Integumentary Skeletal And Muscular Systems

Run a hand along a goat's back in a Sokoto market and a trader can tell you, before the animal is even weighed, roughly what it is worth. The hand is reading three body systems at once: the skin and coat under the fingers, the bones felt through it, and the muscle covering those bones. None of the three works alone. The skin protects what is underneath, the skeleton gives the whole animal its shape and its levers, and the muscles are what turn those levers into movement, and eventually into meat.

In this lesson you will learn what the skin is actually made of and why it does so much more than simply cover the body, how the skeleton is divided into an axial frame and an appendicular frame with each bone doing a distinct job, and how three different kinds of muscle tissue keep an animal standing, digesting and breathing all at the same time. You will also see why a stockman's trained hand, feeling for bone and muscle beneath the skin, is one of the oldest and most reliable tools in livestock management.