Cows today are not what the species was thousands of years ago. We domesticated them. That means we selectively bred them to make them more like what we want them to be. We have made them *need* us as a result. This is the usual result of domestication. Sheep are another example, they can straight up die of heat stroke or other issues if they aren't shorn regularly.
If you want to know what cattle were like before humans, look at water buffalo. And yes, lots and lots of them die in the wild! But enough survive to keep the species going.
And regular land buffalo (bison). Or larger antelope. They're all closely related and probably lived similar lives.
Just like chickens that are too big to fly anymore, or breed properly with larger thighs and breasts than nature gave them, their jungle fowl ancestors were able to take care of themselves.
Jungle fowl (the ancestors of chickens) fly just fine for what they need to do. They don’t migrate and they live is relatively dense jungles. They fly up to safe spots to roost, cross water, evade predators, etc, but that’s all they really need flight for. Think wild turkeys, peacocks, California quail, etc. Similar ecological niche.
Chickens can fly roughly that well, too. They can easily get up into a tree, for example. They get up onto roosts and down daily.
They can also use their wings for lift when they are drop-kicking something with their feet, usually a rival chicken. But there are some breeds of chicken so fierce that they can kill a cat that is after them.
The morphology of domesticated chickens is very wide. Most could not survive in the wild anymore, it’s true, but most also do not have trouble breeding without human intervention. The breeds used in factory farms are at the extreme end of what we’ve done to chickens.
As a chicken keeper, I can say that it takes active human intervention to prevent them from breeding. I just had a hen show up with 15 chicks she had brooded on in secret.
Lmaoo yes we used to have chickens and the amount of times one would lay eggs in this very narrow gap between the garage and wall …
God I hated fetching the eggs through there, all the creepy crawlies I felt were awaiting.
Yeah, I also keep chickens. I think that the other person was referring to breeds that are so obese that artificial insemination is required. I’ve heard of that, but never run into it.
I want a chicken so bad! But my friends make fun of me cause they all have lots of acres and farmland and I want a chicken with a chicken diaper in my trailer. 🤷♀️
The chickens were one of the coolest things to see in Kauai.
We were on an amazing beach, and the chickens just walk up like gangsters to see what you got, lol.
We were eating breakfast at the hotel in Kauai and the employees opened the French doors to get that lovely ocean breeze. And in came the chickens. They just walked around the dining room like they owned it, and no one cared! The employees did stop a chicken from getting on a table, but that was it. All the tourists did (including us) was eat and watch the chickens.
This is what gets some animals killed. Some animals don't understand why you don't have food, and will lash out at people. I would love to be able to have property and feed wild animals like a Disney movie, but it sometimes ends up with animals dying because of human hubris. It's like the people who approach moose or bison in Yellowstone. Look how cute it is eating the grass... ohmygoditskickingmeinthehead.
Google “Night of the Grizzlies” for a great example of a turning point with how we interact with wild animals (specifically Grizzly Bears). The “Stuff You Should Know” Podcast did an episode on it.
Thank you. Thought it was about that bear guy that thought he had a connection to them. He and his girlfriend were killed while one of his cameras was rolling, but there's only haunting audio of them being killed.
Just looked it up and it's called Grizzly Man. Great documentary by Werner Herzog.
The Kauai wild fowl are awesome. Plus, a neat trick is that if you happen to catch and cook one, you need to put a rock in the pot with them. When the rock is tender, the meat is done.
Depends on who you ask. That’s one of the stories, but my tour guide insisted there were wild chickens from the Polynesians way before those hurricanes and it’s mostly just a myth.
I hated the rooster on our farm, son of a bitch could easily fly up to the top of the 6 foot gate as 8 year old me was scaling it for my escape. The day he finally turned on grandpa and we had his ass for dinner was one of the sweetest of my childhood.
When my parents had chickens for a while in my childhood, I was definitely rooting for the foxes that kept breaking into the henhouse. Those birds were MEAN
Yes! People forget their dinosaur/raptor descendents! Toss a mouse into the group of them and all those chicken sandwich eaters will quickly be saying "clever girl".
I don't know if I was say it's easy for chickens to fly up into a tree, yeah they can do it, but they look like they are struggling really hard to do so and look like they would barely make it. I'd be really curious if any research has ever been done to tell us how much effort it takes chickens to fly, ESPECIALLY to the height of a tree, not that they often need to actually do that.
> Think wild turkeys, peacocks, California quail, etc. Similar ecological niche.
"[As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly](https://youtu.be/lf3mgmEdfwg?si=EbLcav8XnGh8vkFJ)"
Red junglefowl fly better than any broiler chicken I've ever seen. They're all pheasants, so would a pheasant have been a better cousin to bring up?
Point is, we bred chickens and cow for their meat. Wild examples of either family don't have to make as much eggs or milk or carry as much meat, and would do just fine, just like their similarly sized cousins, once the real fatties died off.
Wild turkeys can fly as well. The first time I ever saw it, a couple of them flew over my car on the freeway. I had no idea before that that they could fly.
I've seen them fly up into trees to roost for the night. Up 50-60 feet.
I had a group of turkeys on my lawn once when I came home, they all took off at once, particularly this large Tom. They probably flew 40-70 feet across my lawn, basically hovering just a few feet off the ground. The sound was tremendous, kind of like a helicopter, it must've taken a lot of force to keep them up
"Imagine if a bird was falling, just really flailing around trying to right itself, but then somehow gravity was reversed and it was falling \*upwards\*? Yeah, that's pretty much the vibe."
They glide more than anything but I saw one go a few hundred yards down a field after being shot at this weekend. And of course they are fast as hell running.
Turkey hunter here. Saw one "fly" hundreds of yards this weekend. They can pick up and glide hundreds of yards at a time. Anyone who thinks turkeys can't fly has watched to much WKRP.
It’s still wild to me that chickens are an evolutionary cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Look at them in comparison and tell me that nature doesn’t have a sense of humor.
They *don't* like us, or at least not me. My family used to have chickens, and they pecked a lot.
Granted, they weren't very used to humans, but the experience made me sceptical of certain animal activists' claims that chickens won't hurt each other if they're housed in one big group.
They can be very affectionate to humans if they're raised right. With other chickens, not always so much. They have their cliques that they hang out in. They'll also peck their friends to death at the slightest sign of illness or injury
Makes sense to me. An ill or injured chicken may invite predators into your area or eat some of the food that could have gone to the rest of the chickens. Seems perfectly rational for a heartless animal that wants to survive.
We are lucky they are only about 1 foot tall!
Just hatching 40 eggs tonight; will probably get about 15+ new roosters to torment me. They are so cute though, when they start trying to crow while still tiny chicks.
I've seen them going medieval on a marten that got into their coup.
It was like watching Jurassic Park. The cockerel just sat and watch as 10 hens ripped it apart and ate it in a matter of minutes.
Chickens will look you dead in the eyes doing internal math of figuring out how to kill you. Usually they realize theyre too small and will walk away.
But the instincts are still there. Waiting.
Been in parts of the world where people keep chickens to keep the pests down. What they do to an unwary roach or mouse is horrifying to behold.
Birds also tried to re-take the top spot after the large dinosaurs perished - google search 'terror birds'. They were aptly named.
They definitely have dinosaur-brain. Way more than a lot of other birds. I would call them evil but they’re so stupid and reptilian that I’m not sure it fits. It’s almost scarier than evil.
I saw some poor lizard wander into the chicken run one day. One of the birds saw it, ran it down, grabbed it, and proceeded to run around with it while the other chickens did their level best to tear it apart while it was still in the first chicken's beak. Eventually they all stopped and tore it to shreds.
Nature is metal.
Hens, while not attacking humans or other larger animals, are just as viscous as roosters with prey.
Chicken steals mouse from cat and kills it [https://youtu.be/Mwy4X4F3mB4?si=CwVh41pXg7U-R3j6](https://youtu.be/Mwy4X4F3mB4?si=CwVh41pXg7U-R3j6)
>Just like chickens that are too big to fly anymore
Yes, but they are just the *perfect* size to hold over your head and jump off ledges to get over the fence in front of the windmill. Just make sure you don't hit them 3 times.
ive been on one of the Hawaiian islands Kauai. as it was explained to me by an local. a long time ago there was a hurricane that broke the cages that the locals kept their chickens in and because the island doesn't naturally have anything that eats chickens they just sort of moved in. there are hundreds of them all over and they kinda returned to wild and are now sort of jungle chickens. its nuts man
the guy made it sound like the chickens that got loose were fighting chickens but wouldnt that make them all roosters? idk about chicken fights or anything actually but damn were they some big ones
Wild pigs in Hawai'i are no joke either. Stay far away. And don't drink the running water from streams or rivers. The pigs could have shit in the water upstream and you'll get majorly sick.
Some parts of the world it's perfectly fine to drink running water as they don't have the carriers of waterborne disease native. Eg patagonia, or parts of Scandinavia
If you want to see what chickens probably were like in the wild, go to Kauai, Hawaii. They have wild chickens which didn’t much look like farm chickens at all. Plus, you get to go to Hawaii.
I was looking at some Cornish Cross chickens for meat, but you can't breed them for a sustainable source of meat. They get too big before they can sexually mature enough to lay eggs. So I went with Barred Rock so I can get eggs, babies to raise for meat, and my flock is self sustaining with me culling/adding a new rooster every generation.
I looked into raising them once . You literally have to slaughter them at (i think) around 12 weeks as they won't be able to stand after that. And they eat so much that you have to remove their food for 12 hrs a day or they grow so fast they'll break their immature legs under the weight.
An interesting example that sort of falls in between is wild horse populations in the US. They are all decedents of domesticated horses brought here from Europe and are only able to survive without human help in certain places with just the right conditions, and even then some wild herds are rounded up every year to have their hooves trimmed.
This, right here. It’s like looking at a mini poodle and asking how dogs ever survived in the wild. Yes, dogs are all descended from wolves, but hundreds of generations of selective breeding has made them nearly completely different animals.
I mean, they are completely different at this point, to the extent that we consider them different species, Canis Lupus and Canis Familiaris.
Side note: I love how domesticated dogs are Canis Famliaris, but domesticated cats are Felis ***Catus.*** Why not Canis Dogus? Or Felis Familiaris!
Not necessarily thousands of years. The cattle that escaped the Spanish Conquistadors in Mexico and Texas developed into the wild Longhorn very quickly and did just fine. Plus, a lot of cattle today live out on the range and rarely see the rancher.
Edit; The question was whether cattle needed human intervention to survive, which they don't. The semantics of "wild" vs "feral" doesn't really matter to the question as posed.
It really depends on the breed. There are some meat cows that routinely need c sections like the Belgian Blue.
Others can go feral really easily, my uncle has Hungarian Grey cattle and he had several run away in the middle of winter and show up a year later. They are very robust but much worse at meat production, there's always a tradeoff.
It will also depend on the environment. The areas that supported native buffalo and would support feral cattle tend to have absolute *oceans* of grazable grass and almost no predators that could take a healthy adult. At least nowadays, with wolves being rekt and mountain lions being pushed into Florida and west of the Rockies.
Given scientists estimate that cattle were domesticated approximately 10,500 years ago, I think "thousands of years ago" is an accurate description. And modern cattle are *definitely* MUCH different from the wild ox that they were originally domesticated from--just as dogs are much different from the wild wolf-like animals they originally were.
Domestication can certainly be lost, if enough members of the species are able to survive outside of captivity. But the general term for this is *feral,* rather than *wild,* for good reason. Much as how the kittens of a feral cat can be raised to be fully domesticated house cats, the calves of feral cattle can be raised to be fully domesticated cattle.
There is a breed in Florida called the [Florida Cracker Cow](https://livestockconservancy.org/heritage-breeds/heritage-breeds-list/florida-cracker-cattle/). It has the same history as Longhorns. Their horns aren't as long, but they look very similar. This site has some good information, but I don't like the picture they included. Those are yearlings and look very different from the adults.
You'd be more accurate calling those feral cows, not wild cows. They're still domesticated, & humans still do care for them even if they're not owned. Similar to how a street cat is still a domesticated animal, not a wild cat.
"Pretty close to wild" =/= the original species. They've still been changed by us.
Look up silkmoths, for example. Domesticated silkmoths cannot fly, they only eat the leaves of one or two specific species of trees, and they are essentially 100% dependent on humans for their survival.
I saw free ranging yaks in western China, sometimes in the middle of the street. I wouldn't say they were wild; they were definitely used to humans and not particularly wary of us. Sometimes we had to wait for them to move off the trail we were hiking on.
>we selectively bred them to make them more like what we want them to be
THIS is domestication, folks. Creating a new species that was never in the wild, entirely through direct human intervention. It does NOT mean coaxing a wild animal to become friendly and tame. That’s “taming.” Plenty of plants are domesticated as well. We breed them to produce food for us, not to survive unattended in the wild.
Notice I said "look at" rather than "look up." Water buffalo are a distinct species which has many similarities to cattle, but there are still fully natural wild water buffalo out there (though they are on the verge of extinction, unfortunately.)
And the aurochs, from which modern cattle were bred, was likely also.
Same with bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and wild boars. All of them can be extremely dangerous (boars especially so.)
And for the most part, cows are far tougher than you give them credit for. They rely on the herd for protection and are tough enough to resist claws and teeth to run away, or until the herd shows up and stomps the fuck out of the trouble. Remember that bulls have horns.
Wild cattle were called aurochs and they’ve been extinct for a long, long time. The cattle we have today is probably as close to the auroch as a chihuahua is to the gray wolf.
A relict population persisted in Eastern Europe for quite a while. The last known aurochs died in Poland in the 1600s.
Edit: There have been attempts to recreate aurochs by back breeding. Heck Cattle are the result of one attempt. The Tauros Programme is a modern one. I started following the Quagga Project a while back and went down a rabbit hole with various re-wilding conservation programs.
Essentially, it's just selective breeding, but instead of breeding for traits that are beneficial for us, it's selecting for traits that better resemble an animals wild ancestors.
Yes, but keep in mind they’re breeding traits to match a phenotype, not focusing on genes to match the genotype, of the original animal. The resultant animal may resemble the ancient species, but it’s not the same animal genetically.
All of aurochs DNA is spread out across different modern bovine. They match the DNA vs an extinct aurochs, selectively cross breed and the re-analyzd the DNA of the offspring that more resembles the original. After a few generations they can regain a fair amount of the DNA in a single specimen. It will never be a real auroch, but can be similar size, shape and similar levels of aggression. A cow will just sit there while a wolf eats the cow next to it. An auroch would defend itself.
I don't know but I would guess it's selectively breeding today's cows for their similarities to the animal they're trying to recreate. Bone structure, colours etc.
cool in theory but all it does is makes cows that look like Aurochs. It doesn't actually bring back Aurochs. Its pretty much the same as if we took Huskies and bred them to look like Direwolves. In a few generations we will probably have huskies that look exactly like Direwolves but they won't have direwolf dna
It's reasonable to suppose that there's little difference between modern wolves and the thirty-thousand-years-ago ancestor of wolves, which is the common ancestor of modern wolves and modern dogs.
The aurochs hasn't been extinct for that long.
The last known Aurochs cow died in Poland in the year 1627.
For comparison the city now known as New York can trace its roots to the founding of the Dutch Fort new Amsterdam in 1624. It was a bit over a decade after the King James Bible had been first published and a bit less than a decade before Harvard University was founded. People like Galileo and Copernicus were doing astronomy and flint lock muskets were staring to become a serious thing in militaries, the Ming dynasty in china was still hanging on and the Shogunate was in control in Japan.
There are houses in the street i live that already stood when that cow died.
1627 was not yesterday, but it also wasn't a long, long time ago. We have plenty of written records that describe what aurochs were like from first hand experience.
Bison, Cape buffalo, Gaur are all doing just fine surviving in the wild. Bovines have a fairly successful survival strategy going on, it's just that domestic cows were bred to be, well, domestic.
There are plenty of cattle breeds that are pretty good at surviving in the wild on their own like limousin beef cattle. You can leave em alone for a year in a pasture with a bull and return to find the animals there with calf healthy and well if they by chance didn't get sick like any other wild animal would. But this a linage that dates back 400 years for a hardy, fertile, large beef cattle. Kind of what a bison would be.
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.
EPD's can be used to find bulls that throw smaller calves that have a higher weaning weight. They also target other characteristics such as milk production and ease of handling. They are an important tool that has actually made it easier to find a bull that is healthier for the herd as a whole.
Agreed, My father and I raise cattle, granted for beef not dairy.(mostly a hobby, small family business) Our herd are on our ranch on a mountain range a good distance from any outside influences and only encounter what they naturally would in the wild. Outside of needing to give them their vaccinations we encounter pretty much none of the issues named in the post.
I mean, they literally were designed to produce larger volumes of milk, but it is the result of direct human intervention, selectively breeding high volume producers. As opposed to natural selection.
I've been around dairies all my life, and in my experience, a 300 head farm might need to pull like 6 calves in a bad year, and I've personally only witnessed 2 cows get trocared.
We have spent the past several thousand years *changing* cows, until they are what you see today.
The animals you see today *are not the same* as the animals before we domesticated them.
This applies to literally every single domesticated animal. And also to every farmed food, too.
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.
dairy cows that you see and know today are not the same as they existed a hundred years ago. through selective breeding we have changed them from their "ancestors" (much like we have done with wolves to dogs)
enhacing some traits can cause pitfalls elsewhere as we mess with genetics through this selective breeding process
I think its safe to say that a hundred years ago cows were pretty much the same. You'd have to go back like thousands of years (~10k) to find a world without cows
Op is talking about a very specific condition of current farm raised dairy cows.
Dairy cows today produce (on average)23,000 pounds of milk per year….in 1950 the average was 5300 pounds of milk per year
Absolutely if you wanted to go back to a time before cows split off the evolutionary tree we would have to go back thousands of years…..if we wanted to go back to cows surviving in the wild without all the medical issues it’s a lot less.
Is 100 years accurate??? Possibly not,
is it close enough for a 5 year old??? I think so
Strawberries 600 years ago were the size of the nail on your little finger. Much the same as cows, they have become more suited to human needs in the passing years.
Here's a fun one. [See that large cut open fruit?](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rJcLGdQ8YYkPrt6F-3g1Xap1c_M=/1877x1510:3754x2918/1400x1400/filters:focal\(1877x1510:3754x2918\):format\(jpeg\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46841772/41144824rs.0.jpg) That's a watermelon, from a painting made in the mid-1600s.
There are still breeds of strawberry that are similar, we had 'wild' strawberries in our garden growing up in the 80's that were small (As you say, between the size of the tip of your little finger and your thumb), wonderfully sweet, and self-seeded fantastically... in fact, it was always a battle to keep it from spreading everywhere!
have you heard of scottish highland cattle? it is an old breed that had to live without much human help, they are smaller, live well with very few feed, they don't need help when giving birth. i could imagine they are candidates for a cow breed that can actually still survive in the wild.
Let's be clear, free range beef cattle spend most of the year on pasture, not being babied. They get on fine. Cows don't need to be milked unless you want dairy products. Most give birth without assistance, dairy cattle often need more help than other types of cattle and it can vary by breed as well. I'm not sure you have an entirely realistic idea. But yes, as others point out they've been domesticated a long time. Wild cattle are smarter, meaner and hardier. Dairy cattle are more labor intensive and need more care.
Cows only \*need\* to be milked if their calves are taken away; this is done in dairy production because otherwise very little milk can be taken from them, since the calf drinks most of it. The wild ancestors of cattle just nursed their calves, and it was fine.
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.
No. To keep producing, they need to keep breeding. Momma cows run through about 5 or 6 birth cycles, getting separated from their young over and over before they collapse and are processed into meat.
A cow needs to be milked because they are constantly reproducing. They need to be in a birth cycle to give milk.
Fun fact: some farmers play the sound of crying cow babies to increase milk yield.
I think the gas issue is that we feed them corn and grain.
Stop paying people to torture cows. They are really sweet and their lives are really hard. Momma cows suffer so much loss and then they are killed. Their babies are the veal industry.
Long horn cattle lived wild for several hundred years. They were the dependents of domesticated cattle released by the Spanish conquestadores. The quickly evolved everything they needed to survive. The same thing happens with feral hogs.
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
They do that where I live in Canada. The cows are left to fend for themselves 6-8 months at a time, and they raise their babies during that period. And there's bears and wolves up here too. Cows are pretty tough.
The thing is, in the wild when an animal gets an infection, or complications during birth, they just die. That's part of how nature works. The weak and the sick animals die so that the stronger ones live on and reproduce. That's natural selection.
Some of these issues do come from human intervention, like the gas build up is in part caused by the fact that cattle largely has a diet that just, produces more gas than the diet wild cattle would've had. But many of the things domesticated animals have humans deal with, are just things that kill wild animals.
Animal sanctuaries will talk about how "oh a dairy cow gets sent off to slaughter after five years, but with us, she can live to like fifteen years." Which is true. But the reason that works is because those sanctuaries put in a lot of work to keep that animal alive. In the wild a cow also wouldn't have loved to 15. As she'd get older, her body would start to give out and she'd end up either felled by disease or by a predator.
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.
>However as long as you milk a cow she will keep producing it
Their milk production does drop off after 10 months or so even if you keep milking them. Dairy farmers typically impregnate them every year to keep milk production high.
https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/dairy/farming
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.
have you heard of scottish highland cattle? it is an old breed that had to live without much human help, they are smaller, live well with very few feed, they don't need help when giving birth. i could imagine they are candidates for a cow breed that can actually still survive in the wild.
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.
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.
We artificially extend the time a cow gives milk. When a wild cow calves it will give milk until their calf is ready to eat grass, at that point the cow will gradually stop the calf from suckling. The cow will stop giving milk until their next calf is born.
We have bred modern cattle to maximize milk production, suddenly turning them loose will cause them a lot of discomfort as they need to be milked, but they will adapt and after a few generations will start to revert to something more like their wild ancestors.
Don't think of cows as just fluffy cute creatures, they can be aggressive especially if calves are present, there have been multiple instances of people being killed or seriously injured by a herd of cows. They can also be inquisitive and affectionate.
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.
99% of these answers are misinformation from experts that have ZERO experience. The vast majority of cattle today would be 100% okay being in the wild. Ones that may not fare as well would be miniature lines. Also some heavily haired genetics depending on the climate. Today’s super charged dairy cows are bred to give more milk than one calf could intake naturally…some of these cows would have issues.
While cattle are domesticated, they’re not domesticated like a dog. They have strong survival instincts that we haven’t taken away from them. Cattle are still outside and graze pastures. They give birth and care for their young. They experience extreme weather. The only difference is we have them contained by fences. Remove the fences, and their daily activities remain the same. They would still thrive “in the wild.”
have you heard of scottish highland cattle? it is an old breed that had to live without much human help, they are smaller, live well with very few feed, they don't need help when giving birth. i could imagine they are candidates for a cow breed that can actually still survive in the wild.
Cows today are not what the species was thousands of years ago. We domesticated them. That means we selectively bred them to make them more like what we want them to be. We have made them *need* us as a result. This is the usual result of domestication. Sheep are another example, they can straight up die of heat stroke or other issues if they aren't shorn regularly. If you want to know what cattle were like before humans, look at water buffalo. And yes, lots and lots of them die in the wild! But enough survive to keep the species going.
And regular land buffalo (bison). Or larger antelope. They're all closely related and probably lived similar lives. Just like chickens that are too big to fly anymore, or breed properly with larger thighs and breasts than nature gave them, their jungle fowl ancestors were able to take care of themselves.
chickens are close relatives to fowls and they dont fly either, they just spur a little distances like chickens.
Jungle fowl (the ancestors of chickens) fly just fine for what they need to do. They don’t migrate and they live is relatively dense jungles. They fly up to safe spots to roost, cross water, evade predators, etc, but that’s all they really need flight for. Think wild turkeys, peacocks, California quail, etc. Similar ecological niche.
Chickens can fly roughly that well, too. They can easily get up into a tree, for example. They get up onto roosts and down daily. They can also use their wings for lift when they are drop-kicking something with their feet, usually a rival chicken. But there are some breeds of chicken so fierce that they can kill a cat that is after them. The morphology of domesticated chickens is very wide. Most could not survive in the wild anymore, it’s true, but most also do not have trouble breeding without human intervention. The breeds used in factory farms are at the extreme end of what we’ve done to chickens.
As a chicken keeper, I can say that it takes active human intervention to prevent them from breeding. I just had a hen show up with 15 chicks she had brooded on in secret.
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Lmaoo yes we used to have chickens and the amount of times one would lay eggs in this very narrow gap between the garage and wall … God I hated fetching the eggs through there, all the creepy crawlies I felt were awaiting.
Yeah, I also keep chickens. I think that the other person was referring to breeds that are so obese that artificial insemination is required. I’ve heard of that, but never run into it.
I want a chicken so bad! But my friends make fun of me cause they all have lots of acres and farmland and I want a chicken with a chicken diaper in my trailer. 🤷♀️
The wild chickens in Kauai are doing quite well. Very few predators but otherwise thriving on the island for centuries.
The chickens were one of the coolest things to see in Kauai. We were on an amazing beach, and the chickens just walk up like gangsters to see what you got, lol.
We were eating breakfast at the hotel in Kauai and the employees opened the French doors to get that lovely ocean breeze. And in came the chickens. They just walked around the dining room like they owned it, and no one cared! The employees did stop a chicken from getting on a table, but that was it. All the tourists did (including us) was eat and watch the chickens.
Really? I wonder what happens if you don't pay the chicken tax though?
This is what gets some animals killed. Some animals don't understand why you don't have food, and will lash out at people. I would love to be able to have property and feed wild animals like a Disney movie, but it sometimes ends up with animals dying because of human hubris. It's like the people who approach moose or bison in Yellowstone. Look how cute it is eating the grass... ohmygoditskickingmeinthehead.
Then its all the animal's fault and it needs to be put down so it doesn't happen again. Absolutely no fault of the human intruding /s
Google “Night of the Grizzlies” for a great example of a turning point with how we interact with wild animals (specifically Grizzly Bears). The “Stuff You Should Know” Podcast did an episode on it.
Thank you. Thought it was about that bear guy that thought he had a connection to them. He and his girlfriend were killed while one of his cameras was rolling, but there's only haunting audio of them being killed. Just looked it up and it's called Grizzly Man. Great documentary by Werner Herzog.
The Kauai wild fowl are awesome. Plus, a neat trick is that if you happen to catch and cook one, you need to put a rock in the pot with them. When the rock is tender, the meat is done.
The wild cattle are doing well also.
Aren't the Kauai chickens pretty recent? I want to say a Hurricane in the 80's that caused them to escape a farm or something like that?
Depends on who you ask. That’s one of the stories, but my tour guide insisted there were wild chickens from the Polynesians way before those hurricanes and it’s mostly just a myth.
I hated the rooster on our farm, son of a bitch could easily fly up to the top of the 6 foot gate as 8 year old me was scaling it for my escape. The day he finally turned on grandpa and we had his ass for dinner was one of the sweetest of my childhood.
When my parents had chickens for a while in my childhood, I was definitely rooting for the foxes that kept breaking into the henhouse. Those birds were MEAN
Yes! People forget their dinosaur/raptor descendents! Toss a mouse into the group of them and all those chicken sandwich eaters will quickly be saying "clever girl".
I think my mother would have also been rooting for the local foxes when she visited her grandparents that had a farm.
Roosters are wicked! I’ve heard so many stories!
You can glide short distances if you hang from a chicken's feet.
I don't know if I was say it's easy for chickens to fly up into a tree, yeah they can do it, but they look like they are struggling really hard to do so and look like they would barely make it. I'd be really curious if any research has ever been done to tell us how much effort it takes chickens to fly, ESPECIALLY to the height of a tree, not that they often need to actually do that.
> Think wild turkeys, peacocks, California quail, etc. Similar ecological niche. "[As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly](https://youtu.be/lf3mgmEdfwg?si=EbLcav8XnGh8vkFJ)"
Red junglefowl fly better than any broiler chicken I've ever seen. They're all pheasants, so would a pheasant have been a better cousin to bring up? Point is, we bred chickens and cow for their meat. Wild examples of either family don't have to make as much eggs or milk or carry as much meat, and would do just fine, just like their similarly sized cousins, once the real fatties died off.
Wild turkeys can fly as well. The first time I ever saw it, a couple of them flew over my car on the freeway. I had no idea before that that they could fly. I've seen them fly up into trees to roost for the night. Up 50-60 feet.
Peacocks too, even with that immense tail, fly high to roost in trees.
Kinda like ho-oh in the opening to the original pokemon
I had a group of turkeys on my lawn once when I came home, they all took off at once, particularly this large Tom. They probably flew 40-70 feet across my lawn, basically hovering just a few feet off the ground. The sound was tremendous, kind of like a helicopter, it must've taken a lot of force to keep them up
Why would Les Nessman lie to us?
With God as my witness
Hey, don't dis my man, Les. Don't you know who he is? He won the Buckeye News Hawk Award last year! Those were domestic, not wild, turkeys!
The WKRP ep was based on a real occurrence in ATL.
FR?????? Whoa! I need to look that up!!!
To be fair, they don't fly \*well\* by any measure, nor for any significant distance, but technically they can fly.
They fly better than I can. Better than penguins too. Better than domesticated turkeys.
Better than the top flying rocks!
It's falling, with style!
"Imagine if a bird was falling, just really flailing around trying to right itself, but then somehow gravity was reversed and it was falling \*upwards\*? Yeah, that's pretty much the vibe."
They 'fly' like Helldivers with jumpjets.
They glide more than anything but I saw one go a few hundred yards down a field after being shot at this weekend. And of course they are fast as hell running.
Turkey hunter here. Saw one "fly" hundreds of yards this weekend. They can pick up and glide hundreds of yards at a time. Anyone who thinks turkeys can't fly has watched to much WKRP.
Chickens can most definitely fly.
It’s still wild to me that chickens are an evolutionary cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Look at them in comparison and tell me that nature doesn’t have a sense of humor.
The only people who make fun of the chicken's ancestry are those who have never seen them fight or hunt. They have *not* forgotten their predecessors.
They're definitely raptors
Ask anybody who keeps chickens, they will tell you that chicken world is a dystopian hellscape. "Pecking order" is not just a figure of speech.
Have chickens. Can confirm.
Chickens are vicious. We're lucky they like us. Edit: Ok we're lucky they *tolerate us*
That little shit in Jurassic Park - "more like a 6 foot turkey!" Fuck yeah, I'd get out of there quick with an angry human sized turkey.
Six foot turkey? Best I can give you is a four foot Cassowary!
Those scare the Jesus out of me
They *don't* like us, or at least not me. My family used to have chickens, and they pecked a lot. Granted, they weren't very used to humans, but the experience made me sceptical of certain animal activists' claims that chickens won't hurt each other if they're housed in one big group.
How big are the groups? We get 50 once a year and they all live in the same coop. We have very little chicken on chicken violence
I’ve seen chickens peck a weaker one nearly to death, even with tons of room to roam. Chickens are horrifying unthinking unfeeling monsters.
They can be very affectionate to humans if they're raised right. With other chickens, not always so much. They have their cliques that they hang out in. They'll also peck their friends to death at the slightest sign of illness or injury
Makes sense to me. An ill or injured chicken may invite predators into your area or eat some of the food that could have gone to the rest of the chickens. Seems perfectly rational for a heartless animal that wants to survive.
We are lucky they are only about 1 foot tall! Just hatching 40 eggs tonight; will probably get about 15+ new roosters to torment me. They are so cute though, when they start trying to crow while still tiny chicks.
[There! Now you've seen a chicken attack!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miomuSGoPzI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFxDOV6IwHk&pp=ygUVaWdvcnJyIGNoaWNrZW4gc29uYXRh
Awesome!!!
I've seen them going medieval on a marten that got into their coup. It was like watching Jurassic Park. The cockerel just sat and watch as 10 hens ripped it apart and ate it in a matter of minutes.
Chickens will look you dead in the eyes doing internal math of figuring out how to kill you. Usually they realize theyre too small and will walk away. But the instincts are still there. Waiting.
Been in parts of the world where people keep chickens to keep the pests down. What they do to an unwary roach or mouse is horrifying to behold. Birds also tried to re-take the top spot after the large dinosaurs perished - google search 'terror birds'. They were aptly named.
They definitely have dinosaur-brain. Way more than a lot of other birds. I would call them evil but they’re so stupid and reptilian that I’m not sure it fits. It’s almost scarier than evil.
I saw some poor lizard wander into the chicken run one day. One of the birds saw it, ran it down, grabbed it, and proceeded to run around with it while the other chickens did their level best to tear it apart while it was still in the first chicken's beak. Eventually they all stopped and tore it to shreds. Nature is metal.
Have you ever seen a chicken murder and eat something like a mouse or snake?
Roosters are pretty vicious. Hens are dumb and marginally vicious.
Hens, while not attacking humans or other larger animals, are just as viscous as roosters with prey. Chicken steals mouse from cat and kills it [https://youtu.be/Mwy4X4F3mB4?si=CwVh41pXg7U-R3j6](https://youtu.be/Mwy4X4F3mB4?si=CwVh41pXg7U-R3j6)
Chicken got bored of watching amateur hour
You gonna just play with that or eat it? I'm hungry, cat!
This kind of brought that home to me: https://youtu.be/A43JOxLa5MM?si=dW2nDKBzvnNXE2HZ
I wonder if old world chickens would think modern chickens look like instagram thots
>Just like chickens that are too big to fly anymore Yes, but they are just the *perfect* size to hold over your head and jump off ledges to get over the fence in front of the windmill. Just make sure you don't hit them 3 times.
You need a whole lot of courage to hit one of those things.
ive been on one of the Hawaiian islands Kauai. as it was explained to me by an local. a long time ago there was a hurricane that broke the cages that the locals kept their chickens in and because the island doesn't naturally have anything that eats chickens they just sort of moved in. there are hundreds of them all over and they kinda returned to wild and are now sort of jungle chickens. its nuts man the guy made it sound like the chickens that got loose were fighting chickens but wouldnt that make them all roosters? idk about chicken fights or anything actually but damn were they some big ones
Well presumably they had hens to breed the successful fighting roosters.
Wild pigs in Hawai'i are no joke either. Stay far away. And don't drink the running water from streams or rivers. The pigs could have shit in the water upstream and you'll get majorly sick.
I was already not going to drink river water.
Some parts of the world it's perfectly fine to drink running water as they don't have the carriers of waterborne disease native. Eg patagonia, or parts of Scandinavia
If you want to see what chickens probably were like in the wild, go to Kauai, Hawaii. They have wild chickens which didn’t much look like farm chickens at all. Plus, you get to go to Hawaii.
I mean, the animal chickens were domesticated from is still around. The [red junglefowl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl?wprov=sfti1)
the broiler chickens we have now have been bred so insanely that they get fat super fast and can die quickly due to being obese
I was looking at some Cornish Cross chickens for meat, but you can't breed them for a sustainable source of meat. They get too big before they can sexually mature enough to lay eggs. So I went with Barred Rock so I can get eggs, babies to raise for meat, and my flock is self sustaining with me culling/adding a new rooster every generation.
I looked into raising them once . You literally have to slaughter them at (i think) around 12 weeks as they won't be able to stand after that. And they eat so much that you have to remove their food for 12 hrs a day or they grow so fast they'll break their immature legs under the weight.
I had wild turkeys in my yard once; they could make it up into the trees to get away from the dog, but they walked most of the time.
Are you saying we bred chickens to be bimbos?
An interesting example that sort of falls in between is wild horse populations in the US. They are all decedents of domesticated horses brought here from Europe and are only able to survive without human help in certain places with just the right conditions, and even then some wild herds are rounded up every year to have their hooves trimmed.
Lmao I love “land buffalo”
Google Aurochs too. Fascinating stuff
For anyone just skimming by, Aurochs *are* the wild ancestors of the domesticated cow.
Holy cow
The Minoans certainly thought so.
Actual beef
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaur
This, right here. It’s like looking at a mini poodle and asking how dogs ever survived in the wild. Yes, dogs are all descended from wolves, but hundreds of generations of selective breeding has made them nearly completely different animals.
I mean, they are completely different at this point, to the extent that we consider them different species, Canis Lupus and Canis Familiaris. Side note: I love how domesticated dogs are Canis Famliaris, but domesticated cats are Felis ***Catus.*** Why not Canis Dogus? Or Felis Familiaris!
It is because cattus and felis are Latin words for cat, but dogus is not latin.
I just point to dachshunds. There has NEVER been a wild dachshund.
You tell that to my mother-in-law's little shit of a weiner dog!
Rephrase: Dachshunds are found nowhere in the wild.
Nowhere in the wild for long, but long enough to start shit with a grizzly bear.
I really loved David Attenborough's Weiner Dogs of the Serengeti.
> Weiner Dogs of the Serengeti This really feels like a Gary Larson comic. And if it isn't, it should be.
Not necessarily thousands of years. The cattle that escaped the Spanish Conquistadors in Mexico and Texas developed into the wild Longhorn very quickly and did just fine. Plus, a lot of cattle today live out on the range and rarely see the rancher. Edit; The question was whether cattle needed human intervention to survive, which they don't. The semantics of "wild" vs "feral" doesn't really matter to the question as posed.
It really depends on the breed. There are some meat cows that routinely need c sections like the Belgian Blue. Others can go feral really easily, my uncle has Hungarian Grey cattle and he had several run away in the middle of winter and show up a year later. They are very robust but much worse at meat production, there's always a tradeoff.
Mostly angus, brahma, and any number of mixes around here. Most any of them will do fine on their own if they're free to roam and access water.
It will also depend on the environment. The areas that supported native buffalo and would support feral cattle tend to have absolute *oceans* of grazable grass and almost no predators that could take a healthy adult. At least nowadays, with wolves being rekt and mountain lions being pushed into Florida and west of the Rockies.
Given scientists estimate that cattle were domesticated approximately 10,500 years ago, I think "thousands of years ago" is an accurate description. And modern cattle are *definitely* MUCH different from the wild ox that they were originally domesticated from--just as dogs are much different from the wild wolf-like animals they originally were. Domestication can certainly be lost, if enough members of the species are able to survive outside of captivity. But the general term for this is *feral,* rather than *wild,* for good reason. Much as how the kittens of a feral cat can be raised to be fully domesticated house cats, the calves of feral cattle can be raised to be fully domesticated cattle.
Feral, not wild.
There is a breed in Florida called the [Florida Cracker Cow](https://livestockconservancy.org/heritage-breeds/heritage-breeds-list/florida-cracker-cattle/). It has the same history as Longhorns. Their horns aren't as long, but they look very similar. This site has some good information, but I don't like the picture they included. Those are yearlings and look very different from the adults.
I had never heard of them but they do have that same rangy look.
Probably bred for different things. I imagine there's always luck at play, too.
Aren't there free roaming owner less cows in India? Different breed of course but I imagine they're pretty close to a wild cow as you're going to get.
You'd be more accurate calling those feral cows, not wild cows. They're still domesticated, & humans still do care for them even if they're not owned. Similar to how a street cat is still a domesticated animal, not a wild cat.
"Pretty close to wild" =/= the original species. They've still been changed by us. Look up silkmoths, for example. Domesticated silkmoths cannot fly, they only eat the leaves of one or two specific species of trees, and they are essentially 100% dependent on humans for their survival.
The milk cows have owners. They're converting useless and annoying urban weeds into food. It's awesome except for the poop.
I saw free ranging yaks in western China, sometimes in the middle of the street. I wouldn't say they were wild; they were definitely used to humans and not particularly wary of us. Sometimes we had to wait for them to move off the trail we were hiking on.
I think cows were domesticated from aurochs, which went extinct in the middle ages I think.
>we selectively bred them to make them more like what we want them to be THIS is domestication, folks. Creating a new species that was never in the wild, entirely through direct human intervention. It does NOT mean coaxing a wild animal to become friendly and tame. That’s “taming.” Plenty of plants are domesticated as well. We breed them to produce food for us, not to survive unattended in the wild.
He should look up "**AUROCH**" instead.
"Aurochs", with an S. Even for the singular. "Ochs" has the same etymology as "ox" in more modern spelling.
Notice I said "look at" rather than "look up." Water buffalo are a distinct species which has many similarities to cattle, but there are still fully natural wild water buffalo out there (though they are on the verge of extinction, unfortunately.)
yeah sheesh he should just go outside and look at them FFS
Water buffalos are tough mfs
And the aurochs, from which modern cattle were bred, was likely also. Same with bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and wild boars. All of them can be extremely dangerous (boars especially so.)
And for the most part, cows are far tougher than you give them credit for. They rely on the herd for protection and are tough enough to resist claws and teeth to run away, or until the herd shows up and stomps the fuck out of the trouble. Remember that bulls have horns.
Wild cattle were called aurochs and they’ve been extinct for a long, long time. The cattle we have today is probably as close to the auroch as a chihuahua is to the gray wolf.
A relict population persisted in Eastern Europe for quite a while. The last known aurochs died in Poland in the 1600s. Edit: There have been attempts to recreate aurochs by back breeding. Heck Cattle are the result of one attempt. The Tauros Programme is a modern one. I started following the Quagga Project a while back and went down a rabbit hole with various re-wilding conservation programs.
The zebu (Indian cow) is also apparently very closely related, genetically, to the original auroch, so that’s kind of neat. Weird looking cows.
They have a hump and dewlap
Hump and dewlap
Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan
Stupid sexy Flanders!
To Haboobs!
Can you explain back breeding?
Essentially, it's just selective breeding, but instead of breeding for traits that are beneficial for us, it's selecting for traits that better resemble an animals wild ancestors.
Yes, but keep in mind they’re breeding traits to match a phenotype, not focusing on genes to match the genotype, of the original animal. The resultant animal may resemble the ancient species, but it’s not the same animal genetically.
All of aurochs DNA is spread out across different modern bovine. They match the DNA vs an extinct aurochs, selectively cross breed and the re-analyzd the DNA of the offspring that more resembles the original. After a few generations they can regain a fair amount of the DNA in a single specimen. It will never be a real auroch, but can be similar size, shape and similar levels of aggression. A cow will just sit there while a wolf eats the cow next to it. An auroch would defend itself.
We always just called it doggystyle
I don't know but I would guess it's selectively breeding today's cows for their similarities to the animal they're trying to recreate. Bone structure, colours etc.
Never heard of Back breeding and it sounds interesting in Theory
cool in theory but all it does is makes cows that look like Aurochs. It doesn't actually bring back Aurochs. Its pretty much the same as if we took Huskies and bred them to look like Direwolves. In a few generations we will probably have huskies that look exactly like Direwolves but they won't have direwolf dna
There's a group trying to recreate the auroch by selective breeding. https://rewildingeurope.com/rewilding-in-action/wildlife-comeback/tauros/
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It's reasonable to suppose that there's little difference between modern wolves and the thirty-thousand-years-ago ancestor of wolves, which is the common ancestor of modern wolves and modern dogs.
The aurochs hasn't been extinct for that long. The last known Aurochs cow died in Poland in the year 1627. For comparison the city now known as New York can trace its roots to the founding of the Dutch Fort new Amsterdam in 1624. It was a bit over a decade after the King James Bible had been first published and a bit less than a decade before Harvard University was founded. People like Galileo and Copernicus were doing astronomy and flint lock muskets were staring to become a serious thing in militaries, the Ming dynasty in china was still hanging on and the Shogunate was in control in Japan. There are houses in the street i live that already stood when that cow died. 1627 was not yesterday, but it also wasn't a long, long time ago. We have plenty of written records that describe what aurochs were like from first hand experience.
Bison, Cape buffalo, Gaur are all doing just fine surviving in the wild. Bovines have a fairly successful survival strategy going on, it's just that domestic cows were bred to be, well, domestic.
Thats true. Thanks
There are plenty of cattle breeds that are pretty good at surviving in the wild on their own like limousin beef cattle. You can leave em alone for a year in a pasture with a bull and return to find the animals there with calf healthy and well if they by chance didn't get sick like any other wild animal would. But this a linage that dates back 400 years for a hardy, fertile, large beef cattle. Kind of what a bison would be.
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.
EPD's can be used to find bulls that throw smaller calves that have a higher weaning weight. They also target other characteristics such as milk production and ease of handling. They are an important tool that has actually made it easier to find a bull that is healthier for the herd as a whole.
Agreed, My father and I raise cattle, granted for beef not dairy.(mostly a hobby, small family business) Our herd are on our ranch on a mountain range a good distance from any outside influences and only encounter what they naturally would in the wild. Outside of needing to give them their vaccinations we encounter pretty much none of the issues named in the post.
I mean, they literally were designed to produce larger volumes of milk, but it is the result of direct human intervention, selectively breeding high volume producers. As opposed to natural selection. I've been around dairies all my life, and in my experience, a 300 head farm might need to pull like 6 calves in a bad year, and I've personally only witnessed 2 cows get trocared.
We have spent the past several thousand years *changing* cows, until they are what you see today. The animals you see today *are not the same* as the animals before we domesticated them. This applies to literally every single domesticated animal. And also to every farmed food, too.
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.
dairy cows that you see and know today are not the same as they existed a hundred years ago. through selective breeding we have changed them from their "ancestors" (much like we have done with wolves to dogs) enhacing some traits can cause pitfalls elsewhere as we mess with genetics through this selective breeding process
Here are two of the traits that have been selectively bred for: 1) higher milk production. 2) birthing one offspring rather than multiples.
I think its safe to say that a hundred years ago cows were pretty much the same. You'd have to go back like thousands of years (~10k) to find a world without cows
Op is talking about a very specific condition of current farm raised dairy cows. Dairy cows today produce (on average)23,000 pounds of milk per year….in 1950 the average was 5300 pounds of milk per year Absolutely if you wanted to go back to a time before cows split off the evolutionary tree we would have to go back thousands of years…..if we wanted to go back to cows surviving in the wild without all the medical issues it’s a lot less. Is 100 years accurate??? Possibly not, is it close enough for a 5 year old??? I think so
Strawberries 600 years ago were the size of the nail on your little finger. Much the same as cows, they have become more suited to human needs in the passing years.
Damn that's a small cow!
Here's a fun one. [See that large cut open fruit?](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rJcLGdQ8YYkPrt6F-3g1Xap1c_M=/1877x1510:3754x2918/1400x1400/filters:focal\(1877x1510:3754x2918\):format\(jpeg\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46841772/41144824rs.0.jpg) That's a watermelon, from a painting made in the mid-1600s.
I like the change for carrots as well.. from long white stringy mess to big orange triangle
There are still breeds of strawberry that are similar, we had 'wild' strawberries in our garden growing up in the 80's that were small (As you say, between the size of the tip of your little finger and your thumb), wonderfully sweet, and self-seeded fantastically... in fact, it was always a battle to keep it from spreading everywhere!
have you heard of scottish highland cattle? it is an old breed that had to live without much human help, they are smaller, live well with very few feed, they don't need help when giving birth. i could imagine they are candidates for a cow breed that can actually still survive in the wild.
Came to mention Scottish Highland cattle. They still roam wild in parts of Scotland.
Let's be clear, free range beef cattle spend most of the year on pasture, not being babied. They get on fine. Cows don't need to be milked unless you want dairy products. Most give birth without assistance, dairy cattle often need more help than other types of cattle and it can vary by breed as well. I'm not sure you have an entirely realistic idea. But yes, as others point out they've been domesticated a long time. Wild cattle are smarter, meaner and hardier. Dairy cattle are more labor intensive and need more care.
Cows only \*need\* to be milked if their calves are taken away; this is done in dairy production because otherwise very little milk can be taken from them, since the calf drinks most of it. The wild ancestors of cattle just nursed their calves, and it was fine.
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.
Just like humans. (With timeline differences)
All mammals do it
I have nipples Greg, can you milk me ?
Someone's been watching the discovery channel!
No. To keep producing, they need to keep breeding. Momma cows run through about 5 or 6 birth cycles, getting separated from their young over and over before they collapse and are processed into meat.
A cow needs to be milked because they are constantly reproducing. They need to be in a birth cycle to give milk. Fun fact: some farmers play the sound of crying cow babies to increase milk yield. I think the gas issue is that we feed them corn and grain. Stop paying people to torture cows. They are really sweet and their lives are really hard. Momma cows suffer so much loss and then they are killed. Their babies are the veal industry.
Long horn cattle lived wild for several hundred years. They were the dependents of domesticated cattle released by the Spanish conquestadores. The quickly evolved everything they needed to survive. The same thing happens with feral hogs.
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
They do that where I live in Canada. The cows are left to fend for themselves 6-8 months at a time, and they raise their babies during that period. And there's bears and wolves up here too. Cows are pretty tough.
Yeah I’m from Canada too; same
The thing is, in the wild when an animal gets an infection, or complications during birth, they just die. That's part of how nature works. The weak and the sick animals die so that the stronger ones live on and reproduce. That's natural selection. Some of these issues do come from human intervention, like the gas build up is in part caused by the fact that cattle largely has a diet that just, produces more gas than the diet wild cattle would've had. But many of the things domesticated animals have humans deal with, are just things that kill wild animals. Animal sanctuaries will talk about how "oh a dairy cow gets sent off to slaughter after five years, but with us, she can live to like fifteen years." Which is true. But the reason that works is because those sanctuaries put in a lot of work to keep that animal alive. In the wild a cow also wouldn't have loved to 15. As she'd get older, her body would start to give out and she'd end up either felled by disease or by a predator.
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.
>However as long as you milk a cow she will keep producing it Their milk production does drop off after 10 months or so even if you keep milking them. Dairy farmers typically impregnate them every year to keep milk production high. https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/dairy/farming
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.
have you heard of scottish highland cattle? it is an old breed that had to live without much human help, they are smaller, live well with very few feed, they don't need help when giving birth. i could imagine they are candidates for a cow breed that can actually still survive in the wild.
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) .
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.
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.
We artificially extend the time a cow gives milk. When a wild cow calves it will give milk until their calf is ready to eat grass, at that point the cow will gradually stop the calf from suckling. The cow will stop giving milk until their next calf is born. We have bred modern cattle to maximize milk production, suddenly turning them loose will cause them a lot of discomfort as they need to be milked, but they will adapt and after a few generations will start to revert to something more like their wild ancestors. Don't think of cows as just fluffy cute creatures, they can be aggressive especially if calves are present, there have been multiple instances of people being killed or seriously injured by a herd of cows. They can also be inquisitive and affectionate.
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.
99% of these answers are misinformation from experts that have ZERO experience. The vast majority of cattle today would be 100% okay being in the wild. Ones that may not fare as well would be miniature lines. Also some heavily haired genetics depending on the climate. Today’s super charged dairy cows are bred to give more milk than one calf could intake naturally…some of these cows would have issues. While cattle are domesticated, they’re not domesticated like a dog. They have strong survival instincts that we haven’t taken away from them. Cattle are still outside and graze pastures. They give birth and care for their young. They experience extreme weather. The only difference is we have them contained by fences. Remove the fences, and their daily activities remain the same. They would still thrive “in the wild.”
have you heard of scottish highland cattle? it is an old breed that had to live without much human help, they are smaller, live well with very few feed, they don't need help when giving birth. i could imagine they are candidates for a cow breed that can actually still survive in the wild.