The article discusses derivational relations between verbs belonging to the semantic field of animals and their cognates in the word-formative nest. The authors focused on a small semantic group of verbs with the meaning “to give birth to cubs”. These verbs generally indicate birthing process of domestic animals. Research literature and Derivational Dictionary of Russian language edited by Tikhonov A.N. qualify these verbs as derivatives included into the derivational paradigm based on cubs’ names being the source words in the word-formative nest. In order to specify their motivational and derivational trend the article examines derivational and semantic relations between words in the derivational pair, which is made up of a verb with animal semantics and the noun denoting the corresponding cub (give birth to a lamb - lamb). The authors also identify semantic and propositional structure of these verbs and cubs’ names correlated with them using onomasiological approach forming the basis of cognitive word-formation. All this allowed to conclude that contrary to the long-held point of view, verbs of this group can be considered not only as stems for the names of the respective cubs, but also as source words in word-formative nests including their cognates.