Everything I hear how cow farmers need to take care of their stock baffles me more and more how these were able to survive for so long
A cow needs to be milked every certain period to avoid infections, bruising, death
A cow needs help with the birth of a calf, as its sometimes a process which cant be done by a cow itself
A cow builds up gasses in their stomachs, requiring punctures to avoid sickness, death
And not to mention the parasites, specific diets, and maybe some other things I wouldn’t know about
In: Biology
On the milk issue. A cow/calf pair will naturally ween the calf off of milk when the calf is a few months old and the cow will stop producing milk but they will keep producing milk as long as you keep milking them.
Cattle breed fairly fast and prefer to be in large herds. They can withstand larger temperature and weather extremes than people expect them too.
Greg Judy farms has spent a lot of time adapting cattle to his rotational grazing system. Example video here but he has a lot more that go through how he sets up his fencing, how he selects cattle and so on. He is in a hot climate and started with short hair “South Poll” breed that he has tweaked over time, compared with more northern grazers using Angus that thrive in cold winters better. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYeDc0AEuF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYeDc0AEuF4)
Joeseph Lofthouse is discussing vegetable growing and adapting, but the same rules apply to animals [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfE2p6ITdLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfE2p6ITdLA)
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Not every cow needs help calving. But if there weren’t any humans around to assist, the genes of cows who die in calf-birth wouldn’t be passed on, and the herd genetics would improve pretty quickly.
In reality, we have inadvertently bred that dependence into them by being around to save the ones who had difficulties.
They did not need to be milked, the calves did that. And when the calf quit suckling, the milk dried up in the mom cow.
Also cattle today are different from wild cattle because they have been domesticated and certain traits have been bred out of them while other traits have been bred into them.
A cow only gives milk when she has had a calf. This calf will be removed from the mother and slaughtered or brought up on something else.
However as long as you milk a cow she will keep producing it. A wild cow will not have to be milked when she doesn’t have a calf.
There is a feral heard of cattle in Alaska. They were brought there and abandoned and they have survived. Nature will find a way.
There’s a place on Canada’s west coast where a herd of cattle now roam wild after the rancher who owned them died, quite a while ago. They’re still there, doing well.
This isn’t really about wild cattle but where I grew up, ranchers would let cattle wander up into high elevations of government owned land to graze on their own and then find them and round them up to bring them back to the home ranch in fall. They usually fared really well on their own, with some predation but the cattle are pretty protective of the herd so they were usually mostly all accounted for in the fall
Veterinarian here (who also works mostly with cattle beef and dairy)
Everything you’re mentioning is a problem we invented by pushing genetics.
Cows were never designed to produce the volume a Holstein can. As a result, Holsteins need to be milked every day.
Many beef cattle producers will push their genetics by buying bulls with higher meat EPD’s (genetic expectations, look it up it’s wild). As a result, bigger calves which occasionally get stuck. The calving issue is actually WAY better than it was a few decades ago when sometimes they had to pull almost every calf or have serial c-sections performed.
The bloat is also almost universally caused by giving them a ration with to many carbohydrates, something they would never run into in the wild.
Either way, we created all these problems but we now have incredibly good meat and milk production even with fewer animals.
That only true for milk breads of cow they are bread not to live in nature but in tended fields.
If you look at beef cows and alpine cows they are lett lose a large part of the year with requiring intervention
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