Before the arrival of machines, work that was too hard for a man to do was carried out with the help of trained animals. For thousands of years, the ox has helped do everything from cultivating crop land to moving buildings. The domestic steer, a castrated bull, is trained to become a working ox.
Cattle come in a variety of breeds.
Certain breeds possess qualities considered desirable in an ox such as size and colour, physical strength and stature, or temperament and agility. The quality of an ox is determined by the training of breeds from which its stock has been derived. Breeding has brought many advancements in the use of domestic livestock. Early oxen were much smaller than today's show breeds. Likewise, the large, robust draft horses of today have only been in use for little more than the last century.