News from the Auerrindprojekt

After the depressing news of Johnny's death in August, there are some good news of the Auerrind Project again.
Domka, one of the three Hungarian Steppe cows of the project, is highly pregnant from Johnny the young Sayaguesa bull. This calf will be the first one of this combination in breeding back (and perhaps world wide) and I am curious on its looks. In sum, it will probably resemble some Taurus and Tauros cows a lot, but it will be interesting to see the amount of dilution in its coat, sexual dichromatism, horn orientation and so on. Of course one individual alone is not representative for the mean average of a certain breed combination.
Pregnant Domka
Currently, the Steppe cows are also grazing with a Cachena x Steppe cross calf. Its father is of Felix Hohmeyer's black Cachena variant and it is not going to be used for the Auerrindprojekt. 
Cachena x Hungarian Steppe
Another interesting photo was recently presented on auerrind.wordpress.com. It shows the breeding bull of Lorsch, Thando, a young Watussi bull. Thando is going to cover the young Sayaguesa and Grey cattle cows and the new photo reveals his impressive horn volume. I am especially looking forward to see the combination of Sayaguesa and Watussi; I think that a 25% Watussi and 75% Sayaguesa or a good "true F2" has the potential to look very impressive already. The winter coat would probably be sufficient, but might need a boost by Grey cattle genes subsequent generations. 
Thando, the young Watussi bull at Lorsch


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What can "breeding-back" achieve?

Image
T he previous three posts ( here , here , here , here  and here ) have explored the borders of “breeding-back”. I give a quick summary. The real differences between aurochs and cattle do not only concern size, coat colour and horns but actually the whole organism: its developmental biology, its endocrinology, its neurology, its behaviour, its morphology, its genome. And all those factors are interconnected and interact in a complicated way. It was probably selection on tameness alone that dramatically changed the organism and the typical traits of a domestic animal (“domestication syndrome”) was more of a by-product. Additionally to that, some new morphologic mutations and artificial selection on certain traits produced the typical domestic phenotype that we see in cattle. The involved number of loci are probably hundreds or more likely thousands. It is very likely that cattle are uniform for these key genes that are responsible for the typical domestic traits that are universal am...
Read more

New Auerrind herd arranged

Image
T he Auerrind project has gained a new area for breeding and natural grazing, the reserve Hammer Auen in Groß-Rohrheim, Germany. Two heifers, namely Ambra the Watussi x Maremmana and the Sayaguesa x Grey cattle, have been moved to the area recently and another two individuals are about to follow. Here are some recent photos:  Grey x Sayaguesa right and Watussi x Maremmana left (©Copyright www.auerrind.wordpress.com) Watussi x Maremmana heifer in close-up (© www.auerrind.wordpress.com) The Watussi crossbreeds are among the most interesting to me of the Auerrind project so far. I like the somehow tropical appearance of the fur of Ambra (short, shiny and contrast-rich colour). She seems to have a Watussi-like ribcage but the zebuine hump is only very weakly developed to almost invisible and the horns are probably going to be mighty. The colour is perfect (the distribution of the black pigment is slightly zebuine*, but that is nit-picking; it is very interesting to see that this allele...
Read more

New photo of some Tauros bulls

Image
G eer vanne Smeed published a new photo of four Tauros bulls at Kempen~Broek on columbusmagazine.nl .  Tauros bulls in Kempen~Broek © Geer vanne Smeed Anyone can guess what kind of breeds or crossbreeds these bulls are and it is probably impossible to find out with the information given in the web, but I speculate that the lying bull at the right might be a pure Maronesa, the bull left to it a Maronesa crossbreed, the bull right in the back a Maremmana crossbreed and no idea on the last one.  EDIT: Geer vanne Smeed told me that according to his opinion the crossbred bulls might be Limia x Maremmana, Maremmana x Maronesa and Maronesa x Limia as those were the breeds present in the herd during the last years  As to the looks of the bulls, the colour is flawless in all individuals. The body shape of the bulls in the foreground cannot be determined as they are lying on the ground, but all of them seem to have a hump and are not that bulky. They might not be quite as large and...
Read more