# newer beef calves



## PassiveMAYO (7 mo ago)

we recently purchased a set of 4 new angus calves,
2 steers,1 heifer, and a bull from a new supplier this season. I have personally never dealt with them but have some questions as I'm concerned I personally haven't seen this behavior and want to address before it causes any problems.
they were roughly 3 weeks old upon their arrival we are looking for a bottle raise situation as they have been very good to us in the past and seemed to work out.so they are now 1 month old

in the past the calves we have purchased always wanted to latch on to a bottle pretty easily and aggressively I might add we never needed to be tricky and or force them to look for the bottle and there seemed to be no problem feeding them. like I said we had to acquire a new supplier as our normal producer stop raising cows this past season. we had a dairy that supplied our previous batch when they had angus jersey crosses they wanted to get rid of, I tried another supplier that does rangeland angus so we decided to try them.

they seem to a lot more skittish even after a week in our possession is this normal?
they are not willing to latch onto a bottle tried several things they however seem to be eating grain calf starter feed fairly well only 1 of the 4 will latch on a bottle two feedings a day roughly 8-10 hours in between. we try with each calve daily at this point just trying to make sure they are healthy and I'm not needing to doing something different than the past as they are rangeland full blown angus and not a dairy cross.
we are getting ready to vaccinate them and introduce to our current herd within the next two months and want to make sure we are on right track


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## MontanaBredRancher (Apr 12, 2021)

PassiveMAYO said:


> we recently purchased a set of 4 new angus calves,
> 2 steers,1 heifer, and a bull from a new supplier this season. I have personally never dealt with them but have some questions as I'm concerned I personally haven't seen this behavior and want to address before it causes any problems.
> they were roughly 3 weeks old upon their arrival we are looking for a bottle raise situation as they have been very good to us in the past and seemed to work out.so they are now 1 month old
> 
> ...


Yes, normal they are skittish. I would put all the calves in a small pen and just sit for a while to get them used to you, your smell, movements, etc.
If they aren't latching on the bottle, re-check you are doing everything correctly. If you need no changes, pour the milk in a bowl and let them lap it up.

Both my husband and I have done this before with bottle calves. Not much else you can do, really. Always has worked; but we also start them on hay young too though.


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