Lutz like one Heck of a mistake

An interesting bit of news caught my eye today. The article itself can be found here. It relates nicely to my Conservation Cow post yesterday.

The Heck cattle have been adopted by European conservationists as a stand-in for the lost auroch megafauna. Heck cattle have a complicated history. However, this history seems to have been overly stressed compared to the disregard for life that the man in this interview has shown (in my humble opinion).

That fact that Lutz Heck, (a member of the Nazi elite, thoroughly bad person and a terrible scientist at that) created the Heck cattle breed should be in my opinion disregarded. They exist, and despite his blundering method and less than pure motives Heck created a hardy and less docile breed of cattle, one that stands a chance of standing in for the lost aurochsen and contributing to restoring European ecosystems. So when you see something like this, off the back of the high spirits I had raised yesterday for the Conservation Cow, it’s a bit disheartening.

The farmer has bought around 30 Heck cattle, to add to his collection of rare cattle breeds. ‘Collection’ right away has me on edge. Animals, especially fierce ones like the Heck cattle, should not be collected. The only one who stands to benefit there is him if he makes a tidy profit on what I think of as the current ‘indie food’ market. If you haven’t noticed already, you will probably see some purple carrots or lumpy potatoes soon. Lidl has even brought out kangaroo steaks. It smacks of the Victorian zoophagy obsession. The rarer it was, the better. Costly signalling anyone? 

The reason Heck cattle have a chance of being a conservation cow for is that they may have some of the wits that the aurochsen possessed. Cows were not always the blundering, slightly dim animals we see today. We made them that way in our selection for meek, placid animals that gave us no trouble (Levy, 2011). So was purchasing a breed of cattle designed to not be kept domestically, to live on a farm, really a great idea? No. It wasn't. Predictably, the animals paid the price and the man profited. He killed 20 of the most aggressive bulls because they would happy have “wiped [him] from the face of this earth”. The 6 that remain are the ones that gave him least trouble. The 20 dead have been turned into burgers. Yet still the main focus seems to be on the word ‘Nazi’.

The video also features a man giving his professional opinion of the Nazi party’s use for the Heck Cattle. While I agree with what he says, I feel he has left out a large part of their story. 

Lutz Heck was obsessed with lost beasts and believed they could be brought back to life. He assumed that the biological legacy of aurochs lived on, divided up among domestic breeds. He thought that by crossing various breeds of domestic cattle, he could recreate the aurochsen (see, I told you about the bad science). Obviously, he was completely wrong. He created a new breed of domestic cattle. aurochsen were giants compared to Heck cattle, standing 6.5 feet at the shoulder (Levy, 2011). They were smarter, faster, more graceful and fearless than domestic cattle. A few years of breeding by Heck couldn't undo thousands of years of selection for docile, meat-heavy cows (Levy, 2011).

For Nazi officials, the goal of purging people they deemed inferior from society went hand in hand with resurrecting Europe’s megafauna. They wanted an imagined ‘pristine’ state of nature (Levy, 2011). In fact, this is an issue for modern conservationists. This ideology is a myth, there is no one ideal state, and in any case, humans have been altering our world for thousands of years before we came to decide what was pristine and what was not.

Phew, thank goodness for science blogs, or it would have taken me weeks to find someone who would listen to that rant!