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Bos (from Latin bōs: cow, ox, bull) is a genus of bovines, which includes, among others, wild and domestic cattle.. Bos is often divided into four subgenera: Bos, Bibos, Novibos, and Poephagus, but including these last three divisions within the genus Bos without including Bison is believed to be paraphyletic by many workers on the classification of the genus since the 1980s.
A bull is typically ready for slaughter one or two months sooner than a castrated male or a female, and produces proportionately more and leaner muscle. [24] Frame score is a useful way of describing the skeletal size of bulls and other cattle. Frame scores can be used as an aid to predict mature cattle sizes and aid in the selection of beef bulls.
The size of the bovine genome is 2.7 Gb (2.7 billion base pairs). [4] It contains approximately 35,092 [4] genes of which 14,000 are common to all mammalian species. Bovines share 80 percent of their genes with humans; cows are less similar to humans than rodents (humans and rodents belong to the clade of Supraprimates) and dogs (humans and dogs belong to the clade of Boreoeutheria).
The largest extant bovine is the gaur. In many countries, bovid milk and meat is used as food by humans. Cattle are kept as livestock almost everywhere except in parts of India and Nepal, where they are considered sacred by most Hindus. Bovids are used as draft animals and as riding animals.
Mature female cattle are called cows and mature male cattle are bulls. Young female cattle are called heifers, young male cattle are oxen or bullocks, and castrated male cattle are known as steers. Cattle are commonly raised for meat, for dairy products, and for leather. As draft animals, they pull carts and farm implements.
A castrated male steer, occasionally a female or in some areas an intact bull that is trained and kept for draft or riding purposes is called an ox (plural oxen); ox may also be used to refer to some carcass products from any adult cattle, such as ox-hide, ox-blood, oxtail, or ox-liver. [3] A springer is a cow or heifer that is close to calving ...
Cattle breeds fall into two main types, which are regarded as either two closely related species, or two subspecies of one species. Bos indicus (or Bos taurus indicus ) cattle, commonly called zebu, are adapted to hot climates and originated in the tropical parts of the world such as India, Sub-saharan Africa, China, and Southeast Asia.
An ox (pl.: oxen), also known as a bullock (in British, Australian, and Indian English), [1] is a large bovine, trained and used as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly castrated adult male cattle , because castration inhibits testosterone and aggression, which makes the males docile and safer to work with.