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Home » A little cow vocabulary

A little cow vocabulary

By Marybeth Feutz 6 Comments

My original plan for this post was to talk about the difference between dairy and beef cows. Then I realized that we (farmers and veterinarians) use the word “cows” when we usually mean “cattle.” So what’s the difference? Well, cows are girls. Cattle are boys and/or girls. So let’s start there.

Bovine – a term for cattle, male or female, young or old. We use this more on the medical side than anywhere else.

Cattle – multiple bovines, males and/or females of any age. (These happen to be all girls, but they range from 3-10 years old.)

angus cows at the fence

Cow – a female bovine who has given birth to at least one calf. (This calf was born on Wednesday, February 1!)

first calf of 2012

Heifer – a female bovine who has not had any babies.

First-calf heifer – a female bovine who has given birth to her first calf. At this point, she can also be called a cow.

Bull – an intact (not castrated) male bovine. As soon as a calf is born it can be called a bull.

Steer – a castrated male bovine. Most bulls are castrated in the first few weeks of life. Steers are in general easier to handle than bulls, and their meat tastes much better.

feeder steer

Calf – The definition of this term is a little bit loose. It is basically a “young” bovine, usually less than a year old. Calves are usually started on a solid diet around 2 months of age, but their primary diet is milk (either directly from mom or as milk replacer) until they are 4-6 months old. (This was one of our calves that was born last year. This heifer calf was less than one week old when I took this picture.)

one week old calf

Weanling – a calf that has been weaned from nursing, usually around 4-6 months old. Beef calves are kept with their moms, so at weaning the cow-calf pair are physically separated. Dairy calves are not kept with their mothers but are fed milk replacer. At weaning time, dairy calves are switched from a primarily milk diet to a solid diet. (Don’t worry, we’ll talk a lot about this later, I promise. I know there are a bunch of questions about dairy farming.)

Yearling – A calf this is one year old. (These three heifers were born on our farm last spring. One of them is the calf in the photo above, one year later.)

yearling heifers

We use the term “cows” all the time, to talk about more than one bovine (male or female), but technically a cow is a girl. Just one more of those communication things that farmers and veterinarians do, when we think everyone else knows exactly what we are talking about.

What other words do you hear that confuse you?

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Filed Under: Where is My Food From? Tagged With: beef, beef cows, cattle, cow, dairy cows

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Comments

  1. Dani Vello says

    02/13/2012 at 2:10 pm

    Nice! So I am reading this and I think, sweet, I’m no longer a heifer, I’m a cow! And then I see that I could have been referred to as either. LOL…I’m just playing around. Years ago I was dumped because a guy didn’t think I was thin enough and a good friend said to me “tell him only cows graze here! MOO!”. So that’s all I can think of when I hear cows/heifers etc.
    And I used to say that cows were one of my favorite animals. I will correct that to BOVINES. 🙂

  2. Dr. Marybeth Feutz says

    02/13/2012 at 2:38 pm

    Dani, yes, technically you are a first-calf heifer. Or a cow. In the nicest sense of the word. You can also say that CATTLE are your favorite animals, that covers all the genders. 🙂

  3. Andrea says

    02/13/2012 at 2:49 pm

    This is one of those cases where, even if it is not correct in the technical sense, I sometimes find it’s easier to tell people that my husband’s family raises cows. Granted, cattle is still understood by most people, but when picture books teach children that “C is for Cow, and a Cow says ‘MOO'” how can we expect them to know that a cow is not ever a male? Don’t bulls and steer say ‘MOO’ too?

  4. Dr. Marybeth Feutz says

    02/14/2012 at 2:21 pm

    Andrea, you’re absolutely right. I also usually tell people that we raise cows, because that is the term that people universally understand. So, here I am, trying to buck the system, and share that all bovines/cattle do say “Moo,” but they are not all girls. 🙂

  5. Don Michael says

    12/10/2017 at 1:11 pm

    Just wanted to say “Thanks”! From my late teens to my early thirties my Granpa and I raised cattle on a small farm in Georgia. He originally purchased 6 cows and a bull and when he passed away in 2005 there were about 40 or so plus Re-Run, this gargantuan old bull (the last of many) who never got in a hurry. Your blog took me back in time- from the smells of freshly cut rye and bales of hay, gas and oil of our old Ford 8N tractor, sweat from days of fencing, to the sounds of cattle lowing and mooing, Granpa’s calls of “Coooooyt, coooooyt, cooooyt” and the rattle of the “cow candy” in a galvanized foot tub. Though meant to teach, your blog has brought back to me a flood of memories I thought long forgotten. A very sincere “Thank You”

  6. Marybeth Feutz says

    12/10/2017 at 8:56 pm

    Thank you so much for the nice words, Don! And thank you for sharing your story with us here. 🙂

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