Cornwall vet swims to rescue of trapped calves in race against rising tide

A herd of calves were saved from drowning when a vet engaged in a midnight marathon swimming race against the tide to guide them to safety.

The 10-week-old animals broke out of Bodrugan Barton farm in Cornwall and became stranded on rocks at Colona beach in the early hours of last Thursday morning with the tide rising.

Their plight was discovered only after a group of people on a nearby boat were kept awake by the sound of distressed mooing.

They alerted officers, who contacted the farmer, Robin Kendall, to let him know that his Wagyu calves, worth about £250 each, had been spotted off the beach.

The calves had escaped from their field through an open gate before crossing three other fields to reach the shore. They ended up on a rocky area as the rising tide flooded the beach behind them and left them stranded.

“By the time we got there, there was probably 30 metres (100 feet) of water between me on the beach and the calves,” Kendall’s father, Tim, told the Times.

“All we could see was calf eyes because it was so dark. Shining the torch across the bay, we could see loads of eyes glinting back at us. There wasn’t enough space on the rock for the calves to stand on and the water had risen to midway up their bodies, past the top of their legs. They were all scrabbling to stay on this ever-shrinking rock.”

The men were able to escort a small number of calves to safety but then had to call on Kendall’s wife, Polly Dugmore, who deals with cows in her job as a country vet.

Dugmore leapt into action, donning a wetsuit and lifejacket. Over the next 90 minutes of darkness, she swam the terrified calves to safety, one or two at a time.

Kendall used a boat to tow some of the other calves to shore while his father and the coastguard lit the scene with powerful torches.

Dugmore said: “I managed one or two at a time to swim them to shore by just sort of swimming behind them and acting like a bit of a rudder and just kept turning them so that they were heading towards the rocks.”

Dugmore said six of the calves had been quite easy to swim to shore but four had panicked and tried to swim out to sea. She said adrenaline kicked in and she was able to get them back. “You get more physical ability by the adrenaline surge,” she said.

By the time Dugmore got to the last three calves, the water was up to their necks, but eventually, they were all herded back to their field.

Kendall said any farmer would have done the same thing to help their animals. “We were just lucky we had a boat, a swimmer and all the equipment to be able to do it and the coastguard were there to help if anything went wrong,” he said.