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| Photo by Michal Köpping |
Regarding its qualification as a "breeding-back" cow, the trunk looks too long (consequently it is not as high-legged as it should be). The horn curvature is wrong as it has those outwards-curving horns of Maremmana or Highland. The colour would be OK if it would not have those tiny white spots on the belly. When not selected against, these tiny white spots can multiply in later generations and result in completely piebald offspring (this happened with some Heck cattle at Oostvaardersplassen).
The deficiencies described here unfortunately go for quite a lot of Tauros cattle individuals, it would require strict selection to fix that. The Tauros Programme describes on their website that they will have a quantity building-phase first and then a quality building-phase, I do not know if this is still the plan of the project.
These horns remind also Texas longhorn
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ReplyDeleteThe approach of the Tauros project is different from, for example, the Auerrind project or the Taurus project.
ReplyDeleteQuality through quantity. Produce many animals in a first phase and select out the bad ones in a second phase.
In Germany, this approach is usually not possible due to lack of space.
On the other hand, it has to be said that they have a considerable amount of relatively wild cattle, which come very close to the Aueroch in horn size, colour and behaviour.Now selection can begin, for example, for horn shape and slender body. The Taurus project in the Lippe floodplain, for example, completely lacks animals with sufficiently large horns (with the exception of the Heck cow from the Wörth line).
I am very aware of the fact that the Tauros Project claims to have a quantity phase first and then a quality phase afterwards, in fact I wrote that in the post. The big question is if the quality phase is just propaganda. It wouldn't be the first time that claims of the Tauros project turn out to be just propaganda. But even if they are indeed planning to do a quality phase, they will have a hard time fixating a good phenotype because so far none of their animals is of noteworthy quality.
DeleteRegarding the horns of the Lippeaue Taurus cattle, some of them are in fact within the variation found in the European aurochs, such as the bull Lamarck and others (compare it to the Himmelev specimen, for instance).