Cattle

Cattle eat grass.

They wrap their long tongue around the grass and pull. Later they bring the food back up and chew it again. This is called chewing the cud.

Cattle are herbivores that graze on grass and other soft plants. A cow wraps its long tongue around a bunch of grass and cuts it with its bottom front teeth against a hard pad at the top of its mouth.

Cattle are ruminants. Their stomach has four chambers. Bacteria in the first chamber start breaking down the tough grass, then the cow brings it back up as cud, chews it again and swallows it. All this takes days, but it lets a cow get food from grass that people cannot digest.

Cattle graze grasses, stems and other herbaceous plants, twisting them around the tongue and cutting them with the lower incisors against the dental pad. The jaws grind in a circular motion that crushes coarse plant material.

As ruminants they have a four-chambered stomach: rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. Microbes in the rumen ferment the plant matter; partly digested food (cud) is regurgitated, rechewed and swallowed again before enzymes in the later chambers finish digestion. Animal Diversity Web gives a total passage time of 70 to 100 hours, one of the slowest among animals, which squeezes the most nutrients from low-quality forage.

Cattle like to be together in a group called a herd.

Mother cows look after their calves. They moo to call each other. They often lie down to chew their cud.

Cattle are social animals that live in groups called herds. A herd has a pecking order: each animal knows which others it should give way to, and calves take on their mother's place in the order.

Mother cows are very protective of their calves and will chase off anything that seems to threaten them. Cows also help look after each other's young. Cattle are active by day, and they spend long hours grazing and then lying down to chew their cud.

Herds are organized by a dominance hierarchy in which each animal yields to those ranked above it, and calves adopt their mother's rank. Females defend their calves and share some care of young within the group.

Animal Diversity Web notes that herding and large size would have protected the wild ancestors against predators such as wolves and lions, which mostly took calves and sick or old animals. Domestic cattle are mainly diurnal, alternating bouts of grazing with long periods of rumination.

People get milk, cheese and butter from cows.

In some places, cattle help farmers pull plows. Farmers take care of their cattle. Kind farming keeps cows and the land healthy.

Cattle are not endangered, because people keep huge numbers of them. They give us milk, cheese, butter, yogurt and meat, and leather comes from their hides. Strong oxen pull plows and carts, and dung is used as fertilizer and even as fuel.

Keeping so many cattle also brings challenges. Too many cattle in one place can overgraze the land, cause soil erosion and damage riverbanks. People also discuss how animals are treated on large farms and how raising cattle affects the climate.

Cattle are not assessed by the IUCN because they are a domesticated animal, but their wild ancestor is extinct. Few animals matter more to people: cattle provide milk and dairy foods, meat, leather and other products, draft power, and dung for fertilizer and fuel, and in many societies they also carry cultural importance and serve as a store of wealth.

Where numbers are pushed high, grazing can cause erosion, overgrazing, damage to riparian habitats and the spread of non-native plants, and range cattle can pass diseases to wildlife. Britannica notes current debates about the ethics of intensive farming and the contribution of commercial meat production to global warming.