Is a cow always a cow?

I’ve noticed a tendency among townies like me to call all cattle cows (which they feel they must mention in discussing Brexit). You’d think that a cow was an obviously female creature. (Didn’t Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, shown from 1965, call his wife Else a ‘silly old moo’?) But that doesn’t stop them. Indeed the main character in an American cartoon film called Barnyard (2006) was a cow by the name of Otis with a milk-giving udder. He was reckoned male and wooed a (female) cow called Daisy. This was not presented as any daring exercise in gender fluidity. One critic recommended that parents should take their children to it if they wanted to ‘depress them while making sure they fail biology’.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

But what do you call the animal represented by bulls and cows? Once it could have been ox, with oxen standing for ‘cattle’.