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What may have happened to some aurochs, and what has happened in modern time within the genus "Bos," is the sudden appearance of miniature calves as small as one-third the size of the parents. These tiny cattle come in two distinctly different forms. In one case, there are dwarfed calves, usually unhealthy, malformed, and prone to early deaths. This kind of misshapen dwarfism is controlled by a recessive gene. A second type of dwarfism produces more symmetrical midget calves. The best-documented case was of a Charolais bull (no name but numbered 717705) at the United States Meat Research Center in Florida. He produced numerous miniature, well-formed calves, regardless of the kind of cow he was bred to. The only explanation was that No. 717705 had a defective (or dissimilar) gene among the many genes that control the size of animals. And it was a dominant gene. Every cow he bred successfully turned out a midget. If No. 717705 had not been destroyed, he would have continued to sire calves eerily reminiscent of the first cows compared with aurochs--half or less the size of the existing breeding standard. More important, his offspring, particularly if bred incestuously, would have continued the miniature line for ages and ages.

In Canada a dominion research station actually collected miniature cattle, Herefords for the most part, and started a small herd of very small cows in the early 1950s. When they realized there was no point in making pint-size rib roasts, they terminated the experiment. To this day, a visitor to a big animal exposition may encounter a pen of midget Aberdeen-Angus, little one-third- to one-half-size replicas. The one thing the visitor will never find out is their ancestry. As with most freak show attractions, mysterious origins are part of the act. They would certainly have come from a "commercial" herd, not from a registered herd, because the sources of dwarfism are too well known, and the registry system too exact, to allow a pen full of miniatures to develop by accident in a registered herd. The last Angus bull known to carry a gene for dwarfism was calved in 1977, and none of his offspring, male or female, can be found in a registered herd today.

Given this plasticity by mutation in the genus "Bos," it is possible that a Neolithic person, wandering through the forests and glades of his homeland, might have happened upon a very small aurochs calf and brought it back to camp. This would be an excellent start on the creation of "Bos taurus," but not the entire answer. There are any number of animals no larger than a domestic cow--bison, Cape buffalo, zebras, wildebeest--that have never been brought under any semblance of control. What was also needed, and perhaps this began while the aurochs was still enormous, was to create a docile beast.

Just as the genus "Bos" has shown extreme variability in size, including spontaneous dwarfing, it has also produced individual animals with temperaments quite different from the parent stock. For an inexplicable sudden change from violent behavior to extraordinary sociability, the best-known example was the famous Spanish fighting bull Civilon, who lived in Spain just before the Spanish Civil War. He behaved so tamely that small children flocked to the fighting bull ranch to approach this marvel of nature and offer him handfuls of succulent grass and edible bouquets of wildflowers. His sobriquet translates approximately as "Big Civilian," for he lacked the "military" ferocity of his herd-mates. Famous across Spain, where his photograph with attendant children was a staple "human interest" newspaper story, Civilon was finally consigned to the bull ring in Barcelona, as a rather morbid spectacle. The city was threatened with attack by Franco's fascist forces, and siege conditions are bad for the human psyche. A promoter thought the spectacle of a pacifist bull would intrigue the public and distract people from their problems.

A full house came to see if the mild-mannered beast would fight. Fight he did, when the mounted picadors lanced him between his shoulders to get him to drop his head so that, when the moment came, the "torero" could drive the sword home, leaning over the bull's horns. He was as brave as bulls can be, repeatedly charging the picadors, ignoring the pain, toppling horses one after another, chasing the picadors behind the barricades. He was granted, as rarely happens, a reprieve from facing the matador and the sword. Civilon had earned an indulgence, "un indulto," for his bravery. His keeper from the ranch walked out onto the sunlit arena, whistled him over, and walked Civilon out of the ring and into the stables, where he could recover from the "pics" before being shipped back to the ranch and a well-earned retirement. Unfortunately, on the night of July 18, 1936, Franco's Falangist rebels entered Barcelona, and looking for food, ransacked the bull-ring stables and ate Civilon for breakfast. Although the rebels were driven out of the city on July 19, it was too late. The date when they ate the gentle beast is the one generally regarded as the beginning of the full-scale Spanish Civil War.

While an occasional gentle aurochs would have helped the process of domestication (and transformation into a new species), the whole process would have been much more rapid if a small group of aurochs simultaneously became less fierce. This moderation of behavior in large unfriendly wild animals, called for lack of a better phrase self-taming, does occur. It has been studied most extensively with North American wild sheep and suggests that there is a distinct possibility that the aurochs met humans halfway or more in a kind of auto-domestication. Another example has been observed in Africa by a biologist acquaintance of the author with much African experience. He related that in two game parks (large outdoor zoological garden/wildlife refuges) some self-taming behavior has been noted with the dreaded and ostensibly fierce Cape buffalo. He personally observed Cape buffalo that had gotten so amicable in one game park that two wardens could sit facing each other on a bull's back and play gin rummy on the impromptu card table.

(This excerpts ends on page 25 of the hardcover edition.)

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