Natural History

This painting by Sir Edwin Landseer is of one of the Chillingham cattle. This bull charged and gored a gamekeeper, but the deerhound on the left managed to hold the bull off until it was shot.

The notion of keeping herds of feral cattle for hunting purposes sounds a bit odd to most modern North Americans.

After all,  we have plenty of large game species still running about on our ranges, and although it might cost some money for the average person to get to shoot one, the animals are still there in sufficient numbers for them to be hunted.

In Britain, large game species were largely gone by the late Medieval Period.

The native wild cattle of Britain, the British variant of the Eurasian aurochs, was extinct by the Bronze Age.

However, within the forests and parkland of Britain, there existed herds of cattle that were large free-roaming and freely breeding.

I say “largely” because there was always a system of management.

It is thought that these herds of cattle actually descend from free-roaming cattle that were enclosed upon baronial hunting lands in the thirteenth century, but that is not the romantic story.

The romantic story is that Britain was once inhabited with vast herds of white, long-horned cattle that roamed freely across the island.

Some stories say the Roman introduced them. Others say that the aboriginal cattle of Britain were always white.

I know of no sources that discuss the existence of white aurochsen.

And it’s sort of a moot point to say that these cattle are aurochsen.  Not a single one of the extant forms of park cattle, as they are known today, approaches the aurochs in size.  The Chillingham herd, the most famous of the park cattle, consists of cattle that are significantly smaller than improved breeds, and it is widely known that the aurochs was much larger than any domestic cattle.

The truth of the matter is that polled and improved cattle have existed in Britain even before the existence of these “wild cattle” herds. Celtic Britain had its fair share of polled cattle, and the notion that all of these cattle were white is also a bit difficult to accept. Perhaps the most primitive of all British cattle breeds is the Highland breed, and it comes in solid red or black– not white.

These “wild cattle”  may have some roots in the beginning of the English hunting preserve system in the thirteenth century. Barons were given right to close off forests and use them solely for the preservation of game. Prior to the development of this system, cattle and other stock roamed freely in the forests, but after they were closed off, the cattle were left in there to breed on their own.  This enclosure was not exactly like the Enclosure Movement that wold come centuries later, for under the Charter of the Forest, peasants were given limited access to these forests.   It is possible that these cattle were descended from animals that were enclosed during the initial development of the hunting preserve, or they could have been continuously augmented with free-roaming stock that their peasant owners were unable to collect.

Whatever their origin, during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, setting up vast hunting preserves became a passion among the landed aristocracy.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, romantic nationalism spread throughout the British Isles, and when it became accepted knowledge that the aboriginal cattle of Britain were white and long-horned, many of these preserves managed herds of white long-horned cattle– which were often hunted in much the same way red and fallow deer were.  Packs of dogs were sent out after the cattle, which were then followed by horseback. At Charley Castle’s hunting park, the cattle would be chased, but the dispatch would be done as the bull ran the gauntlet of shooting gentlemen who took refuge in trees and blasted away at him with shotguns as he ran by.

The white cattle were became living symbols of the English nation, and if foxhunting had not become more popular over time,  this activity could have become the national past time.  However, I think it became obvious to everyone that these animals were nothing more than managed herds of pseudo-wild animals.

These cattle were often celebrated in contemporary texts as wild animals, but they really weren’t   When the herds were much more numerous, any calf that was born with atypical coloring was culled.  There was a human selection pressure for the white coloration, and the natural environment selected for cattle with good horns and foraging behavior. Of course, nature also selected for slightly smaller animals than the typical “improved breeds.”

In weird way, these cattle hunts were the British equivalent of the Spanish bullfight– which also mixed in the Northern European cultural meme of the wild hunt.  These hunts were supposed to show man’s mastery over nature, and if everyone happened to be buying into the theory that these were the aboriginal wild white cattle of England, it was man’s mastery over the wild that once was the island of Great Britain.

By the twentieth century, it was widely established that these cattle were nothing more than specially manage game animals that derived from feral cattle.  Discussion of these animals in John Charles Cornish’s The Living Animals of Today (1902) explains very clearly why these animals were not the supposed white aurochsen of Britain:

The so-called “Wild Cattle” found in the parks of Chillingham and Chartley, as well as in Lord Leigh’s park at Lyme, and in that of the Duke of Hamilton at Cadzow Castle, Scotland, are probably not the descendants of an indigenous wild race. It is not without reluctance that the belief in their wild descent has been abandoned. But the evidence seems fairly conclusive as to the antiquity of these white cattle, regarded as a primitive breed, and of the unlikelihood of their being survivors of a truly wild stock. They are almost identical in many points with the best breeds of modern cattle, and probably represent the finest type possessed by the ancient inhabitants of these islands. But they are far smaller than the original Wild Ox, or Aurochs, the ancestor of our domestic breeds. The skulls of these large wild oxen, which still survived in the Black Forest in Caesar’s time, have been dug up in many parts of England, especially in the Thames Valley, and may be seen at the Natural History Museum. The remains of the extinct wild ox, the Bos urus of the Romans, show that, if not so large as an elephant, as Caesar heard, its size was gigantic, reckoned by any modern cattle standard whatever. It probably stood 6 feet high at the shoulder, and there is every reason to believe that it was the progenitor of the modern race of domestic cattle in Europe. It seems certain that the Chartley Park herd did once run wild in Needwood Forest; but so do the Italian buffaloes in the Maremma, and the Spanish bulls on the plains of Andalusia. Those at Chartley have been kept in the park, which is very wild and remote, so long that they have gradually lost many of the attributes of domestication. This is even more marked in the case of Lord Tankervill’s white cattle at Chillingham. An observant visitor to Chillingham lately noted that the bulls fight for the possession of the cows, and that one is occasionally killed in these combats. The cows still “stampede” with their calves when alarmed, and hide them for a week or ten days after they are born. The horns of the Chillingham cattle turn up; those of the bulls of the Chartley herd are straight or slightly inclined downwards. Crossbreds between the Chartley cattle and some other herds of reputed ancient descent may generally be seen at the London Zoological Gardens.

Formerly there were several other herds of ancient white cattle. One was at Gisburne, in Yorkshire; another at Chatelherault Park, in Lanarkshire; and records of herds at Bishop Auckland in Durham, Barnard Castle, Blair Athol,Burton Constable, Naworth Castle, and other ancient peaks are preserved. Probably all were of a breed highly prized in ancient days, which was allowed the run of the forests adjacent to the homes of their owners; then, as the forests were cleared, they were gradually taken up and enclosed in parks (pg. 208-209).

Park cattle still exist today, but these animals have been heavily interbred with improved English longhorns and shorthorns and other breeds of domestic cattle. The English white park breed is derived from these crosses. The American white park cattle breed might be derived from this stock, but it is much more likely derived from a few crosses with some imported English white park cattle with cattle of the Aberdeen-Angus type.

The only pure park cattle of this hunted type remained in their “wild state” into the twentieth century were at Chillingham Park and at Chartley Castle’s hunting park.

Chillingham cows foraging in the snow. During the winter months, these "wild cattle" are fed hay.

Today, the only pure “wild” herd can be found at Chillingham Park in Northumberland.  The Chillingham cattle were normally stalked in the same fashion as a Highland stag. The terrain was just too rugged to do mounted hunts.

Much romance is still made about these cattle being the remnant of the wild cattle of Britain, when in reality they are the descend from cattle that were specifically managed to be an ersatz large game species.

If you think about it, this isn’t really all that different from people in the United States who manage feral hogs as “wild boar.”   We also have people in New Zealand and Texas who manage primitive strains of domestic sheep for hunting purposes, often crossing them with mouflon to really get them looking wild.

Britain has lost most of its large mammal species in the past few thousand years. The largest wild ungulate on the island is the red deer, which isn’t nearly as large as its close cousin, the wapiti or North American elk. There was a plan to reintroduce moose (the actual real elk) to the Highlands of Scotland, but I’ve not heard if this project has advanced or not.

But that project would have been using Swedish elk.

The British sportsmen were using managed free-roaming cattle to restock the aurochs.

That’s a bit like releasing golden retrievers to restock wolves.

But when you don’t have anything else,  I guess some free-ranging cattle can work as a game species.

I just wouldn’t compare them to bison or aurochsen or Cape buffalo.