They would
look awesome. Colour is one of the most prominent aspects of an animal’s look,
and the first one that catches our eyes. I realized might also blur our
perception of aurochs-likeness: a cow with aurochs-like colour that otherwise
looks like a farm cow (f.e. many Heck cattle) might appear to be more
aurochs-like than a Chianina with way more “primitive” proportions, body
conformation and size.
That’s why
I hesitated to consider Chianina a primitive breed until one and a half year
ago or so – I thought the “wrong colour” is a considerable malus. But first of
all, since there is not simply one colour locus that decides whether a colour
is wild type or not, the colour of a breed is probably unlikely to be mutated
on each locus. For example, Highland cattle are either Ed or e, so the production of eumelanin in the
coat is either over-expressed or totally disabled, so we cannot say if they
have the genetic make up for sexual dichromatism. Only crossbreeding or genome
editing would provide a clue. The shiny red colour of some Highlands implies
that they would have probably a nice and un-diluted aurochs colour (independent
of sexual dichromatism) if they had the E+
allele. And so forth.
Chianina
has the wild type base colour E+ and very likely also sexual dichromatism
masked beneath the dilution factors (see the previous post).
Furthermore,
and what is way more important, colour is regulated only by a few loci which
follow the Mendelian rules quite clear (ignore the transposons that cause some
colour variants which are not relevant for aurochs effigy breeding anyway), so
it is way easier to breed for or against colour variants than it is for traits
like size, proportions, appendages, horn size, skull shape and any other
polygenic traits. This should be known to any animal breeder. Therefore, I
prefer an aurochs-sized and aurochs-proportioned Chianina over a mediocrely
aurochs-coloured Heck.
Anyway, to
see how colour affects our perception of the looks of an animal, and also to
see which results crossbreeding with Chianina can achieve, I did this drawing
of hypothetical aurochs-coloured Chianina using the photo of a cow from
Wikipedia and that of a bull I found via google (I would like to put the link
there, but I couldn't find it anymore):
I admit the
drawing is sloppy. But it was not my intention to fabricate a masterpiece, but
merely to give an impression how such Chianina would look like. It would
probably take a while to breed them, because all those annoying dilutions are
at least partly recessive. All aurochs projects and Heck cattle have this
problem.
Aurochs-coloured
Highlands might be easier to breed because they do not have such dilutions,
brindle is widespread but dominant and therefore easier to eradicate from the
population. Taking black Highlands would be wise to avoid the recessive red
variant, and crossbreeding with Maronesa might be the fastest way because they
have the desired sexual dichromatism and long horns as well. It would be
pointless from the breeding-back perspective, but fun. Initially I intended to
draw hypothetical aurochs-coloured Highlands as well, but was too lazy in the
end.
I want to spend money for auroch-colored Chianina.
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