Heck Cattle. Good name:
Heck cattle were developed in the early 20th century by the Heck brothers in Germany in an attempt to breed back modern cattle to their presumed ancestral form, the Aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius). Heinz Heck working at the Hellabrunn Zoological Gardens in Munich began creating the Heck breed about 1920. Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, began extensive breeding programs supported by the Nazis during World War II to bring back the Aurochs. The reconstructed aurochs fit into the Nazi propaganda drive to create an idyllic history of the Aryan nation.
Sadly, when you cross cows with cows, you don't get aurochs.
The general consensus among biologists today is that the Hecks' original methodology used to "recreate" the aurochs was flawed: once a genetic lineage is gone, it cannot be "bred back". Some go as far as to consider it outright deceitful. For example, Professor Z. Pucek of the Bialowieza Nature Preserve has called the Heck cattle as the "biggest scientific swindle of the 20th Century".
Aw,
heck.
5 comments:
Heck Cattle - a pale reflection of the real thing - Hell Cattle.
When all at once a mighty herd
Of red eyed cows he saw,
A-plowin' through the ragged skies
And up a cloudy draw.
I think I may have closed the loop (or stuffed Ouroboros' tail into his mouth) with this bit of silliness: aurochs -> Heck -> hell -> ghost riders -> the wild hunt (chasing, perhaps, an auroch?). It would be great to have the big bovines back - but my bet is we'll see mastodons or mammoths first...
Genetically impossible, maybe, but it was an interesting story.
The section about the Heck vs. Wisent rivalry was funny-ironic.
Left alone, maybe the Heck critters would come to approximate the aurochs, perhaps even as abandoned longhorn cattle during the Civil War became a hardier breed -- or at least that is the mythology.
Good comments both!
I think you may be on to something-- letting evolution recreate something like the big cattle. But might they need Pleistocene- level predators and predation? I mean, they were HUGE.
Also-- a better "re- creation" may be the ongoing efforts to breed quaggas out of (possibly conspecific) Burchell's zebras with quagga- like markings. That was going quite well last time I heard-- should check...
I think Steve's right about needing some sort of selective pressure to get aurochs and not just Scotch toros bravos. Of course, humans are excellent at providing such thinnings. I didn't know that about the longhorns during the Civil War.
As far as such things can be wished for, I'd as soon see mammoths as aurochs, unless bull-jumping comes back into style.
Lutz Heck also redcreated the Quagga, which I will write on later this week -- being naturally lazy, I will recycle some stuff I wrote a while back :)
A bit of interest for the dog world is that Lutz Heck was instrumental in creating the German hunting terrier. I believe I was the first person to put this complete story together, and it's told here >> http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2004/11/german-hunt-terriers.html and in a small section of a book I put out a while back.
Patrick
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