January 7, 2015
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The Nazis of Interwar Germany may be mostly dead and gone now. But one thing still remains: their cows – and they are pissed.
In a plan that sounds like it came from a Nazi brain, German scientists in the 1920s and 1930s tried to reverse engineer the ancient wild ancestor of today’s cattle: aurochs. By selectively breeding cattle, the Nazi scientists hoped to develop a bovine that looked and acted like aurochs.
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| Credit: Thinkstock |
The modern by-products of this unsuccessful breeding are Heck cattle. Smaller and beefier, Heck cattle appear to have inherited the aurochs ill temper – so much so that a herd of Heck cattle in the United Kingdom recently had to be culled of all but the most docile animals.
British farmer Derek Gow had brought the Nazi cows to the UK in 2009 to raise and graze them on conservation lands. Unfortunately, the herd of 20 had to be culled down to 6 after it became unmanageable for him.
”The ones we had to get rid of would just attack you any chance they could,” he told The Guardian. “They would try to kill anyone. Dealing with that was not a lot of fun at all. I have worked with a range of different animals from bison to deer and I have never come across anything like these.”
“We made sure no one went near them so there were never any incidents,” he added. “To get them into the trailer to get them off the farm we used a young and very athletic young man to stand on the ramp and they charged at him before he quickly jumped out the way.”
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