I am still upset about the aurochs

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Let’s get this out of the way first: Yes, I would like to eat an aurochs. Maybe not an entire aurochs. The wild oxen (scientific name: Bos taurus primigenius) weighed well over a ton, about 50% more than today’s domestic cattle, their distant descendants. That’s a lot of meat, even for me. Still, I would like to have grilled an aurochs ribeye or strip steak, smoked an aurochs tri-tip, braised aurochs short ribs in miso dashi.

But I can’t, because the aurochs are extinct. The last one, a female living in Poland’s Jaktorów Forest, died¹ in 1627, bringing to an end a species that once roamed woodlands and grasslands from North Africa throughout Europe and east through Central Asia to India and even as far as the Korean Peninsula. That meant the end, too, of humanity’s relationship with the creatures. They appeared roughly 17,000 years ago on the walls of the Lascaux Cave, Aristotle name-checked them in his History of Animals, and over the centuries we appear to have transformed them into the cows we now breed, milk, and eat so industriously that they’ve become the world’s no. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gases. We owe the aurochs our civilization in many ways, yet we killed them all off without even realizing it.

What were the aurochs? Picture a cow, but bigger. Like, a lot bigger. An aurochs could reach two meters tall and weigh up to two tons. “Its skin is so large that it may serve as a bed for seven persons,” Aristotle wrote. “Its mane is covered with softer and longer hairs than that of the horse.” Its hump was massive. Its horns were long and curved and intimidating — these were not for show but for defense, or offense. The aurochs was one of the largest land mammals ever to roam Europe, and we domesticated its offspring, then offed the parents.

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What bothers me, or maybe intrigues me, about the aurochs’s disappearance is that it lies between the extinctions of prehistory and those of modernity. I don’t mourn its cave-painting cohort — the woolly mammoth or the saber-toothed tiger — the same way. Those belong to a different era, one of legends and fables. That was a time of transitions, as Homo sapiens spread around the globe and gradually invented civilization while also killing off the megafauna that defined the pre-human world: glyptodons and giant beavers and ground sloths, not to mention the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Because we can’t expect humans 20,000 years ago to have broad knowledge of the world and its ecosystems, I can accept those deaths. It almost seems as if they had to happen for our world to come into being. Although wouldn’t it be cool to have mastodons roaming Montana today, or Denisovan populations to disparage and/or culturally appropriate?

As for the modern extinctions (and near-extinctions), we should have known better. From the 19th century on, we slaughtered the dodo and the passenger pigeon and the North American bison and so, so many whales and countless other species just because we could. We wanted — or should I say “The market wanted”? — their meat, their skins, their blubber, their feathers, so we killed as many of them as we could to get those things, which in some cases was all of them. In the early 1800s, most Westerners believed in “the Great Chain of Being,” the idea of a God-given and therefore static natural order, in which all that existed now was all that had ever existed and ever would exist. But by mid-century, scientists and popular writers had significantly eroded that belief, even before Charles Darwin came along. Still, we kept killing lots of species, and we haven’t entirely stopped.

But the aurochs vanished between these two eras: By 1627, globalization was well under way, with European nations establishing colonies in the Americas and Asia, while North African pirates ventured as far as Iceland on their kidnapping raids. The end of the aurochs does not seem to have been premeditated slaughter. Instead, it was a gradual winnowing. According to this article in TheExtinctions.com, which cites the out-of-print and hard-to-find book Retracing the Aurochs, the animal was known to Julius Caesar from the forests of Germania, but disappeared from Denmark and the Netherlands in the first century CE, and from France in the ninth century. By the 16th and 17th centuries, the aurochs was only in the Polish Royal forests, looked after by gamekeepers; in 1564, they identified just 38. “In 1620,” the article states, “the last aurochs bull died and its horn was ornamented and is now at the national armoury of Stockholm.” I can’t find a cause of death for the final aurochs, in 1627, but whether it died of natural causes or was hunted, we can say man was responsible for the extinction. We grew in population, destroyed or transformed the aurochs’ natural habitat, hunted its members, and made its survival impossible.

And once we finally killed them all, we didn’t even realize it. One 1816 issue of The Philosophical Magazine declares, “The aurochs is now an almost extinct breed, and it is only in Lithuania that it is to be met with: It should seem as if this species had been very abundant in the forests of that part of Europe, as well as in those of Hungary.” This was two whole centuries since the last aurochs had walked the earth.

What strikes me about this one extinction is that it so easily could have not happened. If those Polish royal gamekeepers had kept the game a little better, if a few more aurochs had survived in the wilds of broader Eastern Europe — or Siberia or the mountains of Central Asia, for that matter — then maybe they’d’ve stuck around a bit longer. Maybe enough would have made it that in the late 20th century, we would have recognized their value and begun to protect their habitats, even if only so we could breed, milk, and eat them as well.

More likely, though, we would have slaughtered them all in the 19th century anyway. And even if they’d survived that, we might have come to hate them anyway, because in Nazi Germany the aurochs became an emblem of ancestral purity, and scientists began efforts to resurrect the animal. According to this article in Undark, two brothers, zoo directors Lutz and Heinz Heck:

Those Heck cattle are, it turns out, still around, and are being used in limited rewilding efforts across Europe. Which is great, except that in some cases they’ve turned out to be too aggressive for farmers to keep around. As one Devon farmer told The Guardian in 2015, “The ones we had to get rid of would just attack you any chance they could. They would try to kill anyone. Dealing with that was not a lot of fun at all. I have worked with a range of different animals from bison to deer and I have never come across anything like these. They are by far and away the most aggressive animals I have ever worked with. Some were perfectly calm and quiet and they are the ones we have kept. The others you could not go near.” Off to the abattoir they went.

Two other not-Nazi-connected back-breeding attempts — the Tauros Programme and the Uruz Project — also seem to have had some success, enough that Henri Kerkdijk-Otten, the Tauros researcher who founded Uruz, could actually describe to Modern Farmer the flavor of his cattle: “Their meat almost has a wild taste: It is marbled, tender and juicy and full of omega 3 and 6, vitamins like B12 and E, and iron.”

No word, however, on what kind of cheese they produce. I have a feeling an aurochs cow is simply not interested in standing around to be milked. Perhaps — and this is just a crazy idea — once they’ve successfully back-bred a true aurochs, they could then selectively breed ones that are slightly more docile, that produce more milk and more meat, and that are maybe even a tad smaller, so they can be moved around the planet more easily. I’m telling you, that would be a popular animal! Any idea what you’d name such a thing? 🪨🪨🪨

From Trying! reader Nathan Deuel, coincidentally published in The New York Times Magazine a day before my own piece on driving: