Orphan lamb finds a cow for a mother

Ruth feeds the lamb on Gary Haakma's farm near Tauranga. Picture / Alan Gibson

In the hills above Katikati lives a cow called Ruth.

Six days ago, she threw bovine caution to the wind and offered up her udder to a starving lamb.

Since then, the 2 1/2-year-old jersey cross has barely let the baby Wiltshire ram out of her sight.

She feeds it, grooms it and watches over it like an anxious mother, much to the astonishment of her owner, Gary Haakma.

Mr Haakma found the newborn lamb in a bush on Sunday.

When he tried to give it back to the ewe who birthed it, she rejected it. So he prepared to feed it.

"I had the milk powder. I had everything ready," he said.

But before he got the chance, the "little fulla" sidled up to Ruth and latched on to one of her teats.

"He was right up on his tiptoes. He was reaching up like a giraffe," said Mr Haakma.

The 56-year-old farmer said he had been around sheep all his life and never seen anything like it.

"Normally a cow would just kick them away."

Ruth became surrogate mother to the lamb a day before she gave birth to her first calf, which Mr Haakma said was fortuitous timing.

"There was a supply and demand. She had an udder full of milk and he had an empty stomach."

The cow's hormones might also have contributed to her acceptance of the lamb.

"She was just getting fairly motherly at that point."

Ruth's calf is paying little attention to its adopted sibling, spending yesterday morning asleep behind a shed.

Mr Haakma said the calf came out for feeds only at dusk.

By contrast, the lamb stayed in the paddock with Ruth, falling asleep after a big drink of milk as she grazed nearby.

She cleaned its underbelly with her tongue and turned around to check where it was several times when it scampered away.

Mr Haakma hopes to reintegrate the lamb into his flock of 12 wiltshires, having seen no ill-effects from it drinking cow's milk.

He had checked its bowel movements and said they were "good as gold".

Derek Spratt, president of Bay of Plenty Federated Farmers, said it was possible to rear lambs on cow's milk because it was almost the same as ewe's milk.

But it was unusual that the cow had allowed the lamb to suckle.

"A cow's got great mothering instincts, but they can also be mongrels," he said.

Mr Haakma's main concern was the lamb having an "identity crisis".