Domesticated Cattle Research Paper

Intro:

Cattle, formally known as cows, are the most common type of large domesticated farm animal. Cows provide people with meat, milk, and leather. They have been useful animals since human existence. Cows have four stomachs, which allows them to take nutrition out of the variety of habitats they eat from.

Habitat:

Domesticated cattle in America - the female heifers and cows, and male bulls and steers - also including the bison and oxen, often live in the grasslands. Most of their day is spent grazing on grass. Cattle serve an important purpose in the grassland area because they can trim down large areas of tall grasses. Some of the grasses have pests in them and are sometimes very dry. If they are really dry, it is more easy to catch the grass on fire.
The second habitat for cows is for wild or feral
domesticated cows, live in forested areas if there isn’t grasslands around. This is actually helps many countries including the United States, Ecuador, and many more places. They can trample plants and eat saplings and the greens all over the forest floor. This method keep new trees from growing to help those ones that have been cut done, fall, or die from disease. But this can disrupt the ecosystem causing new animals to find new homes.
The third habitat for cows is to be confined to large, fenced in pastures.
The cattle ranches often have barns where they go partly instead of the field grazing. The cows eat grass and other plants, but ranchers usually cycle them through pastures, so there isn’t overgrazing happening. They cycle to them to different pastures because you don’t want the cows to kill off one part of the land on the property. Ranchers have different operations for the cows, too. If they are at a dairy, they may be in a feedlot and may have to walk to different buildings to be milked. Most cows notice when you feed them, and use that as a schedule. This habitat is one of the known ones for this paper. If you went 25 miles away from Briggsdale in every direction, you would find a cattle operation in some form.
And lastly, in different parts of the world, cattle aren’t native to the United States, but the American Bison species is. Cattle was introduced to North America by the Spanish Conquistadors in the 1500’s, and some were even brought to the first colonies in the 1600’s. Other than North America, cows live in areas of Australia, Europe, South America, Africa, and southeast
Asia.

Place in Food Web:

Briggsdale doesn’t have the biggest food web you could say because we don’t have a lot of animals in the area. The bottom of the food web is the grass and other greens around on the ground, rabbits eat those. Cows are probably on the same level as rabbits because they both eat only greens found on the ground. It obviously can’t be at the top because it doesn’t eat other meat. People around Briggsdale eat meat, and even other animals in the food web can eat them. Coyotes and foxes can eat them, that is why many ranchers get dogs to keep the predators away from their cattle.

Consumer Type:

Cattle in the Briggsdale area and everywhere are herbivores. Cows only eat grass, shrubs, most plants on the ground, most vegetables, and grain. Most ranchers just put the cows in the pasture and don’t get anything much other than that. But to give your cows more nutrients, ranchers give grains, hay, silage, and other things like that. Oh, and most of the time there are mineral tabs out in the pastures for the cows, too. Mineral tabs help cows get their essential nutrients from the deposit of salt and other minerals.

Modifies the Abiotic Environment: