What they do in secret, apparently, is walk on their hind legs, tell badly-written jokes, and get stuck in very strange plotlines. In one episode, the arrival of one clam leads to a swarm of clams taking refuge in the barn. Apparently, clams are able to survive and reproduce outside the water at rates comparable to e. coli bacteria.
Among the main characters of the show are a pig, assorted sheep, a sheepdog, a skunk, a Jersey heifer, and a large Holstein whose name is Otis. What is unusual about Otis to anyone who knows the basic definition of a mammal or has at least learned a little about cows?
Otis has an udder, which are of course nonexistent on male cows. I was immediately reminded of an exchange my mother and I heard at a farm. I don't remember it exactly, but basically a little girl asked her mother if a cow nearby (which had a very swollen udder) was a boy cow or a girl cow. The mother said that both boy cows and girl cows make milk.
It was one of those moments where I'm sure it was very tempting for the farm staff to laugh out loud. My mother and I wondered where this woman got the notion that boy cows make milk. Are people really that undereducated about biology? I feel like I knew that mammals are defined as having fur/hair and lactating (if they are female) when I was in early elementary school. Perhaps part of it was the steady dose of Zoobook magazines I had as a kid… but by the time you're out of school, you should know that male mammals don't lactate.
If you don't know that male mammals don't lactate after school, something is wrong.
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