Lions prefer killing piebald cattle

In my dedomestication series from 2015 I speculate on the selective pressures acting upon the genetic structure of feral domestic animals that will eventually turn the feral animals into wild animals adapted to their environment. I made the prognosis that the animals will show a regression towards wildtype traits because these provide a greater evolutionary fitness since they are the product of past natural selection. Colour would be one of the examples. I speculate that predators would influence the colour of the animals, because some variants are well-camouflaged and others are not, such as piebald individuals. This would, after a sufficient amount of generations in the wild, lead to an eradication of alleles producing piebald colours which are typical of domestic animals and to a genetic fixation of non-piebald (wildtype) alleles. 

My dedomestication hypothesis has empirical problems, as there is no feral population of domestic animals in the same habitat as their wildtype under the same ecologic circumstances that has been reproductively isolated for a sufficient amount of time. But recently there was a study that might provide empirical support for some of my prognoses postulated in the dedomestication series. 

The prey behaviour of lions preying on cattle in Botswana has been analyzed in 2020 by Weise et al.. What they found was not only that lions prefer to kill cattle that are easier prey such as hornless individuals (which is not surprising, as hornless cattle have a much harder time defending themselves against predators than horned cattle), but also that piebald cattle have a higher risk of being attacked by lions. Lions seem to prefer piebald cattle over solid coloured cattle [1]. The authors speculate that a piebald colour makes identifying movement easier for the lions, and therefore they are attacked more often than solid coloured cattle [1]. I think that it is also possible that it is simply the fact that piebald patterns stand out more than solid colours, so that these individuals are attacked more often.  

The authors also found that short-horned cattle were preferred over long-horned cattle, which were mostly avoided by the lions. 

These findings are very interesting. In my view, they clearly suggest that at least some wildtype traits (solid colour, long horns) provide a selective advantage over domestic traits (piebald colour, short or no horns). The authors indirectly say the same by pointing out that cattle lost adaptions of the aurochs against predators [1] (this is a generalization that is not actually true, as there are cattle which still have large forwards-facing horns, significant body size, an athletic long-legged stature and wildtype colour et cetera). This implies that in a heterogeneous cattle population, where some individuals have these wildtype traits and others do not, this will lead to an increase in the frequency and eventually the fixation of the wildtype alleles, and therefore a regression towards wildtype traits, when exposed to selective pressure caused by large predators. 

This shows that the selection criteria of "breeding-back" are not pure cosmetics as some critics repeatedly claim, but actually contribute to the survival of the population of the animals once returned into an ecosystem with predators. 

Literature 

[1] Weise et al.: Lions Panthera leo prefer killing certain cattle Bos taurus types. 2020.