Animals: Pieter Poth's Calves

Hollander Pieter Poth, 53, has been a dairyman all his life. He owns a 300-acre dairy farm two-and-a-half miles out of Clarksburg, W. Va. Dairyman Poth's farm is the largest around Clarksburg, completely equipped, immaculately clean throughout. His 105 cows supply a large part of the milk for Clarksburg's 30,000 people. Last week it was no novelty to Dairyman Poth to see that one of his Holsteins, named Alta Clover, was about to calve. Patting her sleek sides, he guessed that she might even have twins. He penned her up for the night.

Next morning when Dairyman Poth went into his barn, he found that during the night Alta Clover, without assistance, had given birth to sextuplets: five heifers and one bull—four spotted black and white and two nearly all white, all six fully developed, healthy. Stunned, Dairyman Poth put them with a Guernsey and another Holstein to help the mother nurse her herd.

When news of the extraordinary birth reached Clarksburg, busy Dairyman Poth had to stop work to show the sextuplets to scores of visitors. Said he, "I was so completely surprised I could hardly believe my eyes. I didn't think it was possible. I want to raise the heifer calves, but I don't know whether I will raise the bull." He said he valued the mother at $300, the calves at $15 each. However, the whole little herd may be valueless. In multiple mixed births, the calves are usually free-martins (hermaphrodites), useless for milking or breeding, and the bulls also are sometimes sexually abnormal.

World Record. Expert cattlemen were as completely surprised as Dairyman Poth. Howard Mason Gore, onetime (1924-25) U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, onetime (1925-29) Governor of West Virginia and a cattleman himself, declared that the largest birth he ever heard of was quadruplets. Benjamin F. Creech, animal husbandry expert at the University of West Virginia, said he thought quintuplets was the most prodigious previous cow birth. Last week in Washington, the American Genetic Association said that quadruple calves occurred in one birth in every half million. For quintuplets and sextuplets they would not even guess at the figures. Neither would the Department of Agriculture. Nobody there had ever heard of sextuple calves. Consensus was that Dairyman Poth's sextuplets were probably a world record.