pro's and con's on twinning?

[76 Bar]

Can't recall the percentage of beef twining claimed by "stats" but after more than 4 decades raising cattle with an eagle eye I'm convinced its more common than one would be lead to believe for a variety of reasons both pre and post gestation.

 

[TCRanch]

Little update on my twins:

First set doing great!


Second set? Still glad I sold one.

Third Set? Ummmm . . . Karma again. Before I let them out of prison I told the mama if she'd take care of them I'd feed the smaller one she initially ditched. I swear, she understood me! Twins were almost always together but I never saw her let him nurse, she'd kick him off every single time. Fortunately he knew the sound of the Polaris and would come running for his bottles so I never had to search for him. Did she ever let him nurse? Dunno. Obviously I couldn't watch them 24/7 and he was always ravenous for his bottles, looked sunken in each morning. BUT!!!! My last cow that calved this year (a few weeks after the twins) has adopted the rejected twin and I now have a blended family, the calf is completely off the bottle.


Still not a fan!

 

[Nesikep]

Can't recall the percentage of beef twining claimed by "stats" but after more than 4 decades raising cattle with an eagle eye I'm convinced its more common than one would be lead to believe for a variety of reasons both pre and post gestation.

I think it's about 4%.. some will depend on breed, feed, etc too.. I think it's not too far off.. I've had 12 sets out of 550 births, that's including the ones that bungled it all up and miscarried (we had one cow do that a couple times)

 

[LJCB]

Explain the environmental factors involved. also if she doesn't twin and has a healthy heifer calf will that healthy heifer be predisposed to twin?

Without getting too deep into the physiology of why it happens, cows are more likely to double ovulate when they aren't cycling normally. The first heat after calving or heats after prolonged nutritional or heat stress are more likely to be double ovulations.

If a cow has a genetic predisposition to twinning, her daughters can inherit it without necessarily being twins themselves.

So would you say it's more likely for a cow to have twins after she has been flushed? I flushed a cow last year and just put the bull in with her after because I didn't want her to fall back in the calving cycle and she bred up pretty quick but had a set of twins.

 

[Buck Randall]

Explain the environmental factors involved. also if she doesn't twin and has a healthy heifer calf will that healthy heifer be predisposed to twin?

Without getting too deep into the physiology of why it happens, cows are more likely to double ovulate when they aren't cycling normally. The first heat after calving or heats after prolonged nutritional or heat stress are more likely to be double ovulations.

If a cow has a genetic predisposition to twinning, her daughters can inherit it without necessarily being twins themselves.

So would you say it's more likely for a cow to have twins after she has been flushed? I flushed a cow last year and just put the bull in with her after because I didn't want her to fall back in the calving cycle and she bred up pretty quick but had a set of twins.

It's tough to say for sure, but since we know that cows with disrupted estrous cycles are more likely to twin, it's not unreasonable to think that a flush could do that.

 

[Katpau]

I'm not fond of twins. If you calve in a confined area and are willing to spend the extra time needed to make sure both twins are successful, I think twins could be an advantage, but for most they may be more trouble then they are worth. I decided to look up my own records on twinning. I found information on my last 15 sets of twins. There may have been others during that time period, but we calve in an area where it is possible for a twin to disappear without our ever knowing it existed.

2 sets - Both calves died. They were difficult assisted births and we would have likely lost the cow had we not found them in time.
3 sets - One calf was still-born
5 sets - The cow rejected one calf. We bottle fed one of them and the other 4 were successfully grafted onto a cow that had lost her own calf.
2 sets - The cow might have been willing to raise both, but one was removed shortly after birth and put on a cow that had lost a calf.
3 sets - The cow raised both calves. We penned all of these up for a week or more, so that both calves were strong enough to keep up. One of these cows had already lost track of one of her calves by the morning after the day she calved. Perhaps she would have found it again, but she had moved the other about a 1/2 mile away when we found her. We penned them and she did accept the lost calf right away. Another one of them fed both calves for about 3 months, then decided she only wanted one and the other was not allowed to nurse unless it was sneaky. It ended up weaning 200 pounds lighter then the calf she liked.