A Cow’s Habits.

A cow is a very restful animal except when disturbed by extraneous causes, and the active habits of her life are of little interest here, the chief importance of her for study being the passive side of her life or small minor tricks. As a domestic animal she lives to eat—and be eaten and drunk—but her wild ancestors and relatives have had far from an easy life, though this (in them even) has not expressed itself in animal pedometers. But on her neck, back, flanks, legs and haunches the cow has some interesting specimens of areas where the normal hair-slope is reversed in accordance with her habits.

The most striking of these is shown in Figs. 34 and 35, where the bare form of the animal is shown and the dark thick arrows are made paramount in order to make the remarkable arrangement of her hair along the back so clear, that little verbal descrip­tion is needed.

Figs. 34 and 35.

(A) Side view of cow, showing arrangement of hair-streams on the back. (B) View of back of cow, showing the same.

Behind the level of the horns the normal or backward slope proceeds until the middle of the length of the neck is reached, when it encounters transversely a sharp upstanding crest and beyond this the hair is directly reversed from a point over the shoulders, and here a whorl is found. From this point the stream returns to its ancient and normal course and so passes to the tail. When the base of the tail is reached a very significant and apparently whimsical arrangement of the hair down the centre of the tail is observed. This consists in a line of stiff hairs which stand up at right angles to the surface of the tail, and it gradually passes into the normal again when the more muscular part of the tail is passed. I should add here that the crest and reversed hair on the back are common to many wild ungulates of this ruminant group, and a good example of it is seen in an antelope, Oryx Beisa, which I figured and described in a paper at the Zoological Society of London.

Arrangements of its hair so audacious as these need explana­tion, and it is found in the mode of life of the cow. So large a part of its daily life is spent in the business of grazing with her muzzle close to the ground, during which the neck of the animal is constantly stretched downwards from the back at the level of the shoulders, that the skin, which is very loose in this and most other portions of its body, is dragged upon to allow of the extreme flexion of its neck. This traction is for all this time acting against the normal or backward slope of the hairs, and has given rise to this victory of a new force through a thousand generations. It is equally clear that a mechanical explana­tion of the line of erect hairs on the first nine or twelve inches of the tail is forthcoming, for one has only to watch a cow standing on a hot day, undergoing her torment of flies, to see it writ large. Very strong little muscles are found at the base of the tail, those along the more free portion becoming smaller and smaller until they disappear towards the tip. These give a powerful flicking action to the long heavy tail and I once made some observations as to this on a number of cows which were grazing in summer on a comparatively cool wind-swept hillside in the western end of the Isle of Wight. I watched several cows on different occasions and found that one would flick her tail 348 times and another 1082 times per hour. Giving these cows an eight hours’ working day, “working” for their living in grazing and ruminating by turns, one gains a vivid idea of the number of times per diem these powerful muscles of the tail contract. If we call it a day of four hours of grazing and four of ruminating, for the sake of argument, we get 1392 to 4328 flicks of the tail each day in the time of flies, leaving out of account the casual flicks in which she would indulge when flies were not tormenting her. It is hardly necessary to point out how the underlying muscles would drag upon the skin of the tail over them and gradually reverse more or less the “lie” of the hairs. They have not formed into a feathering or complete reversal, but have come near to it.

Further down the haunches of the cow there is on each side at the back of the thigh a curving reversed area of hair which turns upwards and towards the middle line. This is the place where the tail as it swings from side to side sweeps over the limb and brushes upwards the hair of the thigh towards which it is swinging. So that the activity of the tail is responsible for another of the patterns in which the cow’s hair is arranged.

The lower segment of the hind leg exhibits one more reversed area of hair due to the cow’s habit of lying on the ground slightly inclined to one side, for the more comfortable disposing of her limbs, the effect of this attitude being seen in the manner in which the hair on the back of the leg turns inwards.

On the dewlaps and flanks are certain variable curls and turns of hair produced by the frequent twitchings of a muscle situated just under the skin called the “Fly Shaker” or panniculus carnosus. This muscle is seen any day in the carcase of an ox hanging up in a butcher’s shop, and it is interesting to notice the fact that it is distributed over only the lower half of the flank, for the purpose of shaking off flies from a region which the tail does not reach efficiently. None of this sheet of muscle is found within the effective range of the cow’s light artillery, as on the haunches or hinder portion of the spine. This sums up the equipment of patterns of hair on the species of this group of ungulates, which is more adorned with them than any I have examined, and it will be admitted that compared with those of the horse, it is a poor exhibi­tion, but one which it is easy to understand if the fundamental principles of this inquiry are kept in mind.