You wouldn't know it from cartoons, but in cattle, color has nothing to do with gender. There are brown cows, black cows, black-and-white bulls, and brown-and-white bulls. In fact, cattle are not even limited to these colors — cattle can be white, or even gray.
Many cartoons, however, depict all cows as being black-and-white or brown-and-white and all bulls as being brown or black.
This may be doubled with Animal Gender-Bender if cows are depicted as a separate species from bulls, although this doesn't happen very often since most kids understand that bulls and cows are the same species despite the Bizzare Sexual Dimorphism between them shown in many cartoons. Subtrope of Typical Cartoon Animal Colors.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Pokémon: Miltanks, which are Cow Pokemon are black-and-pink while Tauroses, which are bull Pokemon are brown.
Comic Strip
- In one Far Side comic, a farmer is getting ready to milk a black-and-white cow in front of a black bull. The black bull's thought bubble says "Touch my wife's tits one more time and I'll kill you!"
Films — Animated
- Home on the Range: Maggie is brown-and-white, Mrs. Calloway is black-and-white, and Grace is yellow-and-brown. When they encounter bulls, all the bulls are brown.
Video Games
- The Mobile Phone Game Brain Test Tricky Puzzles has some questions featuring a black-and-white cow or a brown bull. One question even features both of them and involves dragging the cow to the bull so they can recreate, resulting in a group of calves that are all either black-and-white or brown.
- Harvest Moon:
- Harvest Moon: Subverted. You begin the game with a black-and-white cow, but you can adopt cattle in a variety of colors.
- Played straight in Harvest Moon: A New Beginning and Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns, however.
- Legend Of Zelda: Cows are usually black-and-white. Elsie, the one cow who isn't black-and-white, is blue-and-white. Minotaurs are black.
- Minecraft: Cows are depicted as black-and-white or brown-and-white while bulls are depicted as brown or black.
Western Animation
- Arthur: Cows are black-and-white and bulls are either black or brown.
- Back at the Barnyard: Otis the Cow is black-and-white, Bessy is brown and gray, and Abby is yellow-and-black. Whenever a bull shows up, it's either black or brown.
- Blue's Clues: Cows are always black-and-white, while bulls are always brown.
- Family Guy: Bulls are always depicted as brown, and cows are almost always depicted as black-and-white with the one exception being Mr. Cow in the episode "McStroke", although it's likely that he was actually meant to be a steer since he has no udder.
- A bunch of cows show up in the school in the The Ghost and Molly McGee episode "Talent Show". They all are black-and-white. In "The (Un)natural", Molly feeds a brown baby bull while Scratch is chased by an adult bull, also brown.
- Gravity Falls: Any cow that appears in the show is black-and-white, while any bull that appears in the show is brown.
- King of the Hill: The episode "A Rover Runs Through It" features bulls, and they're all brown. In the episode "Raise the Steaks" features both a cow and a bull. The cow is black-and-white and the bull is brown. At the end of the episode, they have a baby cow that's brown-and-white.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Every cow is either black-and-white or brown-and-white, while every bull that shows up is either black or brown.
- Peppa Pig: Mrs. Cow and Carol Cow are black-and-white, while Mr. Bull is brown.
- Phineas and Ferb: Bulls are always depicted as brown or black while cows are almost always depicted as being bicolor, the one exception being in "That's the Spirit" where Doofenshmirtz turns into an anthropomorphic brown cow, despite being a male.
- The Simpsons: Played straight most of the time, except in the episode "Maximum Homerdrive", when one of the bulls has a yellow patch around his eye.
- South Park: In earlier seasons, the cows were either black-and-white, brown-and-white, or even black-and-brown. In "Fun with Veal" all the calves have udders and are referred to as baby cows, and are all bicolor as well.
- Thomas & Friends: Cows are black-and-white and bulls are black.
