Cattle

Cattle are big, gentle farm animals with wide bodies, soft eyes, and a slow, swishing tail. People keep them on farms all over the world, and you can find them munching grass in green fields on almost every continent.

Long ago, cattle came from a huge wild animal called the aurochs, which is no longer around today. Over thousands of years, people raised cattle on farms, and the friendly cows and bulls we know now became calmer and happy to live alongside people.

Cattle are herbivores, which means they eat only plants. They spend much of the day grazing on grass and clover. A single cow can nibble a big pile of grass in one day. Then it rests and chews its food all over again, a clever trick called chewing the cud that helps it get every bit of goodness from the grass.

Cattle have a very special stomach with four rooms inside. The grass they swallow gets softened in the first room, then comes back up as a mouthful called cud so the cow can chew it a second time. This slow, careful way of eating lets cattle turn tough grass into all the energy they need.

A baby cow is called a calf. After growing inside its mother for about nine months, a calf can stand up and walk within a few hours of being born. It drinks its mother’s milk and stays close by her side, and it can even tell her moo apart from all the other cows in the herd.

Cattle like to live together in a family group called a herd. There are around a billion cattle in the world, which makes them one of the most common big animals on Earth. People give them wide fields, fresh water, and shade, and the cattle give us milk in return.