Nazi-bred super cows will save the dung beetles!
Steven Morris of The Guardian reports on a herd cows in Devon that were bred by a pair of brothers who wanted to recreate the aurochs, "an extinct European wild ox" that "features as an important beast in Teutonic mythology."
Derek Gow believes Heck cattle - which, he says, "look prehistoric" - could one day have an important conservation role, taking the place of aurochs in the environment. "They would be ideal for a reintroduction programme in Britain because they don't need human attention."Nazi-bred super cows roam farm in DevonHe added: "They are an important part of the ecosystem because each cow produces its own weight in dung a year. That is excellent for the whole food chain, from dung beetles upwards."
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That's just bullshit.
they wanted to hunt them? Spears only then, I hope.
I wonder how good they would be in a cheeseburger? Does anyone know?
The Nazi link is somewhat tenuous and decidedly dodgy. The Nazi party were purportedly responsible for eating them rather than preserving the herds the Heck brothers has bred and reared during hte 1920's. Again, the Nazi party just jumped on the gene/breeding/purity/mythology link and then held big banquets for party leaders who promptly ate them (for the magic). Hence the fact that there were very few of the cattle after WW2...
Bleh. Saying 'they look prehistoric' is kinda silly if the goal is to really reintroduce Aurochs, and not some ecological niche placeholder from an ice-age forest ecology that doesn't exist anymore.
Pedantic: the singular is "aurochs", not "auroch". It's cognate to "ox" and pluralizes in the same way, to "aurochsen".
Erm isn't the amount of dung related to methane production? Bad eco move?
It took thousands of years to breed the viciousness out of the modern cow (and bulls are still plenty vicious as it is), they want to undo all that?
I wonder if they are vicious? Behaviour and appearance aren't necessarily genetically linked.
And precisely what ecological niche are Heck Cattle supposed to fill? The role of wandering onto rural roads and pasting vehicles, rather than allowing moose/deer/elk/other to do it?
I had to see a photo of a "prehistoric" cow:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Heck_cattle_female.jpg
I heard the bull is really just Leonard Nimoy in heavy makeup.
Wouldn't all the methane off that dung pose a danger to the atmosphere?
@Nanuq: The Nazis were weird like that; they literally saw viciousness as a virtue. Presumably, a world in which the cows could turn you into hamburger if you weren't a worthy opponent would, from a National Socialist point of view, have been a better world.
@ACB: Hence the talk from libertarians about "sheeple"
Much cooler:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisent
For example: a full-grown cow eats about one of those huge round bales of hay PER WEEK!
Somehow, I'm quite confident that your basic cow produces much more than their own weight in dung per year...
JARMSTRONG said:
I have that same postcard ... got it the same time as the Jackalope one.
Oh come on, I'm the first person to make this joke?
"I, for one, welcome our new bovine overlords."
Now you've gone too far. Say what you want about Jane, but she ain't no Naxi cow.
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share..."
-V. Nabokov, Lolita
I'd rather the effort was spent on resurrecting woolly mammoths, then miniaturizing and domesticating them, but that's just me.
They may have a point. I don't think humans realize how much they impact the environment. Consider something as simple as street lights, and how they disrupt insect travel, similarly backyard "bug lights" (which don't actually do anything for mosquitoes but instead kill moths and beetles).
The loss of the great herds of American Bison meant that the life cycle of cowbirds who traveled with the herds were disrupted. Cowbirds are like cuckoos, and leave their eggs in the nests of other birds to be raised by surrogates (cowbirds evolved this because they traveled with the herds and couldn't stay in one place). Since the depletion of the bison herds in the late 1800's the cowbird population has expanded and grown, relying on domestic livestock, and apparently reducing the populations of once common songbirds.
The brothers Heck did create the "Heckrind" in Berlin 1920. I don't quite understand how Nazis figure into this.
Heck cows have heavy poos
@23 Raneessin That's easy. The Hecks were German and The Guardian's British. It's seems to be quite impossible for a British newspaper not to bring in the Nazis, when covering something German.
I wouldn't put ti past some of them to write up an article about the Nazi past of the Nobel peace prize winner of 2050, if he or she happens to be German.
In the Netherlands, they walk freely in some nature reserves. They are quiet beasts, but you do not want to walk between a mother and her calf.
They are excellent cattle to keep a nature reserve open without much care.
There is a book called The Zookeepers Daughter about what the Nazi's did to destroy the Zoo in Prague during WWII and what happened to the zookeepers families. The Heck brother who was running the Berlin Zoo during the war stole all the animals from the Polish Zoo. He was supported by the Nazi's - it is a very sad story. The book is a recent publication. sorry but I don't remember the authors name.
sorry the book was called The Zoo Keepers WIFe
The book is called "The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story" and is by Diane Ackerman.
It is getting 1 to 5 stars on Librarything
@25 Peterbruells: Thank you. I'm so sick of this british newspaper obsession of "ooh, German! Must be Nazis, and Nazis, always sexy, fun and weird, plus, really evil, sexy!"
@25 Peterbruells, it's like that Fawlty Towers episode. "Don't mention the war!"
Silly, silly, silly thing.
They have been breeding this kind of bulls in Spain for centuries for bullfighting purposes and suddenly it is a new, ecological idea.
Meh...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Cattle
The Guardian has a follow-up piece, of sorts, on the fascination with all things Nazi.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8014598.stm