SOME SUPREMELY USEFUL ANIMALS
The fact that likeness of structure, which compels naturalists to group
certain animals into a family in spite of possible unlikeness in size
or form, is accompanied by resemblance in quality, is well illustrated
by the family Bovidæ (Latin _boves_, "cattle") which includes goats,
sheep, antelopes, and oxen; for all of these in flesh, products
and disposition, are alike suited to the requirements of men, and
especially of mankind in a social civilization. This family of animals
furnishes us with nearly all of our milk, butter, and cheese; with
flesh food, woolen clothing, leather goods, horn, gelatin, etc.: and
gives us such servants as the ox and goat; while sportsmen find in it
the most fascinating of their larger game.
The distinctive feature of this most useful of animal tribes is the
possession of hollow horns, properly so called. Horn is a chitinous
material developed from the skin, and not dissimilar to hair; indeed
it would be no great stretch of facts to say that a cow's horn was
composed of agglutinated hairs. These horns are sheaths that grow over
cores of bone--outgrowths of the skull--increase in size until their
wearers are mature, grow at the base as fast as worn at the tips, and
are never shed. They may be borne by the males alone, or by both sexes;
or the males may have horns far larger than those of the female, as
in the sheep; and in a few cases both sexes are hornless. No family
is more difficult to subdivide, for the various forms intergrade
inextricably.
Our mountain goat, or "mazama," which dwells on the snowy heights of
the Pacific Coast ranges, from southern British Columbia to farthest
Alaska, is one of these intermediate ones, suggesting both goat and
antelope in its make-up. It is about the size of an ordinary domestic
goat, has small, sharp, black horns, and is clothed in long white hair
with an undercoat of wool fitting it for the wintry cold in which its
life is spent, for except in midwinter it never comes below timber
line, and even then avoids the wooded places. In the rough mountains
of Japan lives a similar goat antelope, woolly, but not white; and the
lofty heights of western China is the home of a smaller one, the goral,
and the Himalayas have the big serow. All these have short, sharp horns
rising from the top of the skull. Their nearest western neighbor is the
famous chamois of the Alps and Carpathians of Europe. The extraordinary
agility of these mountaineers is possible because of the pads beneath
their hoofs that give them the clinging surefootedness which is so
remarkable.
Most closely allied to them, probably, are the goats, also denizens of
mountain regions, the typical species being confined to the highlands
between the Caucasus and northwestern India. This is the true goat from
which the domestic goat is descended; but the long-haired "Angora"
goat is derived from the markhor, a sheeplike animal of the Himalayas
with tall, much twisted horns. One of the special characteristics of
the goats (genus Capra) is the beard of the rams; and this feature
belongs also to the ibexes, several similar species of which are
found from the Pyrenees eastward along the mountain tops to northern
China, each occupying a limited section of country, and one inhabiting
the mountains about the head of the Red Sea. That of Spain is called
"bouquetin," and that of the Alps "steinbok." All the rams possess
great horns, sometimes fifty inches long, that rise from the occiput,
curve backward, and show on their fronts a series of prominent cross
ridges. One passes from these goats to their near relatives, the sheep,
by way of the "bharal" (or "burrel") which combines the characteristics
of the two sections so thoroughly that the proverbial "separating
the sheep from the goats," easy enough on the farm, is practically
impossible among wild flocks. In this crag-loving wanderer the horns
of the rams are as long as those of an ibex, but roundish and wide
spreading, instead of upright and cross-ridged. The "aoudad," whose
home is in the mountains of Morocco and Algiers, and which is familiar
in menageries, has such horns, but approaches nearer in other respects
to the typical sheep, whose rams carry the great spiral horns at the
side of the head, that are still the pride of our domestic merinos, and
were the badge of the Theban god of gods, Ra Ammon. No better example
of these magnificent mountaineers, which under one or another of
several specific and local names, such as argali, oorial, etc., are, or
were, to be found on rough highlands all the way from the Mediterranean
to Bering Sea, can be shown than our own "bighorn" sheep of the Rocky
Mountains, and of the mountains of Canada and Alaska.
Now we come to the great and beautiful section of the antelopes,
in which naturalists recognize thirty-five genera and perhaps a
hundred species. Antelopes were scattered in Pleistocene days all over
continental Europe and Asia, but never were present in America, for
our so-called "antelope" is a pronghorn, as has been explained. Two or
three species now inhabit the plains of central Asia--among them the
swiftest mammal known, the Mongolian "orongo." The ungainly "nilgai"
and the little "black buck" are familiar in India, and the pretty
dorcas gazelle races across the sands of Syria and Arabia; but the
vast majority of antelopes belong to Africa. They range in size from
the duikerboks, not much bigger than fox terriers, to the eland, which
has almost the bulk of an ox, and should be domesticated, like beef
cattle, for its excellent flesh. No handsomer mammals than antelopes
exist, judged by either form or coloring. They inhabit all sorts of
country, too, as in other lands do the deer, of which Africa has none.
Deserts, such as the Sahara and the Kalahari, and the stony steppes
of Somaliland, support not only the swift and agile gazelles, but
several large kinds. The grassy plains of South Africa were formerly,
and to some extent still are, the pastures of great herds of such
antelopes, large and small, as blesboks, wildebeests (or "gnus"),
hartebeests, steinboks, springboks, and many others. Springboks used to
assemble at certain seasons, and migrate across the veldt in countless
thousands, allowing nothing to stop the headlong rush of the host. The
thick jungle is the refuge of the harnessed antelopes, and of several
diminutive kinds rarely seen in the open; and along the watercourses,
and in marshes, live the big red waterbucks, the shy sitatungas, whose
feet are curiously modified to fit them to walk on boggy ground; while
rocky hills are the chosen home of the klipspringers and duikerboks,
agile pygmies that creep about among the brush like big rabbits, or
leap from rock to rock like miniature goats. A score or more of the
species of these beautiful creatures have been carelessly or wantonly
exterminated, and many others have become rare, but protective laws are
now in force in all the parts of Africa controlled by the Government of
South Africa, or organized as British, French, or Belgian dependencies.
The quaint and complex musk ox, a lone relic of a past era now exiled
to the remotest north, is a connecting link between the sheep and
the cattle, the last and best of the ruminants. Here, as elsewhere,
the style of the horns is characteristic of the group--slender,
backward curved or twisted, and somewhat compressed or keeled, in most
antelopes; heavy, cross-ridged, triangular in section and often spiral
in the sheep and goats; rough and helmetlike in the musk ox and some
buffaloes; and in the oxen round, smooth and always springing from
the side of the skull. The cattle fall into three groups: buffaloes,
bisons, and oxen.
The buffaloes are tropical cattle, usually heavily built, with massive,
flattened, wrinkled horns, and the hair so thin that in old animals the
bluish black skin is left almost naked. The typical buffalo is that
native to India and Ceylon, where it formerly roved in herds, which,
quickly forming into a compact bunch, heads and horns out, defied
attack from even the lion or tiger. Bulls often exceed five feet in
height, are extremely strong and quick, and carry rough horns, sweeping
back circularly, which may measure twelve feet around the curve. Such
a veteran herdmaster spends his days wallowing in marshy jungles, his
broad, splayed hoofs sustaining him in the muddy soil, and his hairless
back, coated with clay, proof against insects; but evenings and
mornings he leads his band out to feed in lush prairies where the grass
is tall enough to hide them. This is the race that has supplied the
working cattle of hot, swampy regions, especially where rice is grown,
and that has been the farmer's servant in the Far East, in Egypt, and
in parts of Spain and Italy from time immemorial. Several breeds have
been developed, of which the best known to Americans is the carabao of
the Philippines. Africa has native buffaloes in two species, neither of
which has been domesticated. The African buffalo is regarded as perhaps
the most dangerous brute a sportsman can meet in that land of irritable
beasts. Only rarely will even the lion attack one single-handed, and
then seldom succeeds.
The bisons, although regarded by systemists as of two species, the
North American "buffalo" and the European "wissent," are as nearly
alike as well can be. The latter originally ranged over all Europe, and
was necessarily a forest animal, and hence never could assemble into
herds as did its American cousins. It has been protected on the Czar's
and other great estates in Lithuania and Russia, to the number of about
700; but these preserves were ravaged during and after the World War.
The wanton waste that swept away the millions of our American bison
in a few short years would long ago have exterminated this species
also had it not been preserved in bands here and there in the West
and in various animal collections. The peculiarity of the bison is
the massive, humplike strength of the fore quarters, the great mop of
hair upon them and about the head, and the short, stout horns growing
straight out of the side of the head.
The animal called "bison" by sportsmen in India is the gaur, one of
four species of true oxen inhabiting southeastern Asia--heavy animals
with massive, upcurved horns, a long, ridgelike spine, short tail, and
fine, glossy, dark-colored hair. A big bull of the gaur or "sladang,"
as Malays call it, will stand six feet tall at the shoulders, and is
one of the greatest game animals of the world in every sense of the
word. Celebes has a curious dwarf ox, the "anoa," which is hardly
bigger than a goat. Contrasted with this is the great ungainly yak of
Tibet and the high Himalayas, where it still wanders in a wild state,
although large herds are kept by the Tibetans as beasts of burden
in a region where hardly any other large grazer can exist. Finally,
the Orient is the home of an extraordinary race of ancient domestic
animals, the white, humped cattle of India, of which many breeds exist,
modified by local conditions and purposes, and prehistorically used in
Egypt and probably southward. No wild animals of its kind exist, and we
know nothing of the origin of the race.
We now come to the most interesting species of the family, now extinct
as a wild animal, but perfectly traceable--the primitive wild ox of
Europe, the original of our farm cattle. It was much larger than any
modern breed, and bore immense, wide-spreading horns, as still do
certain coarse breeds in southern Europe, and especially in Spain,
whence the herds of long-horned cattle of America were derived.
Old bulls were black, but there is reason to suspect that the cows
and calves may have been red. This great animal roamed throughout
Europe and western Asia, and was counted among the fiercest of
game in Cæsar's time, who found it called "ur," or "aurochs"; the
former word was Latinized as _urus_, and the latter, when this ox had
disappeared, became transferred to the bison. Even in Roman times the
wild ox was growing scarce, and it died out early in the seventeenth
century. Meanwhile, from prehistoric days, calves have been tamed by
the peasantry, and such cattle as Europe and the Mediterranean basin
generally possessed were until quite recently little better than rough
descendants of this captured stock.
The so-called "wild white cattle" preserved in various British parks
are, according to Lydekker, albino descendants of the tamed native
black aurochs stock, of unknown antiquity, and are kept white (with
blackish or reddish ears and muzzles) by weeding out the dark-colored
calves which occasionally appear; but do not represent the original
aurochs as well as do the Welsh breed preserved in Pembroke since
prehistoric days. These park cattle are all of moderate size, elegantly
shaped, with soft hair, white, black-tipped horns of moderate length,
and many wild traits.