Saving the Texas Longhorns 1927
TEXAS longhorns are nearly extinct.
The thundering herd has joined the buffalo, the six-shooter and the brass rail as a vanished part of the more or less wild life of the old West. A few specimens of “the most spectacular domesticated— or semi-domesticated—animal that America has produced” will be preserved by the Government in the Wichita National Forest, Oklahoma, says The Outlook, and we learn further from an editorial in the New York Evening Sun that:
The range set apart for the longhorn reserve herd is in what was the Indian Territory, where there are still thousands of authentic red Americans. Old-time cattlemen of the Southwest, familiar with the longhorn in its mightier day, will select the individuals to compose the herd and be a monument to a strain of taurine excellence to which the sturdy cattle upon a thousand hills give testimony.
It seems only yesterday that longhorns were so numerous as apparently to be able to defy extermination. It was not only their number, great as that was, which seemed to guarantee their endurance; their hardiness, their ability to care for them-selves on the range even when grass was sparse, their spirit, all combined to make superb animals of them. Survivors they were of many a long year of life in the rough country, and they seemed destined to outlast the centuries. No person who has ever seen a great herd of them thundering across a prairie, their fine horns flashing in the sunlight, would have dreamed that as a species they were destined to an end so near. Their throng seemed inexhaustible.
Descendants of cattle brought to America by the early Spanish colonists, they had developed qualities which enabled them. to flourish in a wild state. Their long and sharp horns equipped them to protect their calves from forays by wolves, panthers and other beasts of prey. Minimum requirements of food and water enabled them to thrive even in times of comparative drought and on pastures where cattle of less sturdy breeds would have starved. The very things which served them best in a wild state, however, served them ill in a state of domestication. After man had cleared the range of beasts of prey the long horns of the longhorns only caused them to injure one another, particularly. when they were stampeded. The better food they were ultimately able to get went to building up additional bone and muscle rather than fat and milk.
Curtailment of range and increased demand for heavy beef cattle caused breeders to experiment with various crosses, especially those of longhorn cows with shorthorn bulls. The result has been greatly improved stock, beasts which retain much of the hardiness of the old rovers of the prairies and exhibit the flesh-building qualities of their cousins.
Source: The Literary Digest of April 16, 1927
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