Tauros cattle arrived in CZ Republic

Today I was addressed to an article by derstandard.at by Margret Bunzel-Drüke from the ABU. It reports that a small starter herd of Tauros cattle have arrived in the CZ Republic. See here or here, for example. You see some photos of the herd on each of these links.  

It has been prepared to set up a Tauros site in this country since at least 2010 if I remember correctly, now a herd of one bull and five cows accompanied by 15 Exmoor ponies have been released in the ex-military base Milovice on 40 hectares. 

The background of these six animals is nebulous to me as usual. They are all rather young, so they might be second-generation crosses (at least some of them). I think that this cow, because of the shape and size of its horns, is likely to be half Highland x Maremmana, I have no idea what the father might be. The other long horned cow on the larger photo, might be Maremmana x Sayaguesa based on its looks, or of the same combination as the other one (because of the longer hair on its belly). The bull next to it looks as if it is the son of their Pajuna bull, it might also have a Highlander and/or Maremmana in its ancestry because of the large horns. Regarding the other animals, I have no clue. They could have anything from Sayaguesa, Pajuna, Tudanca, Limia and also Maronesa (in the case of the low-horned cow on this photo) in their ancestry. 

All in all, based on what I have seen so far, the sexual dimorphism in the Tauros herds is weak so far. That is because the founding breeds are variable in this respect. In this variability, the Tauros animals tend to be on the "dark end" of the colour spectrum, as far as I can tell. It is not possible to tell what the horns will be like yet, because there is so much variability to be expected. I hope that the influence of Highland and Maremmana is enough to breed spectacular horn sizes. It is nice to see that many of the early cross products are slender and well-proportioned right from the beginning, what is not surprising since most of the founding breeds are of that type. 

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