I've been working on this mod of mine for a few days now, im very new to mod development.  I want to essentially copy the animations of the vanilla cow, and a few others over to a custom version.  such as drops, textures, and the items you get from them being different (in the case of like milking cows, or sheering sheep).  Ive written most of it, however im not sure where the animations for the mobs are.  Ive found the camel's but I need things like the creeper's, and the mobs i named prior.  Where is this stored, and how may i use it for my custom mob variants.

As far as I know, it's impossible to get the animations of vanilla entities and use them for modded ones. However, you could try extending the class of the vanilla entity and using the same renderer with a different texture. That essentially tells Minecraft to reuse the same hardcoded animations. 

just got around to testing that it worked!
thank you so much