“Little Girl Befriends Baby Cow That Lost Its Mom“originally appeared on ABC News, and was reprinted with permission.
When a precious calf ended up in this family after losing her mom, little Kinley Gray took her in with open arms.
“They are just so cute. My heart cannot even contain all of that love,” Lacey Gray, Kinley’s mom, told ABC News of the unusual yet heartstoppingly adorable bond the two now share.
Lacey is a professional photographer from Michigan City, Mississippi. She had reached out to her husband’s uncle, who owns cows, to see if she could borrow a calf for a photo shoot she was hoping to do. Little did she know that would soon lead to her owning one.
“I shot him a text and said, ‘Hey, this is what I’d like to do. Can I borrow one of your calves?’” she recalled of their initial conversation. “He laughed so hard. He said, ‘That is not how that works. You cannot just borrow a calf without the mom going crazy.’”
She hadn’t thought about that aspect but understood and moved on.
“But the next morning I got a phone call from him, and he was so serious,” Lacey recalled. “The tone in his voice was clearly that something bad had happened. He said, ‘Do you really want a calf?’ He told me, ‘The mama fell, and she’s not going to get up from it. She will die from this. I’m calling you to see if you want this baby, but you have to bottle-feed it several times a day.’”
Without hesitation, Lacey agreed, not having a clue about what she was getting herself into with raising a cow, let alone a 3-day-old calf that had just lost her mom.
“We brought her inside the first night. She slept in the laundry room,” said Lacey. “But Kinley ran in there and was kissing all over her. She brought her books. She read her books, and when it was time to walk her, Kinley wanted to do it all by herself. She would walk her all over the yard.”
Now, barely two weeks later, the precious pair are absolutely inseparable.
“Kinley cries when she has to leave. She always wants to be with her,” said Lacey. “She kisses her ears. She likes to kiss both of her ears instead of just one. She’ll lift Molly’s face up to kiss her on the nose. Kinley will sit down with her and not let our dogs come near her. She wants her all to herself. She wants to feed her all by herself. It’s really sweet.”
The happy new family did get to have that photo shoot after all, despite circumstances changing a bit.
“I was almost in tears,” Lacey said of shooting the two of them together. “She just has a connection with her. She just knows that’s her family. This is just so crazy and so sweet. I just hope that I can watch them grow all through Kinley’s childhood.”
