Colloquially maybe, but male cattle aren’t cows any more than a Dyson vacuum cleaner is a “hoover”
The problem, really, is the lack for a well-known and widely-used gender-neutral word for animals of that type.
In contrast, we have “stallion” and “mare” for certain animals of specific genders, but we also have “horse” for them all. We don’t have a word like that for cows and bulls. We do have “cattle”, but that’s a collective term and doesn’t really work for an individual one. We also have “kine”, but I think that’s archaic and not much known these days, and I think it may also be a collective term.