On the afternoon of April 13, during spring calving, cattle ranchers Bobie and Mark Dean were shocked to discover one of their cows was carrying three calves — a rare event estimated to occur approximately 1 in every 100,000 pregnancies.
"We had to help her, because she wasn't progressing," explained Bobie Dean. The level of assistance a cow needs when giving birth can vary from simply guiding the calf out into the world to using specialized equipment to reposition the calf or even help the mother by hauling the infant out.
"I got one out, and it had quite small feet, so we assumed there was a second one," Dean continued. "So we pulled the second one, and the rule of thumb is that when you're already helping, you always check, just in case. And when I reached back in, I could just feel a nose at the end of my fingers."
The Deans run a cow/calf operation near Central Butte with just over 400 cows. Amazingly, they have seen triplets before: A decade ago, they had another odds-defying triple delivery — unassisted that time.
So far, all of the triplets on the Deans' farm have survived birth and done well, including these latest calves.
"They're all doing good," Dean was happy to say. "It was pretty shocking, we were not expecting triplets, that's for sure."
