I have noticed that dwarfs designated as miners tend to get super tough over time and start running really fast. i like to designate future soldiers as miners first. anyway, I'm not sure what a cow would have done to become super tough, but i would love to know whats up with super cow.
It's genetic. Her father is enormous and skinny with golden hair, brown skin, black eyes. Her mother is gigantic with incredible muscles, flax hair, brown skin, black eyes. Her sister is gigantic and quite fat, with golden hair, brown skin, black eyes.
I need a better bull to replace the father. Sorry about incest, but I have a very limited population and incest doesn't exist in DF. So I'll hope for a strong male from these two, then eliminate the parents (remove mother for all golden-haired cattle, remove father for all fat/strong cattle). Then I need to decide whether to breed cows for meat/strength or tallow/fat. Will document whether fatness seems to be genetic, by something like breeding cows for high fatness and donkeys for high muscularity.
I suspect that the mother and father are pure samples of golden/flax hair, and that flax hair is recessive. We'll see.
Training with a pick seems to be way better for mining skill than actually mining during every waking hour. And mining takes too damn long to train practically, so I'd like to either see that sped up (with balance for soil) or keep this exploit.