Heck cattle

A Heck bull of the advanced breed from Steinberg/Wörth, Germany.

A Heck bull demonstrating the divergent coat colours within the Heck cattle gene pool, from Oostvaardersplassen.

Heck Cattle are a hardy breed of domestic cattle. They are the result of an attempt to breed back the aurochs, which became extinct in 1627, from modern aurochs-derived cattle. Controversy as to success of the program and techniques used specifically revolve around genetics, behavior, biology. It must be kept in mind that there are considerable differences between the domestic cattle breed of the Heck brothers and the aurochs and that there are other cattle breeds which resemble their wild ancestor at least as much as heck cattle or more.

Development

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 ancestral form, the aurochs, Bos primigenius primigenius. Heinz Heck working at the Hellabrunn Zoological Gardens in Munich began creating the Heck breed in 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 fitted into the Nazi propaganda drive to create an idyllic history of the Aryan nation.

Heinz Heck, in Munich, crossed Hungarian Grey Cattle, Scottish Highland, Murnau-Werdenfels, Angeln, German Friesian, Podolic cattle and Corsican breeds. In Berlin, his brother, Lutz Heck crossed Spanish and French fighting cattle with other breeds. The resulting animals’ configurations were vaguely similar. The Berlin breed was lost in the aftermath of World War II so modern Heck cattle are descended from the Hellabrunn breed (Munich). At the end of the 20th century, other so-called primitive breeds like Sayaguesa cattle or Chianina were crossbred with single Heck cattle herds to come closer to the aim of creating a cattle breed that resembles the extinct aurochs in external appearance. This cross-breed is called Taurus cattle, which is not to be confused with TaurOs Project (see below).

Characteristics

Heck cattle cow at Mannheim, Germany

A typical Heck bull should be on average 1.4 m (4'5") high and a cow 1.3 m (4'3"), with weight up to 600 kg (1,300 lb). Heck cattle are twenty to thirty centimeters shorter than the aurochs they were bred to resemble. However, there are single cross-breeding efforts to increase the size and weight of the some heck cattle herds, particularly in Germany.

The Heck bulls are not much larger than the bull of most breeds of domestic cattle, while wild aurochs bulls are believed to have often exceeded 1000 kilograms (2,200 lb), half the size of a rhinoceros. So the African Watusi cattle were then brought into the herd. The result was a somewhat larger animal, but it also caused infertility among the cows, a sign of the genetic divergence that had occurred between these populations of Bos over the millennia. Heck cattle were first bred outside of a zoo in 1980. There were 88 registered at that time. Continued crossbreeding with these animals resolved the infertility in the cows.

Size is not the only aspect in which heck cattle differs from its wild ancestor. Heck cattle is bulky, like many other domestic breeds; while the aurochs, as a wild bovine, was athletically built. The legs of heck cattle are shorter and the trunk much longer than in the aurochs, in which shoulder height and trunk length nearly equalled each other. Heck cattle have a comparably small and short head, while aurochsen had an elongate large head sitting on a muscular neck. Aurochsen had a well-developed shoulder musculature, carried by long spines, which is absent in heck cattle. All in all, proportions and body shape of heck cattle are not particularly similar to the aurochs and do not differ significantly from many other domestic breeds.

The horns of the aurochs were characteristic for the species, at the base they were swung outwards-upwards, then forwards-inwards and inwards-upwards at the tips. Aurochs horns were overall large and thick, reaching 80 centimetres in length and 10 centimetres in diameter. However, the horns of heck cattle differ in many respects. Usually, they curve too much upwards or outwards, or do not reach the length or diameter of the aurochs. Often the horns of heck cattle strongly resemble the breeds it was created from, for example, Hungarian gray cattle.

Only in coat colour heck cattle may fit the aurochs, in having bulls with a black overall coat colour with a light eel stripe and sometimes having cows which have a brown colour. However, some heck bulls may have a light saddle on the back, which was not present in the aurochs and the sexual dimorphism is often strongly reduced. Furthermore, blond straight front hairs are common in heck cattle. It is not clear whether those hairs were of light colour in the aurochs since historical report do not mention a certain colour for that area; Cis van Vuure calls a blond colour of the front hairs a discolouration which appeared after domestication. Furthermore, in the aurochs those hairs likely were curly instead of straight.

Furthermore, heck cattle demonstrates a high amount of heterogeneity, higher than in wild animals or most other domestic breeds. Besides the features that are wanted because they bear resemblance to the aurochs, strongly divergent features may pop out. Such as a gray or beige coat colour, or a black-whitely spotted colour pattern.

All in all, heck cattle differs in many respects from the aurochs and there are breeds, like Spanish fighting bulls, Sayaguesa Cattle, Pajuna Cattle, Maremmana primitivo, Maronesa and others, which bear in some aspects a greater resemblance to the wild animal, according to some scientists (see van Vuure, 2005). Nevertheless they are capable of coping in the wild with cold temperatures or nutrient-poor food, thus they are commonly used for landscape conservation. On the other hand, there are other robust cattle breeds which at least can cope as well as heck cattle in nature.

Distribution

There are about 2000 Heck cattle in Europe and few elsewhere.

In Oostvaardersplassen in Flevoland near Lelystad (Netherlands), there are about 600 Heck cattle freely roaming without human interference. Other cattle are at the Falkenthaler Rieselfelder near Berlin. There are also Heck Cattle at the Nesseaue nature reserve near Jena, Thuringia and at the Grubenfelder Leonie nature reseve in Auerbach, Bavaria. There were about 100 registered in France in 2000. In 2009 nine cows and four bulls were imported to south west England from Belgium. Derek Gow, a British conservationist who operates a rare breeds farm on the Devonshire-Cornwall border, bought a herd of 13 Heck cattle in 2009.

Controversy

Criticism of the methodology and result of the Heck brother's programs dates back to at least the 1950s. Cis van Vuure describes the work of W. Herre in 1953 and O. Koehler in 1952 who found: "A lack of basic knowledge about the extinct aurochs, broad selection criteria in the breeding-back experiment and the rich imagination and complacency of the two brothers led to their excessive simplification of the breeding-back procedure. Criticism also focused on the carelessness, the ease and the speed with which they had carried out their experiments as well as the genetic basis"

Heck cattle are propagated in some places to fulfill the role of extinct megafauna in the ecosystem. However, there is uncertainty as to what ecological niche the aurochs itself filled. Dr Frans Vera claims that the aurochs lived in open parkland and supports their inclusion in nature reserve management. Cis van Vuure, however, in his book, Retracing the Aurochs: History, Morphology and Ecology of an Extinct Wild Ox suggests that the aurochs dwelled in dense forests and marshes while the Wisent dwelled in the open landscape. Wisent supporters claim that Heck cattle landscape management is a public relations ploy in order to illegitimately garner support for Heck cattle at the expense of a genuine native species, the wisent.

Because heck cattle bears less resemblance to the aurochs than some other modern cattle breeds do, a new back-breeding project, TaurOs Project, has formed in The Netherlands . Using the reconstructed mitochondrial genome of the aurochs, the suitability of primitive breeds - such as Sayaguesa Cattle, Pajuna or Maremmana primitivo - has been tested, in order to locate the ancient DNA in primitive cattle and unite it in one breed.

Breed organizations

• SIERDA – Syndicat International pour l’Elevage, la Reconnaissance et le Développement de l’Aurochs-reconstitué (English: International Union for the Breeding, Reintroduction and Development of the Reconstructed Aurochs)

See also

• Heck horse
• Sayaguesa Cattle
• Aurochs

References

• International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. 2003. Opinion 2027 (Case 3010). Usage of 17 specific names based on wild species which are pre-dated by or contemporary with those based on domestic animals (Lepidoptera, Osteichthyes, Mammalia): conserved. Bull.Zool.Nomencl., 60:81-84.
• Vuure, C. van. 2005. Retracing the Aurochs: History, Morphology and Ecology of an Extinct Wild Ox. Pensoft Publishers. Sofia-Moscow.
• Vuure, C. van. 2002. History, Morphology and Ecology of the Aurochs (Bos primigenius)

External links

• EAAP breed description
• Modern German Heck cattle (in German)
• 'Nazi' cattle being bred in UK BBC News (video) on introduction of Heck cattle to Devon, UK, 2009-04-26