Where are all the wild cows at? Are there herds of wild cattle roaming the plains like buffalo and horses? I have never seen this. Were cows always in North America or were they brought over by the savages (read: Spanish Explorers)
Every other good food animal I can think of runs around in the wild. Deer, Turkey, Chicken… Wait a minute, Chicken?? Where the hell are the wild chickens??? Why are we missing wild chickens and wild cows. Did we just domesticate all of them many years ago?
Cows are so fat and lazy. Do they ever run? Can they run fast? I do not picture a wild cow as a very difficult prey to catch. I cannot see one darting off like a deer or gazelle. Maybe that is why there are no wild cows. They all were eaten by predators. So do cows owe their further existance on this planet to us?
Can anyone shed some light on this?
This has bene discussed before, but I don’t recall the thread topics, so someone else can search for them. Besides water buffalo, bison and yaks, the ancestor of the common bovine is most likely the auroch, a shaggy brute of a bovine who lived in Eastern europe until it was hunted death a few hundred years ago. Although no aurochs exist any longer, some people are trying to “reverse-evolve” them from cows today by selectively breeding for auroch like traits and then letting them run loose through the wilds of Poland or some such thing.
Hmm… I might as well take a stab at the rest of your questions:
– Cows as we know them were introduced to the New world by explorers and settlers.
– Aurochs were not exceptionally fast, but they were large tough brutes with shaggy coats who hung out in the Black Forest in the middle of winter. Most certainly things ate them (wolves for instance), but I doubt they were easy prey. At any rate, yaks get along fine in the wild so I assume aurochs did as well. Cows owe their continued existance to us to some degree since if we all died tomorrow, I don’t know how well the cows would cope with natural predators onnce they bounced back from mankind. On the other hand, aurochs owe their lack of continued to existance to man as well.
– I think chickens came from India in their native form. Their native form could also fly, by the way.
See http://www.grotte-de-han.be/uk/han/aurochs.html
Also called the “primitive ox” or “oxen of the plain”, the aurochs is the ancestor of all the bovidae.
Once widespread in Europe, it lived in the plains and at the forest’s edge.
It became extinct in Poland in 1623. A German zoologist has “recreated” the breed by crossing cattle from the Camargue, Corsica, Spain and Great Britain.
This massive and strong breed has a dark coat with a light stripe down the spine.
It has long lyre-shaped horns.
It enjoys sounds health and lives to be at least 20 years old. An adult male weighs up to 900 kg.
The aurochs is a herbivore and also eats buds, young leaves, branches and some kinds of bark.
There is no particular time for the rut. After gestation lasting 284 days, the cow gives birth to a calf which is soon able to join the rest of the herd.
See britannica.com http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/5/0,5716,22185+1+21851,00.html
This britannica site rocks!
All modern domestic cattle are believed to belong to the species Bos taurus (European breeds such as Shorthorn and Jersey) or Bos indicus (zebu breeds such as Brahman) or to be crosses of these two (such as Santa Gertrudis). Many contemporary breeds are of recent origin. The definition of a breed is difficult and inexplicit, although the term is commonly used and, in practice, well understood. It may be used generally to connote animals that have been selectively bred for a long time so as to possess distinctive identity in colour, size, conformation, and function, and these or other distinguishing characteristics are perpetuated in their progeny.
See also:
I wonder the same thing about hamsters and gerbils. I picture giant wooly-sabretooth gerbils and hamsters as the ancestors.
BTW: Here in So. Cal. we have flocks of wild parrots. Every one I’ve seen has been green. No doubt they escaped from their cages, went feral, and probably are breeding. Right NOW! It’s the Parrot Conspriracy! Ahhh! Ahhh!
Last post, because there’s really only so much I know about wild cows. However, the feral parrot remark reminded me of a friend of mine who lives in central Illinois. His mother lives on a rather large property that was at one time a farm and is now the crumbling remains of a farm as she isn’t able to maintain it and is able to live off the oil on the property without having to raise chickens. Anyway, at one time they owned a bit of cattle. As the farm went into decline, the cattle broke out from the fenced area and wander the property at large (kept in by another fence). A large portion of the property is wooded and that is where generation after generation of quasi-feral cow has lived, growing shaggier and thicker. I’m not implying that natural selection has made them shaggier in the course of ten years, but rather that left to their own devices cows aren’t quite the sleek coated and well fed animal we imagine on Old McDonald’s farm. There may be more “wild” left in the cows than we believe. As for my friend, I believe I’ll tell him to wait 10 more years and then ship those babies off to Poland to run free.
Hamsters and gerbils you buy from the pet store are almost exactly the same as their wild cousins. Here are two fun facts: All of today’s pet gerbils are descended from a group captured in Mogolia in 1935; A Japanese laboratory sent 22 gerbils to the U.S. in 1954, and their descendants stock pet stores nationwide.
BTW, Johnny L.A., almost all parrot species are green. And yes, your parrots are either introduced or escaped, since our only indigenous parrot, the Carolina Parakeet, is now extinct.
An important distiction should be made for this thread between wild and feral. Wild animals were never domesticated. Feral animals were once domesticated, but escaped captivity and began breeding on their own. This clarification should simplify things.
Re cows running like deer: Oddly enough, this is exactly the way that Texas Longhorns were described by people who knew them, “damn if that old cow couldn’t run like a deer.” See the cowboy stories of J. Frank Dobie. If you look at photos, Longhorns are definitely leggier than your average Jersey cow.
Johnny L.A., your resident parrots are probably what’s called Quaker or Monk Parakeets. They are a growing problem all over, in the Midwest and Northeast, too. And don’t even mention Florida. And yes, they’re escaped pets, now gone feral.
And so can domestic chickens, if their wings aren’t clipped.
How do you think the rooster gets on top of the roof to crow? Though domestic hens are probably usually too full of
eggs to fly.
True, however, even roosters don’t fly like eagles or albatrosses. Wild jungle fowls’ flight is geared toward enabling them to quickly make it to the treetops to escape
predators.
Nah. Hens can fly too. Neither hens nor roosters can fly very well or very far, but both do fly.
We used to have chickens running around on the farm when I was a kid. They could manage short Wright-brothers-at-Kitty-Hawk sorts of flights – maybe 50 to 100 yards. It was obviously an enormous effort for them to do so, and they would do it only under duress (e.g. when chased by a dog).
They flew up into trees every night to roost (or during the day for a rest) as well.
Back when my grandparents had a dairy, we called the cows at milking time by yelling, “Come, bos! Come bos! Come bos!” Milking time was also feeding time, and yes, they came a’running. Maybe they weren’t particularly graceful, but I wouldn’t have wanted to try to outrun them.
I asked my dad once why we called the cows ‘bos’ or ‘boss’, and he said it was Latin for cow. To be honest, I wasn’t real sure he was right, until reading this thread (dumb, dumb me, daddy is always right!).
No, I doubt they are Monk Parakeets. Besides the fact hat there are no large Monk Parakeet colonies in the West besides Texas, Monk Parakeets would probably be calleld “White and green” instead of green. With the information Johnny L.A. gave, there is no way to deduce the species. As I mentioned earlier, “green” is not a good clue when dealing with parrots.
Full of eggs? While a hen is always full of oocytes, there is only one egg in her body at a time. And having that egg in the body does not usually conspicuously affect the flight abilty of birds.
And of course chickes can’t soar! Soaring is limited to meat eating birds, like albatrosses and eagles, as you mentioned. All the birds in my backyard don’t fly like eagles or albatross.
Actually, their flight is geared toward flying away from the threat and the predator losing sight of it in the density of the forest. Think about it: if something was chasing you, would you rather climb up a tree or get away with enough speed for the thing chasing you to lose you? And Red Junglefowl are too poor flyers to make it to the treetops. Although, if pressed, I could imagine one fluttering upwards from branch to branch.
And bison, which are closely related to cows, can easily sustain speeds of 30 mph, a fact which Yellowstone Park has tried to impress on visitors with limited success. You cannot out run an angry bison, any more than you can outrun a racehorse.
Aurochs, meanwhile, were probably even bigger than the American bison. They don’t have many enemies.