And you thought bulldogs had exaggerated features. Bulls once had them, too!
In my part of the world, shorthorn cattle are still called “Durhams.” County Durham in northern England was major source for the foundational stock of the breed. The other area of importance is the Teeswater region, which is on the border between Yorkshire and Durham.
These animals were established using Bakewell’s “in and in” system, which used very tight breeding practices to fix traits. Robert Bakewell had himself used this system to establish the English longhorn as a premier beef breed in England, but using the same system, the shorthorn breeders were able to create a strong line of dual purpose cattle– that later devolved into several specialist breeds!
Most shorthorns in my part of the world are roans. So the reference to “roan Durham” in West Virginia means a polled shorthorn with a red roan coat.
None of these cattle look like this one. It may have impressed beef show judges, but such a cow would have a hard time foraging or being driven. My guess is that one would have lots of structural issues, and the bulls–which are the base of any agricultural breed’s program–might even have issues mounting the cows.
It’s an impressive show animal, but the metric for cattle is not what they look like. The metric has always been whether the animal can produce either good milk or beefs and whether it can pass those traits onto its offspring.
Dogs don’t really have that metric, which is why you can continue to breed lots of extreme conformation. With dogs, the value is more in what the animal looks like than it ever could be in any kind of livestock.
Wouldn’t you say that the metric for most dogs has changed over time? That most dogs these days are bred for their looks versus most dogs in the ranching days being bred for whether they can do the job?
Yes.
This was actually brilliantly described in Veblen’s Theory Leisure Class.
In that analysis, there have always been commodities that are had more of a symbolic value. For example, in feudal society, only nobles were hunters and warriors. So swords were symbols of prestige and power.
In Victorian England and later all over the Industrialized West, owing purebred dogs became as symbol of prestige and power. (Veblen contended that people tended to chase after those commodities that gave them symbolic power and prestige than actually fight for real power themselves.)
The vast majority of dogs in the West had a great deal of utility, but in the old days, noble women kept lap dogs and noblemen kept hunting dogs. Everyone else had working dogs of real economic utility. After the Industrial Revolution, the middle class was big enough for the vast majority of people to keep dogs that had very limited economic utility. And at that lies the roots of much of the modern dog culture and fancy.
Do you have a link to that online by any chance?
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/VEBLEN/chap06.html
The whole book: http://books.google.com/books?id=2kAoAAAAYAAJ&dq=theory%20of%20the%20leisure%20class%20dogs&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false
A good discussion on how this applies to dogs can be found in Mary Elizabeth Thurston’s Lost History of the Canine Race and Mark Derr’s A Dog’s History of America
The former has some now discredited stuff on dog domestication, but the latter is very good..
Wow, thanks! I’m always looking for new, more scientific things to read about dogs! :-)
Exaggerations have/do occur in livestock, as well as in dogs. Just two examples: dwarfism (“runts” – achondroplasia?) in Hereford cattle; “double-muscled” Quarter Horses (cf, “Impressive” syndrome). No doubt there are others as well.
And then are the Munchkin (achondroplastic)and Sphinx (hairless) cat breeds, as well as brachycephalic Persians…
Yes, but there are limits to what you can do with livestocks and cats. They don’t tolerate extreme conformation as extreme dogs can.
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