The animals themselves, not the people using it. A cow is the name for female cattle, male chicks get killed early, and the horseback empires were run mainly from atop of mares.
Purely economically, males are useful only for fertilization. Males can’t produce milk or eggs, so better to just kill them young and sell their meat as a delicacy. Farmers gather sperm and do artificial insemination.
also, they can be more aggressive, especially if there's more than one of them in a group. easier to slaughter the ones you dont want to breed from.
or castrate them. hence oxen, geldings, etc, for male animals that have a use beyond being a sperm factory.
oh yeah, and you dont technically need a lot of males to keep population numbers up, because sperm is incredibly cheap compared to the investment required from female animals
Also roosters would kill each other in the cages we make chickens live in. Plus their meat isn't as good.
There's gotta be someone whose written about how the material conditions of animal husbandry were repurposed as an ideological tool to control human women.
the existence of males is only tolerated because nobody's come up with a better way to keep a large variation of genes in the same population. even so, many species have tried to rope males in to do at least some of the job of raising offspring (apart from spraying essentially free sperm).
humans are one of these species, but it's ... uh.. it's going about as well as you can see.
Less coded than practical.
Newly hatched poultry don't always have any characteristics than can easily tell the sexes apart. Some particular breeds might have sex linked traits that are manifested and visible when a chick has hatched but its not universal.
Also, Chickens have Hens (female) and Roosters (male). Horses have Mares (female) and Stallion (male). Cows have Heifer (female) and Bull (male). There's also nouns for newborns and prepuberty and castrated. I'd imagine that the specific names for things aren't necessary to teach to city folk who aren't expected to ever work around animals
As far as cultures that heavily relied on horses, mares tend to fight each other less while the stallions (and geldings sometimes depending on when they were castrated) can be incredibly dangerous when fighting each other for their position in the herd and when there are mares in heat.
Cant forget to mention that male horses don't have hands to properly wash their penii and sheathes which can get incredibly nasty, to the point of causing urinary tract infections, smegma that becomes the size and hardness of rocks, to just getting rocks and plant material stuck inside. So trying to ride a horse that has gravel constantly grinding against the head of their penis until you take the time to personally hand wash that horse's junk and remove all the unpleasant objects hiding in its sheath isn't the safest or most desirable thing when you can just ride a mare instead.
Cant forget to mention that male horses don't have hands to properly wash their penii and sheathes which can get incredibly nasty, to the point of causing urinary tract infections, smegma that becomes the size and hardness of rocks, to just getting rocks and plant material stuck inside.
hey i learned a new horror about animal slavery.
is that why stallions slap their penis around into their belly sometimes? to try to knock PEBBLES out?!
The basis of animal husbandry is reproductive control. If an animal cannot be bred in captivity in great amounts, they cannot be effectively exploited
this is actually why i've never been sure we've domesticated cats. sure, the designer breeds, yes. but the average barn cat/stray cat/feral cat/wild? cat mix? nah, we've never had reproductive control over them.
