@fixusi said to @ask-drferox: Hey! I read your post on why horse anatomy is quite bad, and it was great. I snooped around online some more about it, and I saw someone mention that cows are really tough, kinda like the opposite of a horse. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what makes cow anatomy so good? I wasn’t able to really find anything online, though I’m not even sure what search terms to use. Thanks for the great blog!!
Cows are tough, infinitely moreso than horses though it’s not necessarily apparent unless you’re studying their medicine side by side. So have ten facts about cows.
Here is the original horse post.
Cattle can eat quite a lot of things that are not food, and aside from the occasional inconvenient potato which might get stuck in their throat, most of it will cruise on down to the massive rumen and just kind of… float there for years. Occasionally pointy metal bits will cause a problem and can actually enter the reticulum, and be pushed forward all the way to the pericardium (heart sack) if they are long and pointy enough. This causes an infectious pericarditis which is not necessarily lethal but is inconvenient.
Seriously the cardiovascular system of cattle is quite durable. With a horse a valid method of emergency euthanasia is to slice open the aorta via the rectum. A horse will be dead in 20-30 seconds. A cow will continue to walk around for several minutes and may even have a snack with a severed aorta.
While the guts of a cow are huge, most of it is the rumen which is really too big to go anywhere. They can displace their abomasum (‘true stomach’) but most of the time this is into a position which only inconveniences the cow a little.
Because they’re a ruminant they don’t colic in the same way horses do, but they will get bloat if they can’t burp (the rumen fills with gas and/or foam). If this happens it is an emergency, and it’s perfectly legitimate for a farmer to stab their affected cattle in the stomach to open it up and let out the gas. The cow will probably wander around and have a snack, with a stab wound into her rumen letting it vent, until the vet can get there to patch it up.
While there is lots that can go wrong with giving birth in cattle, it’s not nearly as dramatic as the horse can be. While with a horse if something goes wrong, it goes wrong fast, cattle can survive having their calf die while giving birth and being stuck, starting to rot, and then being pulled out piece by piece.
Cattle have sturdy skulls with well-built sinuses, which is how it’s possible to shoot one in the head multiple times and still not have it be dead.
Their infection resistance is superb compared to the horse. If a horse has retained fetal membranes after giving birth, it’s an emergency by 24 hours. With a cow you can leave them for days or weeks if you can stand the smell.
If they’ve busted their stitches and eviscerated themselves after a caesarian, you can scoop up those intestines she’s been walking on in the mud, hose them off, put them back in, and with treatment it’s plausible she’ll survive. We do caesarians standing in cattle by the way, under local anaesthetic.
They’re actually pretty good at having their organs outside their body. If cow prolapses her uterus (the whole organ pops inside out through her vagina following the calf after giving birth) then it’s not certain death, so long as she doesn’t run about too much.
Because they have two toes on each foot, instead of one hoof like the horse, if they break a bone in either toe you can reasonably attempt treatment.
In short, when faced with conditions that would devastate another species, cows respond by wandering off and possibly having a snack at the inconvenience.
In addition, cattle can do some seriously weird things. Sometimes they’re born with an extra, non-functional leg. Sometimes you get a schistosoma reflexus.
Cattle can throw some weird curve balls and then they just keep going on with life.
That’s not to say they’re bombproof. (Partially bulletproof maybe, but not bombproof). If they don’t burp, they die. They can bloat. They can get anthrax if they eat too much dirt. They can do some serious damage to each other, especially bulls and once they’re down they’re in serious trouble. But compared to the horse, cows want to live.
This post viewed early by my patreon supporters.
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