(continued from previous page)

Anyone who has watched a rodeo has seen one of the Indian breeds, the Brahma. They have little to offer in terms of milk or meat (and, of course, they are not eaten at all in India). They were not part of the great story of "Bos taurus," the prolific genus of all great beef cows and milking cows, until in this century they were crossed with the Aberdeen-Angus. If it wasn't for their unexpected talent for bucking off riders at a rodeo, they would be the least-seen of all cows in North America. Besides a hump and an extremely flexible back that make them all but impossible to ride once they start twisting and bucking simultaneously, all the Indian cattle have long horns and floppy ears. (Most bucking Brahmas have had a foot or two lopped off the ends of their horns to make them less deadly weapons.) Whenever Brahmas are crossed with European breeds, the offspring all have floppy ears ... it's a dominant gene. When naturally polled or hornless Aberdeen-Angus are bred with any other cow, the crosses are all hornless because the polledness gene is dominant. A registered breed of cows, called Brangus (Brahma X Aberdeen-Angus), are black (another dominant gene), hornless, and floppy-eared. They are a popular, if physically unattractive, beef bred in tropical and subtropical countrysides where the Brahma genes give them some immunity to tropical diseases and the Aberdeen-Angus genes make them palatable.

The world of descriptive biology has scholars who either like lots of species or who like to keep it simple. To the simplifiers (or lumpers) there is no such animal as "Bos indicus;" there is only "Bos taurus" variety indicus, or, in plain English, regular old cows but with humps and beagle ears. The compromisers settle for a subspecies nomenclature and thus, to use a real example, a black Angus cow carries the Latin scientific label of "Bos taurus taurus," and a Brahma cow works under the alias "Bos taurus indicus." The purpose of all this Latin is to achieve scientific precision in a universal language. Unfortunately, people do the naming, and nothing human beings are involved with stays simple. Either way, lump or split, there's no reasonable scientific name for the Brangus.

In common English usage, any sort of cattle can be simply termed cow, even if that word has a more precise meaning. Aberdeen-Angus breeders in the West, if they want to be laconic, will say that they "raise black cows." When distinguishing among cattle in a group, a cow is a female that is old enough to have already dropped a calf. A heifer is a young female approaching or just entering breeding age. Males of any age are bulls. Calves are animals anywhere from just-born to sexually mature but not yet involved in breeding. They are either heifer calves or bull calves.

"Ox" was once commonly used in England as a generic noun for cattle taking a singular verb, no gender implied. In North America an ox is exclusively a neutered male draft animal; neutered males headed to the packing plant are referred to as steers. Proper British usage for a steer would be "bullock." "Ox" has now become, in many districts, the British equivalent to our "steer," that is, a neutered male raised for beef.

Heifers are infrequently neutered, and the same verbal adjective is used for them as for cats or dogs; they are spayed heifers. This is a trickier operation than neutering a male and not much practiced. Occasionally, a naturally neutered heifer calf is born because she is the fraternal twin of a bull calf. This is a happening entirely unique to cattle, and the mechanism is not understood. Apparently the male hormones circulating in
the mutually shared blood system of the cow and the calves effectively sterilizes the female, whereas the male is always normal. These sterile females are called freemartins, a term whose origin is lost and which has no other meaning. Freemartins are highly prized beef animals, tender and well marbled.

There is no record, no physical evidence, of how and precisely when and where Stone Age humans tamed and bred the aurochs. What is certain is that they did it very carefully because the aurochs was an animal nearly twice the size and many times the weight of the hugest modern cow. Worse, from Neolithic man's point of view, the aurochs had a reputation for fierceness equal to that of bears or lions. There are very few contemporary accounts of aurochs, and none of them encouraged getting close to the beast.

The once-well-known description of the aurochs is in Julius Caesar's "Gallic Wars," where he mentions several unusual animals found only in the primordial forests of northern Europe and Britain. The aurochs was just such a curiosity; the animal was long since extinct anywhere south or east of modern Germany. It is also the only strange animal Caesar wrote about that actually existed, for Caesar was as gullible as the average tourist in the American West who believes in Jackalopes. This is Caesar's account of the aurochs:

"In size these are somewhat smaller than elephants; in appearance, color, and shape they are as bulls. Great is their strength and great their speed, and they spare neither man nor beast once sighted. These the Germans slay zealously, by taking them in pits; by such work the young men harden themselves and by this kind of hunting train themselves, and those who have slain most of them bring the horns with them to a public place for a testimony thereof, and win great renown. But even if they are caught very young, the animals cannot be tamed or accustomed to human beings. In bulk, shape, and appearance their horns are very different from the horns of our own oxen. The natives collect them zealously and encase the edges with silver, and then at their grandest banquets use them as drinking cups."

Temperament aside (and exaggerating the ferocity of wild animals is a universal and continual human habit), the sheer size of the aboriginal aurochs militated against domestication. There are no examples of large, wild animals successfully domesticated--not even the "tame" Indian elephants used for logging in Asia. Those elephants were captured wild and young (being unwilling or unable to breed in captivity), and training them is one of the most dangerous of occupations. Circus elephants and such obviously dangerous animals as circus lions and tigers are not domesticated, but they have been behaviorally modified one by one. The offspring of the "tamest" tiger (or elephant), left to its own devices, will be as deadly as a perfectly wild animal. Dangerous performing animals require a regular and continual regimen of training and reinforcement.

(continued on next page)

If you’d like to read other book excerpts delivered each day in your email, visit www.DearReader.com.