Back in India when I was a child, that was the middle of milk revolution and India was importing high yielding milk cattle from Europe and others. Either keeping the breeds pure or mixing them with local cattle for the pure breeds didn’t sustain the extreme temperatures or the tropic weather.
That said, females were milk cows and the question about males were a disaster for the eternal belief that those cows/ox couldn’t be used for tilling land. When probed deeper, answer always was that the foreign cows lacked the hump needed to stop the yoke and beam from sliding down.
I believed the answer till I left the country and realized people in Europe were ploughing even with horses and donkeys, there is no breed of horse that has a hump.
The answer finally came to me when visiting the Billings dairy farm in Vermont. The cattle can’t take the heat and love the nippy cold and will slide on snow and hence the farm had big industrial fans to keep them cooler.
So, the answer was three fold, one is the fact that these cows/ox were not trained for tilling and for generations were bred for milking and training these is a hard task and might take a few generations to get them ready. Second, we needed to change the yoke and beam design for these ox and lastly and most importantly, these cattle were bred for the cold weather for generations and had trouble adjusting to the hotter/tropical weather.
Now, the question can rest in peace.
