 |
| Animal Life, May 1963 |
Last year I wrote an article about the short-lived British magazine Animal Life from the early 1960s (see here). I found a letter in the July 1963 issue I had written to the editor in response to an article in the May 1963 issue entitled ‘Extinct Animals Live Again’. That article dealt with the cross-breeding done by the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck to recreate the Aurochs and the Tarpan from domestic breeds of cattle and horses respectively The article treated the whole thing as a great success for the Hecks and for zoos in general. But anybody with an iota of knowledge of genetics would have known that the Hecks were naive in their basic premise. Reversing the effects of domestication was never going to occur by selecting for superficial resemblance to the wild type. They simple created other domestic breeds.
Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald (1900-1981) a journalist and amateur naturalist who looked after letters and queries from readers (and may have been the editor) added a note to say that the topic was a’ stormy’ and that many ‘zoologists’ were convinced by the Hecks’ experiments. Well, there were many ‘zoologists’ often self-styled, around in the 1950s and 60s, who had opinions but little real knowledge or scientific background. In Britain the claims of bringing back the ancestral forms became well known in the 1950s, probably, I suggest as the result of Heinz Heck writing an article for Oryx, the journal of the Fauna Preservation Society, in 1951.
When I located the original article in Animal Life I found that its author was Philip Street.
Fast forward over 60 years and the cattle the Hecks bred are now listed simply as another breed of domestic ox: Heck Cattle. No surprise there.
Over those same sixty-odd years, the truth about Lutz Heck (1892-1983), who was trying to breed aurochs in order to re-wild parts of Europe captured by his fellow Nazi-party members (see my article here and an article in the Smithsonian Magazine here) has emerged, even though the records of the Berlin Zoo, which he ran, are still closed to enquiry. Hermann Göring was his patron with a shared interest in recreating the fatherland’s historical landscapes and in hunting the animals they housed. Heinz Heck (1894-1982) the younger brother, by contrast, was held at Dachau for a time as a suspected member of the communist party and fir having been married briefly to a Jew. Both were responsible for the breeding experiments and it was Heinz who wrote about them after the war.
But there are still people out there who believe that it is possible to recreated these extinct forms by cross-breeding modern breeds. Those same people though must contend that nothing happened in terms of gene mutations and intensive artificial selection during domestication. No… I don’t buy that one either.
 |
| Heck Cattle at a wildlife park in Germany in 2011 From Wikipedia. Photo by 4028mdk09 |
