- A cow chews its cud for about 8 hours per day.
- Sheep and camels chew cud, too.
- No two Holstein's spots are the same.
- A cow must pump 10,000 pints of blood through its udder to produce 3 gallons of milk.
- Cows drink a bathtub's worth of water a day.
- A cow can outrun a horse through bogs or mud. Their cloven hoofs spread out and don't sink as deep as horses hoofs.
- Cows produce enough milk every day to make 14 lbs. of cheese, 5 gallons of ice cream or 6 lbs. of butter.
- The average cow produces 30 lbs. of urine and 65 lbs. pounds of feces per day.
- Cows can't walk down stairs because their knees don't bend the right way.
- It takes 340 squirts to fill a milk pail.
- Farmers start counting a cow's age only after she has a calf.
- The first cow in America landed at the Jamestown Colony in 1624.
- Nearly every American family had its own cow until the 1850's.
- There are about 9.2 million dairy cows on 110,000 farms in the US.
- 99% of all American dairy farms are family owned and operated.
- A dairy cow starts producing milk only after she has her first calf.
- Most cows have their first calf 2 years after birth.
- The best-producing cows make about 400 glasses of milk per day.
- Cows eat 40 pounds of food per day. That's about 100 burgers from McDonald's.
- Old cows in India have their own nursing homes.
- Cows can see nearly 360 degrees around their head.
- You can count the rings on a cow's horns to find out her age, just like a tree.
- 10 cows produce enough intestinal gas to heat a small house for a year.
- The oldest cow ever recorded was named Big Bertha. She birthed 39 calves and died at 48.
- You can increase a cow's milk production by calling her by name or playing her classical music.
- A group of twelve cows is a "flink".
- A cow gets up and down about 14 times per day.
- Some cows have a permanent hole in their side, called a fistula, that lets farmers reach into their stomachs to study their digestion.
- Belgian Blues are selectively bred to have twice the muscle mass of normal cows.