Cow bells are still common in parts of Austria, Switzerland, and the south of Germany. They are mostly worn out of respect for tradition, but do have some real world utility for helping farmers locate their cattle, who are allowed to roam and graze freely on the steep and rugged slopes of the Alpine valleys. …
Why Do Cows Wear Bells? (And Do They Like Them?) Read More »
Cows can sweat, but they don’t sweat effectively due to a lack of active sweat glands. Since cows can’t sweat effectively, thermal regulation can be difficult for them, and they have to employ a range of clever methods to avoid overheating, including using their breath and their horns to cool down. This article is going …
Cows are large, lumbering beasts with clunky backward-pointing knees and a weight of over 1200lbs on average. You would be forgiven for thinking cows couldn’t jump much more than a few inches off the ground at most, but surprisingly they can. In extreme circumstances, cows have been known to jump over seven feet (over 2 …
You’ve heard of children of the corn, but what about cows of the corn? Throughout the warm summers, cows spend their time out in their pastures and meadows eating just about anything they can find, but what if they were to wander into a cornfield? Would they be in cow heaven or would they hate …
Most livestock is marked in some way to help identify them, but one method of marking stands out above the rest as the most stereotypical and controversial – ‘Branding’. Branding cattle is a method of creating a unique identifier on livestock to deter theft and help with identification. Farmers use a hot iron to cause …
There aren’t many things about cattle that humans don’t already know. After all, we’ve been farming cows for thousands of years. But, there is one strange occurrence in cattle that has perplexed and terrified farmers for centuries: Freemartins. Freemartins are a quirk of nature, they are a special type of female cow born with masculine …
Complete Guide to Freemartin Cows (What Are Freemartins?) Read More »
Dogs bark, chickens cluck, cows moo, and bulls… moo? Or do they? There are many differences between regular cows and bulls, but is the noise they make one of them? Bulls do moo, similar to how cows moo. Bulls moo for mostly the same reasons as cows, to communicate and socialize with their herd, but …
Whether you’re a steak connoisseur or a raw food vegan, you’ve probably wondered at some point why people eat cows at all. Who was the first person who saw a cow wandering around and thought “that looks tasty!”? It turns out that there are some pretty logical reasons why cows are so widely eaten by …
You’re probably aware of the price of beef products, but what about the cow they come from? You could spend $100 on a fancy steak, so how much is a cow worth? Hundreds? Thousands? Let’s find out. Cows are worth anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a family cow all the way up to …
Like all mammals, cows produce milk for their young. Unlike most mammals, cows are also farmed for their milk by humans. So what happens once a cow gives birth? Do they just get hooked straight up to the milking machine? Cows can be milked almost immediately after giving birth, however in many cases the farmer …
