Orphan Calf Care
Reading Time: 7 minutes
by Heather Smith Thomas
Strange, unexpected things can happen to a mama cow. Learn orphan calf care from bottle and tube feeding to raising a calf with a buddy to reduce stress while keeping the immune system strong.
If you have cattle, sooner or later you may be faced with an orphan to raise. Strange things sometimes happen to a mama cow, often unexpectedly. For instance, this spring in our valley in eastern Idaho, a rancher suddenly lost six cows, and the veterinarian diagnosed the problem as redwater — a clostridial disease related to blackleg, malignant edema, and other toxin-forming clostridial diseases that can kill cattle within a few hours. This disease can be prevented with vaccination, but we don’t know if the cows were some he’d bought that hadn’t been vaccinated, or were only vaccinated once a year. In our area, people need to vaccinate twice a year for that disease. That rancher was looking for a nurse cow for his orphan calves.
Many people have raised calves on bottles (a twin, or a calf that isn’t accepted by its mother, or a calf whose mother died soon after giving birth). It’s usually easy with a newborn or young calf — as long as you make sure the calf receives colostrum within the first hours of life (from its own mother or another cow) to ensure a good start. The antibodies in colostrum provide temporary immunity to many of the diseases the calf might encounter. Newborn calves are hungry and eager to suckle, and it’s not too difficult to feed them. After a bottle or two of colostrum, the calf can be switched to regular milk or milk replacer.
More challenging is the 1- or 2-month-old calf that’s been with the herd all its life and suddenly loses mom. Freak things can happen to cows, such as getting stuck on their back in a ditch, dying from poison plants or bloat, being killed by predators, or some other misfortune. This leaves you with an orphan that might be semi-wild (not ready to accept you as mom), but too young to go without milk or high-quality feed.
Some of those calves can survive by robbing milk from other cows — sneaking up to suckle alongside the calf of another cow. The orphan feels comfortable with the herd for companionship and security and might manage on a bit of milk robbed here and there, although he may be a little smaller than the other calves at weaning.
If a calf is only a couple months old when he loses mom, and you want to provide an adequate diet, you first need to get him out of the herd and in a separate place where you can feed him. You might be able to get the calf to suckle a bottle and drink milk or milk replacer for a couple more months, but some of these calves can do all right without milk — if you can provide good quality hay and a concentrate like grain or calf pellets. The rumen isn’t developed enough yet in a young calf to handle enough forage, but the calf can digest grain or a more concentrated feed like calf pellets.
Milk replacer is expensive. It can also be a hassle to get a calf that age to suck a bottle if it’s afraid of people. Instead, you might put the orphan with an older animal in a small pen —as a buddy, for security — and feed some good-quality feed. Once the calf learns to eat it by following the buddy’s example, you could then create a creep feeder that the calf can go into — if you don’t want the older animal eating all the calf feed and not letting the smaller one get a fair share.
If the orphan is very young and you need to bottle-feed, try to capture it without the stress of a chase. Or bring it in from the pasture with a group of cattle — and get your hands on it in a small corral. Don’t stress the calf too much by chasing; stress hinders the immune system, and you don’t want the calf to get sick. If you’ve already lost the cow, you don’t want to risk losing the calf, as well.
Depending on when the calf lost its mother, it may have already been vaccinated (at branding age), but if there’s any doubt about immune status, give that calf another vaccination with one of the 7-way clostridial vaccines, for adequate protection. Keep the living environment clean. A young calf is vulnerable to problems like coccidiosis or calf scours.
On our ranch, our family has been raising cattle for more than 70 years and we’ve had several experiences raising orphaned calves. One of the first was a calf whose mother was butchered out on the range by a cattle rustler when the calf was just 2 months old. My daughter and I rode for days trying to find the calf, with no luck. He’d gone through several fences into another range and went home with the neighbor’s cows that fall, and the neighbor called us because the calf had our brand on him. He’d survived but was stunted and raggedy and it took all winter to nurse him back to health and get him growing again. He was too young to go without milk when he lost his mama and needed better feed than dry bunch grass.
Over the years, we had cows with fatal problems (one was dying of intestinal cancer, and another was dying from an impacted abomasum) and their pregnancies were far enough along that we were able to take the calves by c-section and euthanize the cows. Those calves fed on bottles until we could “graft” them onto a cow that lost a calf, or had our milk cow raise them. Our young son Michael enjoyed feeding them.
One spring we lost two cows. One got on her back in a ditch and bloated, and we didn’t find her in time to save her. We brought her month-old steer calf in from the field quite easily; he followed his dead mother as we dragged her body out the gate with our feed truck. We cornered him in the barnyard and fed him a bottle. He wasn’t very wild and was hungry enough to suck the bottle.
A couple of weeks later, another cow in the herd suddenly died, leaving a 2-month-old heifer calf. That calf was wilder and more scared than the steer. We had to bring several cows in with her from the field to capture her, and when we cornered her to try to feed her, she was too scared to suck a bottle. She needed milk, so we finally used a nasogastric tube to get the milk into her stomach. At the next feeding time she was still too scared to suck the bottle and had to be tubed again. By the fourth feeding, she finally realized people meant food and decided to take the bottle. After that, it was easy. Those two orphans lived together in our backyard, and our 6-year-old granddaughter enjoyed feeding them bottles.
Those two had a good pasture in the backyard and grew nicely. When they got a little older, we taught them to eat grain. The heifer gentled down and became a pet. Our granddaughter named her Buffalo Girl, and she stayed in our herd until she was 15 years old, producing good calves.
The most recent orphan was a young bull calf we’d planned to keep as a bull, because he was sired by a very good Angus bull and was out of one of our best cows. Her name was China Doll, and we’d named the calf Kung Fu. He was only 3 months old when he lost his mama. She was fine one evening and nearly dead the next morning. Our vet thought she might be suffering from grass tetany, and we tried to give her the necessary treatment (magnesium solution, administered intravenously) but we were too late; she died just as we were starting the treatment.
We were able to butcher and salvage the cow, but little Kung Fu refused to suckle a bottle. We put him into a small pen, cornered him, and put the nipple in his mouth. He kept getting milk in his windpipe because he refused to swallow, and we didn’t want him to get aspiration pneumonia. So, we gave him access to good grass in a small pen and fed him alfalfa hay and a little grain and he grew nicely and became a good bull.
What to Feed an Orphan Calf
Calves can eat a significant amount of forage by the time they are 3 months old. Younger than that, they generally do better if they have milk. If they’re on good pasture, they can do very well, but if it’s mid-summer in a dry climate, the pasture quality is rapidly declining.
Early-weaned or orphaned calves can be raised to normal weaning weight in a corral with good feed. Young calves need a ration that is highly palatable and highly nutritious (at least 16 percent crude protein and 70 percent TDN — total digestible nutrients). There are many options for providing this kind of diet, including a commercial calf starter or a COB (corn, oats, barley) mix with molasses. Commercial calf starter is fortified with vitamins and minerals and, optionally, with medication to prevent coccidiosis. A little high-quality alfalfa hay (with fine, soft leaves and stems; not overly mature and coarse) will also provide the necessary protein and a higher level of nutrients than grass hay.
At first you can give the calf long-stem grass hay and top dress it with the grain ration for 3 to 5 days until he is eating the grain or pelleted ration. Make sure calf always has access to clean water. During heat of summer, calves also need shade. The less stress, the better. Some calves adjust nicely to living by themselves, while others do better if they have a buddy or companion, either living with another animal or in a pen next to it — to provide mental comfort and security.
Because of the stress of sudden weaning off of milk, it’s always wise to make sure the calf is vaccinated for clostridial and respiratory diseases.
Heather Smith Thomas ranches with her husband near Salmon, Idaho, raising cattle and a few horses. She has a B.A. in English and history. She has raised and trained horses for 50 years and has been writing freelance articles and books nearly that long, publishing 20 books and more than 9,000 articles for horse and livestock publications. Find Heather online at HeatherSmithThomas.BlogSpot.com.
Originally published in the September/October 2025 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.
