoon when it began to show signs of weakness.
“At first I swallowed, now “What you suck out of one mouth you put out through the other.”explains the rancher, who sees that little one as much weaker and predicts that he has only a few hours to live.
The atypical calf comes from a cow that is crossbreed Blonda with Limousine pregnant from natural mating of a Limousin bull, details Miguel Fuentes, who has no hope that she will survive beyond this Friday.
And after that? He will surely take it the truck that removes the bodies from the farms as he does with any other carcass, although the rancher admits that “he would gladly donate it” for science to study, but no one has proposed it.
“I imagine it is a case worth studyingwith those two brains and how they are combined,” he points out.
