This farmer invented ‘Moo muffs’ to keep newborn calves warm

If you’ve been sweating your way through the past few muggy weeks, it may seem impossible for you to remember a time when it was actually cold enough outside to warrant hats and scarves. But on June 24, a dairy farmer in Ireland tweeted out a pic of one of his calves sporting baby pink earmuffs, and the internet went wild.

“So it turns out ear muffs for calves to stop them getting frostbite are a real thing,” wrote Twitter user @ThisFarmingMan_.

The post has since been liked 171,000 times and garnered more than 30,000 responses. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen baby cows sporting earmuffs like these.

This past February, a story about earmuffs for newborn calves began circulating after Holly Poad, the owner of Triple P Farm in Lone Rock, Wisconsin, posted about the solution her and her aunt, Kim Ewers, had come up with for their own cows.

The idea came to Poad after her family lost their barn in a fire. Like humans, livestock are suspectible to frosbite in cold temperatures.

Poad was desperate for a way to protect her newborn calves from the cold and invested in calf jackets and a pair of calf earmuffs. In order to save money, she asked Ewers — who owns an embroidery business — if she could sew some additional pairs.

Ewers ran with the idea, coming up with the design that would eventually become Moo Muffs.

“The pair she was talking about was just fleece,” Ewers told KWQC. But Ewers was afraid that if the fleece got wet, the earmuffs might actually end up damaging the calves’ ears.

So in addition to the fleece, Ewers added a water-repellent material to the outside and also included adjustable straps. She also used bright colors so that the items would be easy to spot in the event that the calf rubbed off the Velcro or the earmuffs come off in some other way.

Poad posted the design to both the farm’s Facebook page and on several show cattle social media groups, announcing that she was selling the Moo Muffs for $20 a pair. People from states across the country soon began clamoring to buy their own pairs.

“I was surprised,” Poad told KWQC. “I thought we’d maybe sell five, ten pairs. I didn’t think it was going to be anything that big.”

Because of the demand, Poad eventually began working with a livestock supply company that would take care of production.

Now, Moo Muffs has its own online home, where interested parties can keep up with the developing brand and keep an eye out for deals.

Now that’s some ingenuity. What do you think about these eye-catching animal earmuffs?