Heather is our new rep for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and was introduced to the folks of the bloggo brigade by Corinna last week. Here is her first outing as guest blogger...
It seems like not a month goes by without the media reporting that some extinct animal, maybe, could be, cloned at some point in the near future. Generally these stories are just fluff, but very few people know about the attempts in the 1920s and 30s to bring back the Aurochs*, a prehistoric Ox that most domestic cattle are derived from. This being the period between the wars the motivation was not so much conservation, but driven by a desire for something pure and strong, a kind of livestock equivalent of the Eugenics movement which was highly influential at the time, not only in Germany, but also the rest of Europe and America.
The man in charge of this experiment was Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoo from 1932 to 1945. His memoirs 'Animals my Adventure' are an interesting read, in them he recounts his trips to Africa to collect animals, his attitudes to the Africans would make a modern reader uncomfortable, as he had none of the skill of Gerald Durrell in portraying natives as just as human as 'the rest of us'. His coverage of the war era and his involvement with the Nazi
party are not really touched upon, but he does give us a vivid account of the Zoo suffering from an Allied air raid.
Heck's main interest, as a Zoologist was the Aurochs, he decided that by breeding together varieties of domestic cattle that had characteristics of this ancient beast he could recreate it. This project was begun in the 1920s, and carried on into the 30s with the approval of Hitler and Goering, who hoped that he would be able to create an Aryan theme park in eastern Prussia, where Germans could go and experience the life of the Aryans.
Ron Jonson goes into detail on this in his radio programme 'The Quest for the Aryan Cow' which has interviews with Heck's grand-daughter and includes a visit to the park in Munich where the descendants of Heck's cattle live on a island.
Despite their fearsome reputation and the awe in which they were held back in the 1930s, Jon Ronson is not that impressed by them. After all they are really just domestic cattle that are a facsimile for Aurochsen and not the genuine article. Maybe one day we will be able to clone one, but DNA extracting technology would have to be far better than today as the last aurochs died nearly four hundred years ago.
Were we to clone a thylacine or an Aurochs, we would just be recreating the genetic bottleneck that in part led to their extinction and we must think very carefully about how we go about cloning such things should it ever become scientifically viable.
*Pendantic Linguist’s Note. As Aurochs is derived from the German I have used the more germanic plural Aurochsen which aligns it with the English words Ox and Oxen.
Jon Ronson and the Quest for the Aryan Cow
Animals; My Adventure- Lutz Heck
More information on the effects of Nazism at the Zoo, during and after the Nazi Era
The man in charge of this experiment was Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoo from 1932 to 1945. His memoirs 'Animals my Adventure' are an interesting read, in them he recounts his trips to Africa to collect animals, his attitudes to the Africans would make a modern reader uncomfortable, as he had none of the skill of Gerald Durrell in portraying natives as just as human as 'the rest of us'. His coverage of the war era and his involvement with the Nazi
party are not really touched upon, but he does give us a vivid account of the Zoo suffering from an Allied air raid.Heck's main interest, as a Zoologist was the Aurochs, he decided that by breeding together varieties of domestic cattle that had characteristics of this ancient beast he could recreate it. This project was begun in the 1920s, and carried on into the 30s with the approval of Hitler and Goering, who hoped that he would be able to create an Aryan theme park in eastern Prussia, where Germans could go and experience the life of the Aryans.
Ron Jonson goes into detail on this in his radio programme 'The Quest for the Aryan Cow' which has interviews with Heck's grand-daughter and includes a visit to the park in Munich where the descendants of Heck's cattle live on a island.
Despite their fearsome reputation and the awe in which they were held back in the 1930s, Jon Ronson is not that impressed by them. After all they are really just domestic cattle that are a facsimile for Aurochsen and not the genuine article. Maybe one day we will be able to clone one, but DNA extracting technology would have to be far better than today as the last aurochs died nearly four hundred years ago.
Were we to clone a thylacine or an Aurochs, we would just be recreating the genetic bottleneck that in part led to their extinction and we must think very carefully about how we go about cloning such things should it ever become scientifically viable.
*Pendantic Linguist’s Note. As Aurochs is derived from the German I have used the more germanic plural Aurochsen which aligns it with the English words Ox and Oxen.
Jon Ronson and the Quest for the Aryan Cow
Animals; My Adventure- Lutz Heck
More information on the effects of Nazism at the Zoo, during and after the Nazi Era
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