Pregnant Heifer Ended a 3-Hour Rescue by Walking Off Mid-Unbuckling

A heifer that was three months pregnant was lifted out of a disused shaft at an old quarry site on a farm near Keyneton, in South Australia’s Barossa region, on Tuesday, Nov. 10. She had fallen about three meters. A local vet and nearly 15 volunteers worked for about three hours to free her. She came out with only minor scrapes and bruises.¹

The rescue was reported by ABC Rural, which describes the hole as an exploratory shaft that had sat on the property for at least several decades. It had been covered with branches and sticks. That covering held up for decades, until the heifer walked across it on Tuesday morning and fell through.¹

“It was just a pretty normal morning up until that point,” local vet Saul Morelli told ABC Rural.¹

A long night at the bottom

Morelli thinks the heifer had been at the bottom of the shaft for a while before anyone found her. “She was pretty stressed, but also very tired. I think she’d been trying to get out of the hole most of the night,” he said.¹

He was joined by volunteers from the SES and CFS, South Australia’s State Emergency Service and Country Fire Service. Morelli gave the heifer a light sedative to keep her settled while the crew got her ready to lift.¹

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She did not seem to need much settling. “The cow was actually very calm for the situation she’d managed to get herself in,” Gunther Schulz, deputy unit manager of the Kapunda SES, told ABC Rural.¹

A harness, a spreader bar and a neighbor’s loader

The crew used a purpose-built lifting harness. Schulz said the harness “allows us to place straps under and around the animal and then support that via a spreader bar, so it provides the maximum comfort and safety to the animal.” A spreader bar is a rigid beam that holds the straps apart, so the animal’s weight is spread out instead of being squeezed together.¹

Next came the question of what to hang it all from. The shaft sits on top of a hill, so there was no way to bring a regular crane up to it. A neighbor’s loader did the lifting instead.¹

Schulz said using the lifting gear is not an incredibly common occurrence, and crews have plenty of other ways to move animals.¹

Out, and gone

Once she was up, the heifer wasted no time. “As soon as her feet touched the ground on the outside of the hole she was off, and it was a bit of a panic to quickly let all the straps loose,” Morelli said.¹

She came out in a stable condition with scrapes and bruises on her legs and no serious injuries, according to ABC Rural.¹ It took roughly 15 people about three hours to get her out, and she left before they could finish taking the harness off.