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
In addition to everything else folks have said, bear this in mind about the regular milking. Cows only give milk after they have had a calf. If you keep taking the milk, her body keeps producing it. In the wild, the calf drinks only as long as it needs to, and then it starts to ween off, so mom’s body produces less milk. When the calf doesn’t need to nurse anymore, mom’s body stops producing milk, at least until her next calf is born.
The needing to be milked constantly is purely because a dairy cow is constantly having their milk taken by farmers, so their body keeps producing.
Theres a little island in western Canada called Meares Island. Missionaries brought cattle as gifts for the natives. Things didn’t work out and the natives set the cattle free. You can see their descendants today, they have horns and they’re very fit like horses almost surviving on sea kelp.
By having horns and being strong and resilient, cows in Europe are descent from Aurorchs and even the female had significant horns and could easily kill most predators. They also travel in packs (around 10 in size) and could be really aggressive, especially if they had calves around.
Just look at animals like a Cape Town Buffalo, Rhino or Hippos and you get a clear idea of what kind of power a wild cow could have.
Domestication has intentionally, selectively bred out the traits needed to survive in their natural state/environment.
In my family’s case, my cousin let his heard of five go wild. They were fine, but they were dangerous and agressive after a couple years.
Cows produce milk in the same way and for the same reason human women do, to feed their young. In the wild a lactating cow would have a calf to drink it’s milk and stops producing milk when that milk stops getting drunk
The gas building up in the stomach is because farmers are feeding them corn and other things they wouldn’t eat in the wild in attempt to make them bigger. That is not so common in cows that only eat grass.
Modern cows have been selectively bred by humans according to the characteristics we want (which in beef cattle means size), cattle’s wild ancestors would have been slightly smaller and nature would have continued to naturally select for calves that could be easily birthed.
Sickness can and does kill wild animals but it is much more common on farms and feed lots because they cram such a large number of animals together in unhygienic conditions. Wild herds of ruminants would be constantly moving in the search for grass, instead of standing shin deep in shit in the same field all their life.
Tldr: humans create most of the problems they need to solve when it comes to animal husbandry.
Each of these problems was caused by a human.
We selectively bred cows for more milk production and breed them regularly so that they keep producing milk, and milk them to keep the demand. In the wild, cows only produce milk for their young and might not have young every season and they naturally wean their young after some time.
We selectively bred cows to be bigger to yield more meat, producing larger offspring resulting in riskier deliveries. The access to high calorie fed also makes their babies bigger.
A domestic cow diet is full of processed food that is high in calorie and makes flatulence more likely. In the wild, cows eat fresh plants, mostly grass. They still have gasses, but not to that degree.
And of course, many cows die in the wild from parasites or infections or predators, but at the same time, they aren’t that susceptible to parasites if they aren’t in farms of thousands of cows. Plus once they reach adulthood, wild cows aren’t preferred prey of many predators.
Wild cows are known as buffalo, bison etc. I’m sure you have an easier time seeing how *they* survive. The ones we milk would indeed not last long in the wild. They are to buffalo what a chihuahua is to a wolf.
Milk cows stop making milk if you leave them alone after a while after their last pregnancy.
Mother cows usually need more help with the delivery if the father was from a bigger breed like maximizer dad with a jersey mom.
Cows descended from the wild aurochs, which is a lot alike a guar or bison and those are found in the wild.
My family raises cattle, mostly beef but we’ve raised dairy. Each cow needs about 10 acres to graze healthily. We let them free range on a 250+ acre farm split up into 6 fields with corn and barley/oats. We let them out in the spring and have to go onto BLM land in the fall to round them all up. Fall coats are different from winter coats, you can just see their evolutionary traits that allow them to survive throughout the year. Especially when they have 2 calves instead of the normal 1.
Check out Chirikof Island. Some cows were brought to Alaska by the Russians and left feral on an island and now there’s an unmanaged herd of about 2000.
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