Ox

An ox (pl.: oxen), also known as a bullock (in British, Australian, and Indian English), is a large bovine, trained and used as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly castrated adult male cattle, because castration inhibits testosterone and aggression, which makes the males docile and safer to work with. Cows (intact females) or bulls (intact males) may also be used in some areas.

Oxen are used for ploughing, for transport (pulling carts, hauling wagons and even riding), for threshing grain by trampling, and for powering machines that grind grain or supply irrigation among other purposes. Oxen may be also used to skid logs in forests, particularly in low-impact, select-cut logging.

Oxen are usually yoked in pairs. Light work such as carting household items on good roads might require just one pair, while for heavier work, further pairs would be added as necessary. A team used for a heavy load over difficult ground might exceed nine or ten pairs.

Oxen are thought to have first been harnessed and put to work around 4000 BC.

Training

In the New England tradition, young castrated cattle selected for draft are known as working steers and are trained from a young age. Their teamster makes or buys as many as a dozen yokes of different sizes for each animal as it grows. The steers are normally considered fully trained at the age of four and only then become known as oxen.

Pairs of oxen were always hitched the same way round, and they were often given paired names. In southern England, it was traditional to call the near-side (left) ox of a pair by a single-syllable name and the off-side (right) one by a longer one (for example: Lark and Linnet, Turk and Tiger).