#wild cattle

[mammalianmammals]

Asian Wild Water Buffalo (Bubalus arnee), family Bovidae, Aziranga National Park, Assam, India

ENDANGERED.

photograph by Goutam Mitra

[randomanimaloftheday]

Day 274#: Gaur

Today's animal of the day is the Gaur (Bos gaurus)!

Photo credit: Håvard Rosenlund

Also known as the Indian bison (despite not actually being a type of bison), the gaur is a species of bovine that can be found throughout the Indian subcontinent and in a handful of other places in Southeast Asia. They are the largest living member of the bovid family, with adult males being able to reach sizes of 7.2 ft tall at the shoulder, 10 ft 10 in long, and weighing over 3,300 pounds! For context, male American plains bison (which I covered on day 20#) only weigh around 2,000 pounds, and the average adult Holstein (which is the classic breed of black and white dairy cow) weighs somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 pounds.

Photo credit: Sohail Madan

I mean, just look at this gaur compared to a juvenile Asian elephant! I know the elephant is still growing but HOLY COW!

Photo credit: Animalkingdomvideos

Gaurs have a distinctive ridge on their shoulders, and like the large humps of bison, these ridges provide a sort of anchor point for the powerful muscles in their forequarters to attach to. This not only helps them support the weight of their own heads and horns, but also allows them to do things like almost flipping over entire cars! There's actually a relatively viral video of a gaur doing just that, which is incredibly terrifying in my opinion. However, gaur aren't usually all that aggressive, and bulls don't even seem to fight much amongst themselves during the breeding season. At least, there hasn't been any serious dominance battles observed. They'll still spar a little bit, and will sometimes randomly charge people during the breeding season.

Photo credit: WildeLense_India on Twitter

These bovids used to be widespread across the southern portion of mainland Asia, but due to human activities, their range has shrunk drastically and become very fragmentary. They've even gone regionally extinct in many places where they used to be common, such as Sri Lanka and parts of the Malaysian Peninsula. Today, they are mostly found in hilly evergreen or moist deciduous forests with lots of plants, such as bamboo, grass, shrubs, etc, for them to graze on. Interestingly, human activities not only affect where gaur live, but also their behavior. Historically, gaur have been most active during the day, and this is still the case in the more remote parts of their range. However, in places that have been disturbed by humans, the gaur are becoming more active at night in order to avoid interactions with humans. This seems to be a common trend amongst larger animals, and the same thing has been documented with wolves in North America.

Photo credit: Suraj Bhagat

Gaur tend to live in small herds of around 11 individuals, mostly consisting of females, their calves, and typically just one bull, though more might join the herd from April to May for the breeding season. These herds are usually led by the oldest female, called the matriarch. Occasionally, several herds will join together and create a mega-herd with up to 50 members! But these usually disperse around the arrival of the rainy season. Most males live solitary lives for the majority of the year, but as I said, they will often join up with females in order to breed. They will attract the attention of a herd by making a loud mating call, which can be heard from over a mile away. In addition to this call, gaur will also make a sort of whistling snort to warn other gaur of nearby predators. They also moo like domestic cows do, though it sounds a lot lower.

Photo credit: Roelof van der Breggen

Because of their large size, adult gaur have few natural predators. Occasionally, leopards, dholes, and even mugger crocodiles will take down a calf or a sick/injured adult, but for the most part, these large bovids only have one natural predator: tigers. Ok, saltwater crocodiles have also been known to ambush adult gaur and drag them into the water, but tigers are still the only terrestrial predator known to be capable of taking down healthy adults. One tiger was even reported taking down an adult bull weighing over 2,200 pounds! But the gaur aren't totally defenseless. When confronted by a tiger, the herd will form a circle around the youngest and weakest members of their group and will stomp and wave their horned heads around in a threat display. Since tigers usually hunt using the element of surprise, this usually works in keeping them at bay. There was even one instance in Malaysia where a herd of gaur successfully chased away a tiger from a calf it had already killed, and prevented it from eating the carcass.

Photo credit: Darrell Parsons

Gaur are sadly considered to be a Vulnerable species, mostly due to habitat loss but also because of poaching. In places like Vietnam and Thailand, they are especially sought out by poachers for both their meat and as trophies. Human-gaur conflicts are also becoming more and more common, especially in highly populated areas. Not only are gaur places with lots of humans becoming more active at night, but they also seem to be getting more aggressive than normal. Gaur are normally skittish and usually flee when they encounter a human in the wild. However, in some places where there are more people, the gaur are becoming more and more aggressive towards humans and are much more likely to charge. They've even been documented breaking into pastures and getting into fights with and killing domestic cows!

[dwollsadventures]

Monster Manual - Cattle, Wild

There are a few species of wild bovines, mostly concentrated in sup-tropical forests and plains. Adventurers rarely need to worry about them; they are wary around humans and show much more fear than normal cattle, having to worry about predators in the wild. It’s those that are used to human contact that need to be feared. Because they have been domesticated several times over, it’s difficult to determine which type of bovid can be classified as wild cattle. The zebu and gayal are sometimes found in feral herds, though descend from man-raised species. Gaur and banteng still retain wild populations. The kouprey, a fanciful species which sometimes displays frayed horn tips, is also a wild type. I've met forest folk who've said they’ve seen kouprey, though never seen any myself.

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That's right, ol Gygax took the space in his book for three separate entries for Bulls, Buffalo, and Wild Cattle. I'm done drawing bovids for now...

[pojaytos-art-corner]

HEEEYYYYY! been a while since i posted, but im getting ready for an art market that im going to be selling some things at next month which feels so crazy! this is the first time my art is going to be for public sale so im kinda anxious and also VERY pressed to get a lot of original works done in the next month! So i have a wild cow that i saw on a trip a few years back this time around!

[snototter]

An Indian gaur (Bos gaurus) in Nilgiris, Southern India

by praveen pandian

[dartxo]

"Chillin"

2021

Wild Water Buffalo (Bubalus arnee)

[tim-dennis]

Chillingham Wild Bull

[drferox]

Aurochs

@whalefromwales said: I know that you've said that you're not willing to work with anything resembling an aurochs, but what about them from far away? Do you think it's important that they be reintroduced to certain areas like so many current breeding programs claim, or is there another, less dangerous animal that would do the same job?

Aurochs, the extinct ancestors of modern cattle, are part of a really interesting debate about re-wilding, conservation and genetic technology which centers around whether we have a duty to preserve our natural environment for its own sake, or whether we should also strive to restore it to what it once was.

Aurochs once roamed most of the temperate zone across Europe and Asia, and went extinct about 400 years ago, largely due to decreasing natural habitat, hunting, and probably diseases in domestic cattle, which were domesticated from Aurochs many thousands of years ago.

They were big, dark, horned cattle, and important enough to us as humans to feature prominently in paleolithic art and in our legends, important enough to domesticate some as the cattle we have today, and arguably important enough for many groups in recent history to attempt to recreate.

One argument is that we have some sort of moral duty to preserve the natural environment against our own detrimental influences (where we have harmed it just stop or undo it), and that includes restoring the species which used to live there. There is obviously a limit to that, we can’t go restoring Archaeopteryx and releasing them into the wild, but 400 years is relatively short on a geological time scale. Not as short as the reintroduction of wolves to certain areas of north America, but still certainly shorter than the woolly mammoth. 

Another argument is that we had no idea what we were doing, still have no idea what we’re doing, and may yet come to understand new and interesting ways in which we have no idea what we’re doing when it comes to nature, so we should take steps to preserve chunks of land in its natural state so that we can research it, or at least maintain a pool of genetics we can draw from in the future.

And another possibility is that if we can pull this stunt with re-creating and re-introducing Aurochs, what else can we pull it with? And how will that technology influence our possible future of space colonization and planet seeding?

Initially early projects focused on breeding modern cattle to look like Aurochs. Heck cattle are one well known such project, but there are several, and you can get cattle that look a little like this:

Which look like an Auroch, but it’s not an Auroch. It still has a number of skeletal differences, and it’s still a domestic ox, which will have distinct behavioral differences to a wild ox, including reduced fear of humans. These projects are essentially aiming to create pretty, aesthetically pleasing but feral cattle and I have no reason to see why I would expect them to behave as wild Auroch would have behaved.

Since these projects began, we’ve come a long way with gene sequencing. We can even sequence DNA from bones of Aurochs that died hundreds of years ago, and compare this to modern cattle. This is fascinating, because many modern commercial cattle breeds (holstein fresians are a prime example) have the genetic diversity of an endangered species owing to our extremely strong selection pressures for production traits leading to homozygosity, and the advent of AI which lets single bulls cover a large percentage of the national, and international, herd. Many of our most popular commercial cattle breeds have large numbers, but have less genetic diversity than pedigree dogs.

But the heritage breeds, things like the Highland Cow, which are not bred large scale for meat or mild production but largely continued by hobby farmers that just like them, or people actively trying to preserve local heritage or different breeds, do have more diversity, even if they have smaller numbers, and some of them are much, much closer to the Auroch DNA we have than others.

Seriously, if I ever end up with a small amount of farm land, I want to get heritage breeds. These populations are worth preserving for reasons we might not even know yet until a long time into the future.

Now, a genotype (the genes an animal has) is not the same as its phenotype (what it looks like). So breeding an animal to look like an Auroch does not make it an Auroch.

But we could have the potential the gene sequences from Aurochs that we have, which include both bulls and cows, and put them into domestic bovine embryos. We have (admittedly rough) cloning technology, and bovine reproductive material is not hard to come by. We could potentially clone extinct Aurochs into herds of domestic cattle that are as close as we otherwise could get, and hybridize the two. That is an interesting possibility to try to recreate the wild animal.

But this absolutely hinges on also preserving the natural habitat the Aurochs require, and enough of it, to permit the population to continue naturally with minimal human intervention, and that may be the bigger challenge when all is said and done.

At least the Aurochs is charismatic, and may be a point of local pride, and the existence of which may encourage conservation of the habitat they require.

And hybridizing with modern domestic cattle will hopefully provide some disease resistance and a good baseline of diversity while more Auroch genes are trickled in over time.

If such a project were to work, there would be great potential for reintroducing other extinct mammal species, such as the Thylacine and Woolly Mammoth.

Large deer may well be able to fill the same niche as the Auroch, but they certainly wouldn’t inspire the human imagination in the same way.