I think it might be due to how close we are to cattle - animals like kangaroos can be called by a generic name because the differences among kangaroos don't matter much to us as humans. And even cats - we see them every day but whether one is male or female doesn't matter for most of our interactions with them.
If you work with cattle, though, their age, sex and reproductive status totally changes their role in your life. Most ranchers who raise cattle are cow/calf operations - that means that their stock consists of breeding cows, maybe a few bulls (for many, their interaction with bulls is only when they hire them at breeding time), and calves, which for your purposes are either heifers (you'll keep them to become breeding cows) or steers (which you'll sell at auction). (Before they were steers, they were bull calves - so you have those two categories to distinguish too) So what you do every day is not sufficiently described with a generic term for one of the animals. You're either going to go out and find pairs (cow/calf pairs), check cows, vaccinate heifers, round up steers, or castrate bull calves. Other people in the industry will work with other demographics - breeders will work with bulls, and stockyards will work with steers. Because our interactions with them are so intricately tied up with their reproductive lives, we have need for a lot more than one word. And because our industry has been so specialized, it's been a long time since someone needed to communicate about an activity involving a mixed group of cows, bulls, heifers and steers.
I've noticed the same thing among people who work with rarer animals. Us outsiders wouldn't hesitate to refer to "sheep," but my friends who live on sheep ranches talk about ewes, rams, lambs and wethers.