Social organization of buffalo cows

Abstract

When a buffalo is 3 years old its sex can be recognized from the shape of its head and horns. In younger buffalo sex is more difficult to determine from a distance since it depends on seeing testicles or penis in males. I define cows as ‘adult’ if they are 6 years or older, and as ‘subadult’ if they are 3–5 years old. I define ‘cows with dependent offspring’ as adult cows with calves or young juveniles at foot and ‘cows without dependent offspring’ as adult cows to which neither calves nor juveniles are attached. I have adopted Pienaar’s (1969a) definition of calves as young buffalo that do not reach the inguinal fold at its highest point on the flank of the cow. Juveniles by my definition are older than calves but younger than subadults. This definition of juvenile is different from Sinclair’s (1977, p. 163), and in my terminology all categories are mutually exclusive. To determine the age of dead buffalo I use a set of photographs of teeth of buffalo of different ages prepared by Grimsdell (1969), which was also used by Sinclair (1977). Figure 3.1 was prepared from Sinclair’s data (Tables 13, 19, 20) and shows that males and females have the same weight development up to 6 years of age. I assume that the Manyara buffalo show the same development.