FLEUR FULCHER: Never mind the aurochs

Holding the bones of an animal you know you will never see alive is a horrible experience. Everyone else in my class passed the leg-bone of the Aurochs (Bos Primogenis) around the room, commenting on its weight and size, but not many of us knew what an Aurochs was, and even less cared.

The bone itself was huge, although I was obsessed with these very bovines for years this was the first time I had seen part of one so close up (apart from the aurochs horn drinking cups in Castle Drogo.. always worth a look). It so happened that I was the last in the class to see it, so it stayed on the bench next to me for the rest of the lecture. I confess, that although this was the lecture I had been looking forward to (the only one where I thought I might be up to the general standard!) I spent a lot of time looking at the piece of bone, touching it and thinking. There was anger and sadness as well as excitement that I had got to examine such an object.

We also looked at mammoth ivory, and baleen from the Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) thankfully the Right Whale escaped the fate of the other two animals, but only just, and would as few of my classmates have heard of it then? What if all whales had been driven to extinction in 1627 along with the last Aurochs? Would only 10% of people know or care that these marvellous mammals had EVER existed?

I hope that in 50 years time, students studying what I study now aren’t holding the bones of the Sumatran Rhino and wondering how its extinction could have been allowed to happen without even a ripple of protest.

GUEST BLOGGER HEATHER MIKHAIL: Überoxen

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