What Is An Ox, Anyway?

"In commercial herds, bull calves are usually castrated from birth to six or eight months of age to make a good steer. If given enough time, the steer would be large enough to become an ox.

"If I was raising oxen 150 years ago, I would let the bull calves remain bulls as long as their necks did not become too large or the hump on the neck did not develop because they would grow faster and larger while a bull.

"You could never wait to castrate a bull when he is all grown up (about four years of age) because the hump on his neck would not leave a place for the yoke. A castrated grownup bull is a stag. I think that a stag could be used for work only by using a yoke lashed to his horns and, to my knowledge, these yokes were rarely used in this country."

-- Gordon Hull, in the quarterly folio, August 1998