Friday 13 November 2015

Soon, I promise

As announced in my previous post, a post on my recent 2015 trip to the Taurus cattle herds at the Lippeaue, Germany, is about to come. But I am really busy with university at the moment, the article turned out to be quite long and I have a lot of photo material. So sorry for have you waiting for so long. But the post(s) is/are about to come in a few days. 

Until then, another spoiler pic: 

6 comments:

  1. Nice pic ! I can't wait for your post to come out...

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  2. Hey, nice to get an update-pic!
    However I think you forgot to include the watermark in this one .

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    1. I decided not to watermark the rest of them, because I chose 79 photos for my posts, it would be way too much work for me to watermark all of them. Also, unfortunately, they are not all that beautiful as the first one showing Linnet, because the weather wasn't good that day.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Hi there,
    Allways a pleasure to see some nice new pictures on how the herds are evolving.
    Some issues are intriguing me. Why all the animals - or at least the big majority of them have so small horns. Cannot be included other breeds with bigger horns?!
    Other aspect is about behavior, if the nervous individuals are being selected out, will they be able to cope with life in the wild?! Being tame is an aspect of domestication.
    I am a bison tracker and they are not tame but we can see them in the wild ranging freely without big problems, if we pass the 50m distance they start to pay attention to us and if we approach the 30m they simply go away to the woods. Wouldnt be advisable to include this behavior in the Taurus cattle?! I belive so and this does not mean they are more dangerous, unleass the goal is to recreate a breed that looks like an auroch but for our convenience does not behave like so.
    And the last issue is about the size, in my opinion more then the size it self, proportions and behavior is the most important, functionality in all. Aurochs since they arrival to Europe and in different regions and in different moments had different sizes, but the proportions and the behavior were allways funcional. I see a lot of attention given to the size of the animals that for me is not the most important (nature can work on it for thousens of years with different conditions), and for this reason chianina breed has been used and other breedsa lot more interesting with more wild character and aspect were not. Its obvious that for Taurus program size matters more than functionality.
    And to not be to much annoying when can we have more often posts regarding breeding back of other species, like mamuths, european water buffalo, wild dogs or so many other quite recently extinct species?
    My best regards to all :)

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    1. They have small horns - quite obviously - because the herd is strongly influenced by Chianina, a small horned breed, and Sayaguesa, which does not have large horns either. As discussed in my latest post, they have a Wörth cow now for adding some horn size. Barely another breed is useful for adding large horns without introduce further undesired traits, let alone available. The idea of using Watussi is discussed in the posts as well.
      By "nervous" I do not refer to cautiousness, but rather cattle that try to attack and/or kill you when being handled. Once again, someone has to work with those cattle. It is written nowhere that the cattle are tame, not at all. Only two or three individuals are socialized enough to be touched, the others would take a hike or become grumpy. Furthermore, the behaviour of cattle is rather plastic. If they would not be handled at all, they'd be probably as shy and cautious as bison. Btw, they are rather cautious. And what makes you think they behave to all animal species the way they behave towards humans? They would react totally different to dogs, for example. Let alone if they would be raised in total wilderness.
      As written in the text, the size is *not* a priority but they are confident with what has been achieved so far and actually care most on proportions and horn shape. So the contrary to what you wrote.
      Regarding mammoths: when there are news, I usually post them when I notice them and have time for it.
      European water buffalo: Not much to say about that in general. I don't even know what's the status of the buffalo project of the TNF at the moment. I asked HKO several times but got no definite answer on that.
      Wild dogs: I don't know much to say about that topic except for the posts I have done already.

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