Not the… lark. It’s the… larch.
There are many cows with horns around, and some bulls have balls that could easily be mistaken for udders.
On the other hand, bulls are usually more massive than cows.
I don’t know if this qualifies as ‘knowing the answer’ or ‘educated speculation’ but my dad was a rodeo cowboy (bareback rider) and worked at my hometown’s livestock exchange (sale barn) for 50 years and he just referred to them as cows or cattle.
Also, when a farmer has an animal of the bovine persuasion that has escaped the pasture we just say he has a cow out.
East of the Mississippi, we just called them all cows. That’s how I learned it. Of course, they were almost exclusively female, both the neighboring milking herds and our beef cattle.
However, don’t call them “cowies”. I’m still living that down…
More precisely, “kine” is the plural of “cow”, specifically.
Less than half? :dubious: Good lord. We got to get you out of the house some more.
A cattle ranch, or cattle station if you’re down under, doesn’t require a one-to-one ratio of cows to bulls. One randy bull could service quite a few cows, if that sort of thing were even allowed anymore.
And surprisingly enough, it is this one.
I’m pretty sure there are laws against that.
There are way less than half bulls.
A common ratio is 1 bull to 25-30 cows, on operations that even use actual live cover anymore. Many cattle operations do not have any bulls at all – all the breeding is done by Artificial Insemination with cooled/frozen semen. This is especially common in dairy operations, with their longer-lived herds – you want to buy semen from a bull that is proven to sire cows that produce a lot of milk over their lifetime.
Dont forget the silk of the kine (Ireland).
People say “dog” for all the bitches too normally.
That’s the way my Aunt Ivy said it, and she was a farmer for all of 100 years.
“Imagine, not knowin’ a cockle from a whelk !” --Alan Jay Lerner
“Imagine, not knowin’ a lark from a larch !” --Oliver Faltz
In my experience the conversation would go something like this:
Cowboy 1: Is that one of ours?
Cowboy 2: I can’t tell from here.
Cowboy 1: Why’s it up there?
Cowboy 2: I don’t know.
Cowboy 1: Well, s***, let’s go see.
Huh, ignorance fought.