Obsolete animals can show new breeds a thing or two

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34146, 6 May 1976, Page 9

Obsolete animals can show new breeds a thing or two

(By

GREGORY JENSEN,

N.Z.P.A.-Reuter correspondent)

GETTING POWER . (England). Not all the animals threatened with extinction are such exotic creatures as oryx or leopards or whales. Joe Henson worries about cows. “There are more than 25 breeds of sheep, cattle, and pigs alone that are in danger,” Mr Hendon said. “We think they must be saved.” Mr Henson is saving quite a few. Already his conservation is beginning to pay dividends that could help feed tomorrow’s hungry world. Mr Henson is chairman of the two-year old Rare Breeds Survival Trust. This organisation, spreading rapidly around the world, is devoted to preserving farming’s rejects.

Animals become obsolete just as machines do. More and more breeds, outdated by more productive or specialised cousins, are being left to die out. These are the breeds Mr Henson collects. Some of Britain’s rarest animals — about 40 breeds in all — roam his 2,000-acre Cotswolds farm. Each summer they go on show.

Mr Henson devotes 30 acres of his farm to the Cotswold Farm Park, an open-air museum of rare farm animals. Last year 1000,000 people came. They saw six-horned Manx' Loughtan sheep, of

which less than 500 remain in Britain. There are prehistoric Soay sheep, huge-horned St. Kilda sheep which the Vikings brought to Britain, and placid brown Old Gloucester cattle, of which only 30 were left when Mr Henson stepped in. “I think the trust came along just in time,” he said in his stone farmhouse, 102 miles west of London.

“Some breeds of pigs and cattle are gone forever. The last Norfolk Horn sheep on earth died in 1973, but I think the other breeds are probably safe now.” Conservation is the spark that has made the rare-breed survival idea boom. In two years the society has enrolled 2000 members. Besides the Cotswold Farm Park, two other British “rare breed survival centres” are open to the public and two more are planned. Similar groups have sprung up in France, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, and there are nibbles from the United States, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere. The rare animals saved by the trust — particularly those on Mr Henson’s farm —are proving useful in surprising ways. Film-makers hire them for historical accuracy; country houses are stocking their parks with animals from the past; scientists are studying their blood groupings and genetic make-up. Most of all, they have begun to pass on the characteristics which made them

valuable generations or centuries ago. Here is where the real dividends may lie. “You’ve got to understand,” Mr Henson said, “that as agriculture has developed, livestock has changed.”

Medieval farmers wanted multi-purpose beasts — a dairy cow that was good to eat and pulled a plough as well. Modern animals, like production line workers, specialise.

“But it would be very wrong to think that just because our farming is efficient now, and highly developed, that things have stopped changing,” Mr Henson said. “You never know what genes these breads might have that would be useful in the future. These animals are a gene bank, a unique biological treasure, a living deposit of characteristics that can be passed on. “When I first started talking about this idea I was thinking in terms of 50 or 70 years. But it’s happening already.”

As an experiment, Mr Henson and his farm partner crossed rare Cotswold sheep with modern breeds. “We produced the fastest growing lambs we’ve ever had,” he said.

Highly-promising results have come from crossing modern Hereford cows with ancient longhorns — cattle like those on Stone Age cave paintings, perhaps ancestors of the Texas longhorn. A scientific Government

test on a rare longhorn found — to everyone’s astonishment — that it matched the fastest-growing modern breeds for daily weight gain, and put less of its weight into fat and more into protein-packed meat.