Brown: Some markings look good on a cow

I don’t know about you, but a bandit-face just looks good on a cow. To be honest, I probably know more about how I like my cows to look, and can better describe the many types of faces, coloring, and body features of bovines than humans. Might even have more confidence telling the bulls from the heifers, too.

Bandit-faced cattle look just about like you’d expect. The hair on their face is colored such that it look like they either want to be Zorro or went a couple rounds with a boxer they couldn’t block. My mama thinks they look sweet.

Audra Brown

Down on the Farm

I’m partial to motley-faces. They come in a variety of shades and patterns, but are defined as a generally solid colored bovine with a white face that is mottled by spots, blobs, and or specs of contrasting color. More longhorn in the breeding tends to lend finer, smaller spots, where other breeding might give a blobbier look. What’s really fun is when they have a spot on their face that just can’t help but look like something in particular. Finding shapes in a motley-face’s face is kinda like looking for ‘em in the clouds, but you’re looking at cows. And when you find such an identifying shape, the lucky cow often ends up with a name instead of just a number on her ear-tag. I’ve got one right now, name of F-Hole, like the s-curvy openings in a fiddle. Beats calling her Fiddle-Face. She’s the daughter of Spec, who looks like you think, and the granddaughter of Mot, who was my first motley-faced cow and gave me a long line of good stock with interesting faces.

There’s solids and ring-eyes, rednecks and eyebrows, pig-noses, blazes, dish-faced, black-nosed, and monkey-faced cows. A mustache calf is never a heifer but always a star. And then you have the ones that got them bug-eyes that are just hard to stare down. Accidents and bad-winters sometimes cause more unnatural features, and that’s where you get bob-ears, and that one-eared cow.

No matter the markings or how that makes you feel, the real wisdom to remember is that the important part about a cow’s face is how far it is off the ground. High-headed is rarely a sign of a mild-tempered cow.

Oh, and don’t forget Greta, bless her heart. She’s a good cow, if a little yellow, and has just a bit of a crooked mouth.

Audra Brown is pretty level-headed most of the time. Contact her at

[email protected].