Mouse – lion – cow: three mammals compared

To look at threefoldness in mammals, this page compares three well-known animals from three specialised groups. For the rodents the mouse is taken, for the carnivores the lion and for the ungulates the cow. The same method is applied to three ungulates on the page horse – pig – cow and to two carnivores on the page dog and cat.

Behaviour

Mouse

On a walk in the woods, a sudden rustling among the leaves stops just as suddenly. Nothing is to be seen. In a barn or a cluttered attic, some scuffling can be heard, some small animal darting away, and again nothing is seen. But anyone who waits quietly may sometimes see a mouse wandering around, eating a seed or a berry.

These first impressions already characterise mice to some extent. The sound of a small being that darts away is heard, but the animal itself is seldom seen. Traces are found instead: food remains, droppings, the smell of urine. Mice are skittish animals that immediately dodge away to a safe hiding place when they are disturbed, usually to a spot underneath something, to a hole in the ground or under the floor.

To observe the behaviour of a mouse at leisure, one has to resort to a mouse in a cage. Then an active animal appears that does something different all the time. Mice are constantly busy, touching and sniffing at anything and everything. Toys like treadmills or roundabouts are used for a short time; then the animal moves on to something else. Mice eat several times a day, characteristically using their front legs to hold the food. Sometimes they carry food away to eat it elsewhere. A sudden movement by the observer makes the animal jump. When it sleeps in its hole, it is invisible. Mice sleep often, for short periods of time.

Mice are nervous, sensitive and easily disturbed animals. Sudden events in the surroundings may lead to acute, often frightened reactions. Mice notice much and are open to the world outside with their senses.

Lion

The lion is called the king of animals. With loud roaring, which can be heard from many kilometres away, the lion claims its territory.

Lions live in groups, the so-called pride, of one or two males, several females, cubs and younger animals. They lie around, enjoying the sun or the shade of a tree, relaxing and sleeping, their heads and bodies resting lazily against each other. They rub their heads together and touch each other almost lovingly. They may spend up to 20 hours a day in this way, completely relaxed. The cubs play with each other; it is a peaceful scene.

Suddenly some females detect a herd of prey animals. The hunt starts. Lions can follow a group of zebra, wildebeest or other ungulates for more than an hour in close collaboration. They stalk until they see a chance to isolate one animal from the herd. If this succeeds, some of the lions hide in the vegetation to launch a final surprise attack. From up to about 30 metres they pounce on the prey from behind or from the side. With their canines they bite through the windpipe, or through the spinal cord and the carotid arteries.

Once the prey is dead, the males come closer and start eating first. Large chunks of meat are quickly devoured. The females have to wait until the males have finished and are chased away with growls if they come too close too early. After the females it is the cubs' turn. During the meal there is a lot of mutual aggression. Afterwards all the animals go to a pool to drink a large amount of water, then they lie down and peace reigns again.

Within the pride there is little fighting. The picture changes when young males, who live for years in separate groups of nomads, try to take over a pride. They attempt to drive out the dominant male or males by force. Having done so, they still have to be accepted by the females, which also takes aggression. The new males usually kill the young cubs and then mate with the females. Only then are they really in charge.

The lion's life alternates between lying quietly and hunting actively, between peaceful coexistence and aggression: peace in the daily routine, aggression in the fighting and feeding.

Cow

On a winter morning in the stable, all the cows are eating or chewing calmly and peacefully. Steam rises from their mouths, and only the tranquil sounds of chewing are heard. Some animals look up calmly at a visitor and lift their heads a little; the herd as a whole hardly responds. The eyes do not seem to look clearly; they seem rather dull, turned inward. The cows continue with what they were doing. Outward calm goes together with a great deal of digestive activity.

In summer the herd can be seen in the meadow, and even there it barely reacts to someone approaching: the cows keep grazing or lie ruminating. The animals are seldom found sleeping. Each day they graze for 8 to 10 hours, and they spend about as much time ruminating. The film Grazing cattle shows this unhurried rhythm.

Compared with the other two animals, there is not much activity in this herd animal. There is little interaction, apart from the constant small skirmishes and threats that establish and confirm the hierarchy in the herd. Cows spend about one hour a day on social behaviour, licking each other's skin, for example. To confirm the hierarchy the animals threaten each other, and low-ranking animals give way to those higher in rank.

Cattle are quiet, reserved animals that spend much of their time feeding and digesting.

Differences in behaviour

The mouse is strongly focused on the outer world: the slightest disturbance is detected and produces a strong reaction, which is often flight. Mice hide underground in a hole, where they also sleep. With their senses they live entirely in the outer world, and they can withdraw from it only by going underground.

The lion lives in an alternation of rest and hunting, of peace and aggression. The same alternation of tension and relaxation appears in the hunt itself: the tense stillness of the ambush and the vigorous contraction of the muscles in the final attack. Rudolf Steiner described this as a constant play of falling out of balance and coming back into it (GA 230).

In the cow the senses are turned more inward. This animal is engaged in eating, ruminating and digesting for a large part of the day. Observing and responding to the surroundings are much less developed, and so is the expression of feeling: cattle have little facial expression. Even the proportions of the head point this way, as the salivary glands of a cow are larger than its brain.

Physical features

The body

Mice are small animals with a long tail. The house mouse weighs 20 to 50 grams and its body without the tail is 7 to 10 cm long; the tail adds about another 7 cm. Looking at the body without the tail, the head seems to merge into the body as if there were no neck, and the legs are largely hidden within the body outline.

The body is close to the ground, and at rest the belly touches it. The back is rounded, the spine is curved too, and the hindquarters are higher than the head. The emphasis of the body mass lies at the back rather than at the front.

Lions have a medium-sized, flexible and mobile body of 120 to 200 kg with a long tail. They move with agility and can round their normally straight back. The head is carried on a clear, strong neck, higher than the line of the back. Lions have considerable powers of facial expression. The forequarters of the male are more heavily built than the hindquarters, partly because of the mane; in lionesses this is much less so. The tail is rather long. The body does not touch the ground.

Cows are large animals. They can be up to 1.80 m high and have a massive body of around 650 kg. They stand high on their legs, with the trunk far from the ground, and the torso dominates. The head is joined to the torso by a relatively slender neck and is carried at about the level of the back. On the forehead there are two curved horns. The high shoulders make the bull heavier at the front. The cow is more balanced, because of her udder and because she lacks the bull's high shoulders. The emphasis of the body mass lies at the front rather than at the back.

Fur colour

The fur of mice is brownish grey on the upper side and greyish white on the underside.

Lions are light brown, with somewhat lighter underparts. Males have a dark brown mane. The end of the tail carries a black tuft. The cubs are spotted light brown, and on the underside and the legs the spots remain visible for a long time.

The wild ancestors of cattle were red-brown (the cows) and dark brown to black (the bulls), with a lighter stripe along the spine and a light ring around the muzzle. Common breeds today are black and white or brown and white spotted; others are uniformly coloured, from white to black.

Sense organs

The large eyes of mice are prominent. They have large ears and long whiskers near the mouth, which register the faintest trembling of the air. On the legs and body there are many tactile corpuscles, and the tail is sensitive too. Despite their large eyes, mice do not see very well; they orient themselves mostly by smell.

Lions see well, especially moving objects, and they also see well in the dark. Their hearing is good and their sense of smell excellent.

Cows see well. Even at great distances they can recognise objects or people, and they can see colours. Their hearing, smell and taste are good too.

Heart and lungs

The heartbeat and breathing of the mouse are fast: it breathes about 160 times a minute and the heart beats about 450 times a minute.

Lions have a relatively large heart and large lungs. In relation to body weight, the heart of a lion is about three times as heavy as that of a horse or a cow.

Limbs

The hind legs of the mouse are better developed than the front legs. Mice sometimes stand on their hind legs and use the front legs to hold food. They walk on the front part of the foot.

The legs of the lion are of medium length. Lions walk on the pads of their toes (digitigrade). The limbs are agile, and the gait is lithe, springy and smooth. There is a great deal of muscle around the skeleton, and the skeleton makes up only 13% of the lion's body mass (in the horse about 20%).

The legs of a cow are long, especially the lower parts, and the toes are extra long. Cows walk on the tips of two toes, covered by hooves. What is seen and called the leg is mostly the lower leg and the toes; the upper leg lies within the body outline. Cows walk somewhat stiffly, and running looks laborious.

Reproduction

Mice give birth to 10 to 12 naked, blind young after a gestation of about 3 weeks. The young are born in a hole underground and are independent after about 20 days. There are several litters a year.

The lioness looks for a suitable place away from the pride to give birth. This spot, the den, must give protection from moisture, sun and draughts. After a gestation of about 110 days, 2 to 4 spotted, blind cubs are born. Their eyes open after about a week. When the cubs can walk, several females with their litters may join into a group, and after about 8 weeks the lioness and her cubs return to the pride.

Cows give birth to a single calf after a gestation of about nine months. The calf can stand up and walk soon after birth. In the wild the mother leaves the calf hidden in a sheltered spot for the first days and returns several times a day to suckle it.

Food

Mice eat seeds and nuts: high-quality plant food with a high proportion of starch or fat. Food is sometimes carried away to be eaten elsewhere, and mice also build up food stores.

Lions can eat up to 30 kg of meat at a time, mostly from large prey animals, sometimes from smaller ungulates. They also eat carrion.

Cows eat grass and herbs. They wrap their tongue around small clumps of grass and pull them loose. That is why they eat only longer grass; they cannot bite off short grass, as horses can. Grass is low-quality, hard-to-digest food, poor in energy. Cows eat approximately 50 kg of fresh plant material a day and drink up to 100 litres.

Digestion

The mouse has a relatively large stomach and a short digestive tract of about 8 times its body length. The caecum, or blind gut, is large. The salivary glands are relatively large too, because of the dry food. Mice produce dry pellets that are hardly useful as manure.

Lions have an even shorter digestive tract of only about 7 metres, or 4 times their body length. Meat is easy to digest, but it requires powerful digestion with strong gastric juices. Digestion is quick. The dung smells strongly and is not useful as manure.

The food of the cow is hard to digest. First the grass goes into the rumen, where it is broken down for some hours by microorganisms. It is then brought back up to be chewed again and swallowed once more. Only when the food is broken down finely enough does it pass on through the reticulum to the omasum and the abomasum.

The digestive tract is 50 to 60 metres long, about 25 times the cow's body length. The cow has four stomach compartments: the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum and the abomasum. The abomasum corresponds to the human stomach; the other three are forestomachs, which older anatomy described as widenings of the oesophagus. The dung is moist and very fertile.

Teeth

The teeth of a mouse are dominated by four long, chisel-like incisors. They wear down with gnawing but keep growing throughout life. There are no canines, and the molars are large, with transverse ridges. The direction of chewing is from front to back.

In the lion's teeth the long, sharp canines dominate, used to hold and tear the prey. The incisors are small, and the carnassials are sharply pointed, looking somewhat like canines. The jaw moves up and down, the teeth cutting past each other like scissors.

In the cow's teeth the large molars dominate, with folds running lengthwise. There are no canines, and no incisors in the upper jaw. The direction of chewing is sideways.

The table gives some features of the mouse, the lion and the cow, as a share of body weight in per cent or per mille; the length of the digestive tract is given in relation to body length.

Characteristics

Mouse

Mice have large sense organs and a relatively large brain. They are active all the time and constantly move from one activity to another. Everything is done briefly; they even sleep for short periods, several times a day. Heart and lungs work fast. A mouse held in the hands is felt trembling, nervous. Mice live on their nerves. The nerve-sense system shapes, as it were, the entire body.

The caecum is important for the digestion of food. In the teeth the incisors dominate. Mice store food in hoards outside the body; they do not lay down fat reserves within it.

Lion

Lions have relatively large lungs and a well-developed heart. Their relations with each other are often playful and affectionate, and at other times aggressive. The expression of the middle part of the face plays an important part in the social life of the pride. The lion is an animal that lives out of its feelings.

In the teeth the canines dominate. Food is quickly digested and does not burden the body, in contrast with the cow, where the hard-to-digest grass is ruminated. Observing does not burden the body either, in contrast with the mouse, which reacts to every stimulus. In Steiner's description (GA 230), in cows the blood circulation becomes heavy, while in mice, as in birds, breathing becomes nervous. In the lion there is a balance between blood circulation and breathing: the breathing rate and the rhythm of the heartbeat are in harmony.

Cow

The cow has a long digestive tract and is occupied with digestion full time. Metabolism is present in the entire body: the animal ruminates in its mouth, and the rumen and the other forestomachs lie in front of the true stomach. Digestion in the cow is concentrated at the front of the body, compared with the mouse, where the caecum at the back is important, and the lion, where the stomach in the middle does the main work. In the teeth the molars dominate.

Cattle eat a great deal of low-quality food, with which they build a large body. The cow connects intensively with earthly substances. Turning cellulose into milk and meat demands a great deal of strength and energy from the metabolism. There is much perseverance, a strong will, in this digestion. The legs are long and specialised through the reduction of the number of toes. The skeleton is heavy.

These animals as domestic animals

People have a different relationship with the animals of each of these three groups. Dog and cat are pets: animals that come into the house and are loved. Cow, horse, goat and pig are kept as livestock: they come into the stable and are useful. Mice and rats are kept as pets too, but in a cage. They also come into houses uninvited and eat people's food, and so they are mainly seen as pests.

• Rodents are animals that do harm.
• Carnivores are animals that come into the house and that people love.
• Ungulates are animals that come into the stable and are useful to people.

Three types

• The mouse lives in its surroundings, has sense organs over its entire body, observes much, reacts strongly to what it experiences and can hardly shut itself off from these experiences. The accent is on the nerve-sense system. It can be called a nerve-sense animal, or a thinking animal.
• The lion lives in the alternation of peace and aggression. This animal lives out of its rhythmic organs. Rhythm is seen in the spots on the fur of the cubs, too. The heart-lung system is well developed. It can be characterised as a heart-lung animal, or a feeling animal.
• The cow lives in its powerful digestion and in building and maintaining a large body. Its limbs are specialised. The metabolic-limb system is well developed, and the cow can be called a metabolic-limb animal, or a willing animal.

The nerve-sense animal is the smallest of the three. The activity of the nerves and the orientation to the surroundings cost a great deal of energy, and the high-quality food is turned into activity. The metabolic-limb animal is the largest. Low-quality food is built into a large body; the animal is dreamy, not very awake, and centred on its metabolism. Food is turned into a massive body. The heart-lung animal takes a position between these two.

Polarity of organ system and centre of mass

A polarity exists between the centre of activity and the centre of mass of the body. In the mouse the accent lies on the nerve-sense system, which has its centre in the head. The centre of mass lies at the opposite end, in the hindquarters, which are built higher, and in the long tail.

In the cow, and even more in the bull, the body is heavier at the front, whereas the metabolic-limb system has its centre towards the rear, in the great stomachs and the hind limbs.

The lion lies in between. Its body is balanced; neither the front nor the rear is larger.

The same pattern in other groups

The threefold picture of the mammals is described on the page The threefold human being as a reflection of the three systems of the human body. Whether or not one follows that interpretation, the comparison itself rests on observable features: teeth, digestive tracts, gait and behaviour. The same features can be followed in related groups. Among the ungulates, the odd-toed ungulates and the pigs, peccaries and hippopotamuses show again a nerve-sense, a heart-lung and a metabolic-limb emphasis, each in its own way. Seen this way, the mouse, lion and cow are not three isolated animals but three answers to the question of how a mammal can be built.