Heck cattle in the UK

Well, they do say aurochs genes are in some of the old cattle breeds (and by extension, more mordern ones), but like Heck horses and reconstructed quagga, I think these "aurochs" are only skin deep. I still wouldn't mind seeing one though :)
 
Lutz Heck was also involved with the tarpans and European bisons. Ok, he was a nazi but he was also a biologist and director of the zoo of Berlin. And yes he stole many animals from other zoos (Polish mainly), and organized a kind of canned hunting in Warsaw Zoo. But to call the Heck-cattle 'Nazi-cattle' is wrong. The animals are nothing to blame!

We have some herds here in The Netherlands, for example in the 'Oostvaardersplassen':

1r7x4n.jpg
 
Have you ever seen the wild cattle at Chillingham castle? Although they are white, they may be the closest living relatives of the old aurochs - and they probably behave the same way too. Centuries of inbreeding have made them smaller than Heck's reconstructions, but they are just as impressive in their own way.

Alan
 
gentle lemur said:
Have you ever seen the wild cattle at Chillingham castle ?
Click to expand...

I went once, many years ago. The guide was very careful we didn't get downwind(?) of a cow with a small calf which, if I remember rightly,he told us was blind. He was worried she would charge us...

I would like to revisit but not had another opportunity.
 
actually the cattle from Chillingham is closer to the aurochs then the heck cattle, this cattle is just the product of the imagination of the Heck brothers and although similar in appearance there are some major differences (they aren't big enough and their horn shape is different)
Except the chillingham cattle also Iberian fighting cattle is in this sence closer to the aurochs then the milkshake cows in Devon and Oostvaarderplassen.
Plus their are some things still unresolved about aurochs, basicly we don't know their habitat if it was forest or more open area's and we have no clue about their social behaviour. So the basicly Heck's cattle isnt anymore then a shot in the dark with as original purpose none other then
pleasing the ego's of the nazi leaders. And i should also mention that when creating this project plus the Heck's horse they destroyed a similar Polish project which was ahead of them.

And we should stop calling them recreated aurochs they are just domesticated cows we bred to help to maintain our natural reserves. Nothing less nothing more but in the end just bos taurus.
 
DDcorvus said:
Plus their are some things still unresolved about aurochs, basicly we don't know their habitat if it was forest or more open area's and we have no clue about their social behaviour.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if that's strictly true. Aurochs died out in 1627 (in a forest in Poland), and there are woodcuts and an account (which does sound a teensy bit exaggerateded!) by Julius Ceasar. There are probably more eyewitness accounts too as the Polish royals had gamekeepers survey and keep an eye on the last individuals. There might well be a mention somewhere of how and where they lived :)
 
it was always asumed that they lived in forests because of these accounts but lately biologists take this into doubt and there are
researches that asume that the forest was taken by the wisent and
not by the aurochs, but as stated before we dont know for sure.
And although the last places were aurochs lived were forests dont forget they were the huntinggrounds of nobles and kept there for that purpose.

But for people interested in this subject i can recommend the following book:


C Van Vuure: Retracing the Aurochs: History, Morphology and Ecology of an Extinct Wild Ox


based on a study made at the university of Wageningen.
 
I'll see if I can hunt that book down, as aurochs are pretty damn fascinating :D

As for forests, I can see your point. However, one thing to remember (as the uni doubtlessly did) is that much of Europe was covered in forest; in Britain, at least, it's believed that you could once walk from the south coast to the most northerly point in Scotland without leaving the forest! I guess we'll never know for certain though :)
 
Heck cattle are not closer relative of aurochs than any other cattle. Nor are they very similar to aurochs. However, they do a job Nazi breeders didn't think of - keeping open meadows from overgrowing to protect rare species associated with low-intensive agriculture.

So they are OK, unless somebody calls them 'aurochs' or 'Heck aurochs' or similar. Because this is a direct reference to discredited Nazi-era experiments. Apparently, in 1930's a group of zoologists got mad enough to call aurochs 'Aryan animal' and breed cows under this agenda. Worse, they, among others, destroyed attempts to breed tarpan-like horses in occupied Poland.

Its for short, I'm not sure if heck cattle for their purpose (grazing meadows) are any better than any other cows - eg. Scottish Highlands which also thrive fine without human supervision.
 
You my also be interested in details:

Short on aurochs-cows ancestry:
Fossil DNA tell us that aurochs were very variable species. All cattle in Europe are descendants of Near Eastern cattle brought by Neolithic farmers. Contribution of European aurochs genes exists, but is almost nill and not present in any one race (hecks or another) more than other.

Short on aurochs-heck apperence:
Mr van Vuure himself tells that Spanish fighting cattle is cattle breed most closely similar to aurochs visually. Hecks have only big horns and usually color dimorphism (bulls black with white back-stripe, cows brown, calves rufous-brown). Spanish cattle have more auroch characteristics: horns are pointing forwards, not up, and come close togerher (not U-shaped), long legs, long muzzle, small ears. The extinct aurochs had also even bigger horns, and giant size (ca. 190cm in males) matched by few modern giant cattle breeds. So, don't imagine yourself aurochs like these heck cows from Netherlands on the pic above, with widely spreading horns!
 
This kind of bull is bred for the bullfighting :mad: in Spain are relatively close to auroch, see the pic:




Well! truly it's seems a "mix" between auroch and bison I think...
 
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The British media and their morbid fascination with the Nazis...:rolleyes:

One can argument that instead of breeding Heck cattle, one should rather support the breeding of endangered ancient cow breeds-or reintroduction programmes for the wisent. But I assume the yellow press would also remark about the German involvement in preserving the latter...

Don't confuse the different Heck's:

Heinz and Lutz Heck were the two brothers who started and coordinated the "back breeding" programmes in Berlin and Munich-and the sons of Ludwig Heck (director of Berlin Zoo before and during WWII), who was on very friendly levels with Goering.
Don't know how deep the brothers were really into the NSDAP stuff; I'd guess that they were probably mere wrappers, for the sake of their careers. Daddy's good relationship with Goering might have opened a few doors, and being nice and devout to powerful politians usually pays off... Goering surely supported the project for a while-yet that doesn't turn the poor Heck cattle and horses into wicked "Nazi Experiments".

It's kinda funny that it was actually Heinz Heck who wanted to run down Bernhard Grzimek in front of the Allies after the war for being a NSDAP member; and I thought there's something like honour among thieves...
 
Interesting stuff!

It was only when I was halfway through the thread that the English word "aurochs" (which I had never heard before) suddenly made sense to me and I realised that it ust be the equivalent to the word "uroxe" in Swedish.

"Re-invented aurochs" has been exhibited in a Swedish Zoo, Skånes Djurpark, since many decades ago. At the zoo´s web page one can read the following (my attempt at English translation):

"The aurochs was the predecessor to our domesticated cattle of today and the last one died in Poland in 1627. From Sweden it disappeared in the 11th century and the reasons were extensive hunting and a decline in the climate, among others. Today´s reinvented aurochs is the result from a breeding programme in Munich in the 1920s. Domestic cattle races from all over Europe were inter-bred in order to create an animal that looked like the aurochs. We know what the aurauchs looked like, thanks to bone findings and stone age cave paintings. The original aurochs was to meters lomg and weighed up to a to a 1000 kilogrammes."

Original Swedish text:
Djuren i Skånes Djurpark

I found a couple of nice photos of these animals in Skånes Djurpark:

Uroxe
Uroxe

Certainly very impressive and handsome animals, though perhaps not so accurately "re-invented" after all, given the information about horn size etc in Jurek 7´s posts.
 
Dan you're uroxe or oeros as we call them are some nice examples of Heckcattle :).



ps: the spanish fightingcattle is asumed to be descendents of Iberian aurochs and seem to have a different heritage as most cattle breeds.
 
Hey, DDcorvus, on a completley off-topic track - it is really interesting how our old European languages are connected to each other!

I swear that I sometimes can read a Dutch newspaper article and basically understand the general meaning of it, without ever having studied your your "weird and wonderful" language! By "weird and wonderful", I am in particular thinking of some of your pronounciation of all "non-voul" sounds.... Not sure now if "non-voul" makes sense in English, but I just couldn´t help writing this...

Never mind... you get the picture...

Ah... off-topic, anyway.
 
still off topic some years ago i was with a Swedish friend who made a remark in Swedish and realised exactly what he was saying in Swedish. :) but most of the time I must admit it's that i have the feeling i can almost understand what they are saying :) (the best description i heard till now is that some of the scandinavian languages, danish even more then swedish, is as i hear dutch but i m too drunk to understand, i hope no offence is taken and guess it will be similar for you hearing dutch :) ). So yes it s very interesting to realise how close our languages are related :).
 
I know exctly what you mean - it´s great fun isn´t it?

Though much easier with written languge than with spoken, right?

I live in the southern part of Sweden and supposedly us southern Swedes and the Danes in the east should have no problems talking to each other on a daily basis, but in fact we do.

Sad but true.

Again: sorry for kidnapping this thread...
 
If it were aurochsen i wouldnt care but this are nothing more then domestic cows and have nothing to do with aurochsen. It s a picture of how two german zoo directors (the heckbrothers) thought how aurochsen looked liked and with current knowledge we know they were very wrong.

so in my eye people should use the publicity stunt name of aurochs and just call them what they are Heck cattle. Because aurochsen are extinct
and we wont get them back.
 
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