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To this day, all of the great animals of Africa--from zebras to elephants, wildebeest to elands, dogs and wild cats and dozens more--remain undomesticated. Only a handful of even moderately large animals have been domesticated. The wolf and probably some other wild canines became our dogs, and some dogs are the tamest, most domesticated of all pets. Other large wild animals that have been bred and selected through centuries include the European wild boar, which became our pig; a single species each of wild goat and sheep; the camel (and its American cousin, the llama); and, of course, the cow and the horse, the largest European and Asian domesticates.

The first horses ever tamed, almost certainly in central Asia, did not appear to have to be changed at all; since they ran wild, they were tamable, and once tame, they became a domesticated animal without enough physical change to make them a new species. The domestication simply repeated itself in the New World. North American native peoples, who had never seen a horse before, managed to capture and tame feral Spanish horses that had long since escaped from the conquerors of Mexico and had multiplied and spread into the northern plains, hundreds of miles from the nearest European settlement.

It was no lack of intelligence or culture in Indian country that kept emigrants from seeing dairy herds of tame buffalo on the way west. The fault is in the animals. That is the difference between an animal's ability to be domesticated or to remain perpetually wild. The capacity for tameness has to be bred in the bone. Mankind created the modern cow, goat, sheep, and pig (a sometimes quite dangerous domesticate), but we have never gotten past efficient killing when it comes to managing a bison.

Some of the reasons for this lack of domestication in African and North American fauna, and its consequences, are elegantly summarized in Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." The bottom line is apparently this: A capacity for calmness is the first requirement in a domesticated species. Wolves are both calm and playful except while eating an elk, and even then, they share. Skunks, on the other hand, although slow-moving, are nervous. People do keep skunks in their houses, but they are impossible to litter-box train, and they won't come when you call them. These "pet" skunks (usually with their squirt glands removed) are neither tame nor domesticated; they are commensal--they just happen to live in a house. Some cats and most dogs are symbiotic; either man or beast gains something from the relationship.

Another critical element in domestication is that the animal must have some kind of group culture in the wild; it must naturally form larger groups than pairs or families. In short, they must run in herds or extended family groups that have a confirmed social order. (A lack of any group social order is another reason that cats are so problematically and barely domesticated.) The vast herds of African animals, wildebeest and zebras, for example, are aggregations of individuals that, although they move in groups, avoid contact and have no social structure governing them.

Whether ancient people solved the problem of behavior first or reduced the aurochs to a physically manageable size and then gentled it is, of course, unknowable. Certainly reducing the enormous size of the ancestral animal would be one priority, for its mere bulk and strength would militate against a breeding program. The cow and the horse are at the absolute limit of the size of animals whose breeding has ever been controlled by human beings--outside of a zoological park. So, logically, a first step was to get the animal down to manageable size, and it was a long, long way down.

To get some idea of what an aurochs looked like, how much it weighed, its height and length, paleontologists have to work from an existing, living model. Based on the very lifelike cave paintings of aurochs (and the testimony of Julius Caesar), it is assumed they had the general proportions of our fighting bull, particularly the large head, bulky withers, and long dorsal spiny processes that support the head and horns. The closest living creature in the shape of an aurochs is the Spanish fighting bull. While other breeds have been created for milk or meat or locomotive power, the fighting bull has been built for speed, endurance, and, most particularly, for attitude. Spanish authors of books on cows even create a special subspecies (although without any scientific underpinning) and try to pass the fighting bull off as "Bos primigenius iberica," the Spanish aurochs. The fighting bull, "toro bravo," is clearly a recent development springing from ordinary domestic cattle, a fact reflected in its variable colors. Very few wild animals are different-colored from their brethren. Predatory animals seem to have more flexibility: Bears, wolves, foxes, and panthers all come in two or three colors, from black through brown to almost blond or silver. Although fighting bulls are commonly black, that is a modern affectation. The original bullfights were against more colorful and variable animals.

The fighting bull's horns differ so much from animal to animal that Spanish has more than a dozen names for the various curvatures and lengths of the horns. Such variations do not occur in wild species; there, odd-shaped horns are the idiosyncratic result of a genetic fault, injury, or aging. The occasional Spanish bull that does have horns somewhat like an aurochs's is called "a corniabierto," literally "open horned." Aurochs's horns curved gracefully forward in a large arc, the way a human being's arms would curve around a 55-gallon (140-liter) barrel. The aurochs carried its horns almost parallel to the ground (and its own jawline), more like an African cape buffalo than a cow.

Despite similarities of physique, the aurochs was much larger than the Spanish animal. The largest bull ever to enter a ring was Cocinero; why the bull was nicknamed "cook" has passed from human memory. The term may have been a comment on the tendency of cooks to gain weight. Cocinero fought and died at Malaga on June 3, 1877. According to the rules of bullfighting, he was weighed in the bull ring's shambles after being gutted, skinned, beheaded, and having his hooves cut off. Dead and ready for the butcher shop, Cocinero weighed 414 kilograms, or 912 pounds. Since the dressed weight of a fighting bull averages about 65 percent of its live weight, Cocinero would have weighed 636 kilograms, or 1,402 pounds, alive. Beef cattle can easily weigh that much--that would be at the high end for a feedlot steer going to slaughter--but they are chubby, whereas the "toro" is leaner and meaner. Fighting bulls run in height, measured at the shoulder--but without taking into account the swollen neck and withers of an enraged animal--less than a meter, say, 32 to 34 inches. They give the impression of greater height, but closely inspected photographs of a bullfighter passing the animal next to his body indicates their true height. The bull usually comes up to the "torero's" waist, no higher. The commonest place to be gored is from the knee to the belly button.

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