The Animal Highlight

S5E10: Heck Cattle - Where Nazi Eugenics Meets Modern Rewilding

• Claudia Hirtenfelder and Virginia Thomas • Season 5 • Episode 10

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Fierce, controversial, and caught between worlds—Heck cattle embody the complex intersection of dark history and modern conservation. This final episode of Season 5 of the Animal Highlight explores how these bovines were deliberately bred by Nazi zoologists in the 1920s and now find themselves at the center of rewilding debates across Europe.

Recorded: 14 December 2023 


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Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

 

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Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Siobhan O'Sullivan:

This is another iRaw podcast. We podcast to make the world a better place for animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Welcome back to season five of the Animal Highlights, where we're focused on animals and politics. All the content from this season has been extracted from season six of the Animal Turn podcast, which is a season of the same name Animals and Politics. In this final animal highlight, Virginia had a little bit of an open book to work with, and she decided to speak about heck cattle and their breeding. This includes how they were historically bred by members of the German National Socialist Party and how they're currently being repositioned within rewilding campaigns. This is very political indeed. Well, Virginia, we've made it. It's the final animal highlight. Thank you so much for all of the work that you've done over the course of this season. I've learned so much from you and and I'm really delighted about who you're going to be talking about today I really think this is a fascinating case yeah, well.

Virginia Thomas:

Well, thanks for the opportunity. Really thank you, but also thanks for this one, because this one, you know, with the other highlights I tried quite hard to make them fit with the program interviews or podcast interviews, but this one I could just kind of pick, had free reign to pick what I wanted to. So today I really want to talk about Het Cattle because their story is so fascinating.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, I remember reading about this while doing my preparing for my PhD. Obviously, everything was cows. I still tend to use cows instead of cattle, but that's my own quirk, I know I confuse people with it.

Virginia Thomas:

Well, I think that's the English language. We do default to cows when we mean cattle.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, I mean, I do it because the word cattle etymologically it actually previously didn't only include cows. It used to historically be cows, sheep, sheep, people. It was because cattle meant property, so it's kind of got etymological links to property and to capital and so all of the things that I want to disrupt these animals being equated with. So cow does it link to chapel?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

yeah, exactly yeah, okay, so only over like time have various people and animals been removed from the category of cattle and it's like a form of movable property like cattle. So yeah, and I know that I always, whenever I write papers or anything, people are like why are you using cow instead of cattle? Cattle is the collective noun for cows and I'm like, no, but anyway, I'm not trying to, I'm just saying and also following people like Catherine Gillespie and others that kind of say it's an important move to do that, to kind of use Cal. But that's a different discussion for another day, because this is already a jam-packed, full highlight and a fascinating, really, really fascinating case study. So I'm going to let you take it away, sure.

Virginia Thomas:

But just to say as well, they came up when I was doing my PhD as well, and that's why I've chosen them, really because they come up in rewilding. So heck cattle are interesting politically for two reasons. The first relates to their origins in the Heck brothers. The second relates to biopolitics and the governance of heck cattle as liminal animals caught between wildness and domesticity. Heck cattle are named after the Heck brothers who first bred them, created them really, in the 1920s and 30s.

Virginia Thomas:

Heinz and Lutz Heck were German zoologists who managed the Munich and Berlin zoos respectively. They bred the animals we now know as Heck cattle in a deliberate attempt to recreate extinct wild bovines the aurochs, from whom domestic cattle are descended. Extinct wild bovines, the aurochs from whom domestic cattle are descended. Aurochs were huge, roughly the same size as bison. Bulls could be almost two meters tall at the shoulder, and cows weren't much smaller. Aurochs were sexually dimorphic, with the males and females as being very different. The bulls were black while the cows were red. Those cows and bulls had large, distinctively shaped horns, similar to the horns of today's Spanish fighting bulls. Like Spanish fighting bulls, aurochs would have been fierce, aggressive animals, very different from most of the domestic cattle we're familiar with today, and in attempting to recreate the aurochs, the heckbubbers were deliberately trying to de-domesticate cattle through a process of breeding back. They wanted to produce a pure wild bovine, not tainted or degenerated by domestication, something which was considered a mutation of wild genes. Part of their motivation was linked to their association with the German National Socialist Party. The Nazi ideology of eugenics extended to animals as well as people, and they were interested in producing a master race of cattle for the Third Reich. To an extent, the Heck brothers succeeded.

Virginia Thomas:

Heck cattle are large, although nowhere near as large as aurochs were, and not even as large as some modern domestic cattle breeds. Het cows and bulls both have horns, although their horns are not as large or as distinctively shaped as the aurochs were, and het cattle aren't sexually dimorphic the way the aurochs were. Both cows and bulls can be almost any colour, from black to red. Like aurochs, though, het cattle are fierce and notoriously aggressive to humans. Despite the relative success of the het brothers in creating het cattle, their cattle are controversial today, not least because of their association with the Nazis, but also because of their liminal status as neither wild nor domestic.

Virginia Thomas:

So let's back up a little bit and acknowledge the process by which animals go from being wild to being domestic. Human intervention in animal reproduction produce the domestic species we recognize today, including domestic cattle, and it's specifically human influence on animal breeding what we call artificial selection, as opposed to natural selection, which is seen as a key element of domestication. So even with breeding back, which is supposed to be a method of de-domestication to recreate an extinct wild species, the fact that humans are intervening in animals breeding means that some people still consider it a domestication process. In their view, it's essentially impossible for humans to produce a wild animal, because if an animal is the product of human intervention, then by default it's a domestic species. So a major criticism of the heck is that they're not actually a wild species. They're merely a simulacrum of the aurochs, which leaves them in an interesting position with respect to their relationship with people. It can be argued that they're not really wild, but they're not meant to be considered domestic either, so it's unclear what our relationship with them might be.

Virginia Thomas:

Despite concerns over their provenance and their authenticity, pet cattle have been embraced by rewilding advocates because of their potential to help regenerate wilder landscapes. Large herbivores are seen as crucial in landscape creation, so are a key element of rewilding projects, particularly in Europe. Part of the reason rewilders are so interested in het cattle for this role is that they can live independently from humans. Can live independently from humans. They were bred to be extremely hardy, to be able to survive in harsh conditions and to be capable of subsisting on diets that are very low in nutrition, without supplementary feeding or any other management by people. Rewilders hope that het cattle can play the role of the aurochs in the landscape, grazing in a naturalistic way, disturbing vegetation and breaking up ground, all of which creates opportunities for other species and so contributes to increasing biodiversity. Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Streisand have written about this in relation to het cattle involved in the Oesvardensplasse rewilding project in the Netherlands.

Virginia Thomas:

But rewilding, like like het cattle themselves, is controversial. While it's heralded as the holy grail of ecological restoration by its proponents, others have concerns over rewilding, particularly over how much or how little human intervention is involved, and het cattle have become caught up in these wider debates. In their paper on het cattle in the Espadas Plaza, in their paper on het cattle in the aspartus placer, laura and dryson talk about how het cattle and people become entangled in the landscape of the rewilding project, the extent to which people should or shouldn't intervene in the lives of the animals involved in rewilding projects is particularly interesting with respect to het cattle because they're liminal animals, neither wild nor domestic. This has significant implications for how they're liminal animals, neither wild nor domestic. This has significant implications for how they're conceptualized and therefore how they're treated.

Virginia Thomas:

Even though hecatl are hardy and, theoretically at least, capable of living independently from humans, scholars question whether this is really the case and, even if they are, whether we should allow them to. Do we have a responsibility towards them as a domestic species or should we allow them their own agency as wild animals? The difficulty is that they're both wild and domestic, and neither wild nor domestic. And in response to the status of liminal animals like het, cattle involved in rewilding projects like Jus, fardusplasser, lorimer and Dyson have identified new systems of biopolitics the governance of life and death which relate to our relationships with these animals, and these biopolitics the governance of life and death which relate to our relationships with these animals and these biopolitics are different from those relating to purely wild or domestic animals. They attempt to accommodate the new human-animal relations which emerge as a result of rewilding, and these biopolitics will need to continue to evolve if we're to establish multi-species flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Really interesting.

Virginia Thomas:

Yeah, I guess I don't know if I'm as attached to kind of the divide between domestic and wild anyway, I mean that's a really interesting question, you know, are they binary, is it wild or domestic, or is it a spectrum?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

wild or domestic, or is it a spectrum? Yeah, I mean I think it's. It's quite context specific, like I think you can have, probably you know, because then you've got concepts like feral coming up as well. Right where they're, they're domestic animals, but in effect they've they've gone wild. Like what is? What does that mean? Where does wild begin and domestic end?

Virginia Thomas:

and that's the thing. Why? Why are they feral? Why aren't they wild again?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

yeah, so so, like we're, there's a lot of border policing and I understand that kind of impetus. I'm not saying do away with the, the concepts there they're all useful concepts to use but when you're kind of policing this neat boundary between they are wild and they are domestic and you know, this is how we treat domestic animals, this is how we treat wild animals. Yeah, I mean, like you say, these, these kinds of biopolitical relationships are evolving and yeah, I've definitely got some ambivalent feelings myself towards rewilding, particularly in terms of how it oftentimes also entails kind of moving animals from one community to another community. There's a lot of thorny, tricky questions involved in rewilding.

Virginia Thomas:

Yeah, and I think the reason people get so excited isn't the right word but so adamant about whether something is wild or whether it is domestic, is because of those ways we treat animals and how much or how little we intervene, and whether we owe them responsibilities because they're domestic or whether we should allow them their own sovereignty.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

As an aside, just when you were speaking about their kind of entanglement of the head cows with the Nazi party, the nationalist party. It's really interesting. One of the kind of things that came up through my research was just how much cows are entangled with nationalism generally. So that's quite, and I'm talking about everything from Americans taking dairy cows with them to the Antarctica as a means of trying to say that we've laid claim to the space, to Christopher Columbus having cows on his second voyage to South America to say like cows have really been kind of caught up in national projects forever in ways many other domesticated animals aren't. So it's not surprising to me that they've kind of become this poster child for back breeding as well.

Virginia Thomas:

Well, that's a good point, because they're I mean the Heck brothers did back-greed other animals, but you don't hear about that nearly as much. There's the Heck horse, I think, but you don't hear about them.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, it's really. I mean, there's always this I know Andrea Petit, she does a lot of work on this kind of. There always seems to be horse, cows and humans. They always seem to come up together at the same time. Like I know, stud books the first kind of quote, unquote stud book was from a horse, but it was very loosely done. It wasn't really kind of recording the genes.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And of course these herd books are an essential tool of domestication. Right, this follows the lineages of both male and female bovines or animals to kind of create a breed. But the very first kind of recorded herd book was for a cow, short horns. So it's one of the oldest kind of activities of making a breed, making a domesticated animal. Anyway, I could talk about this forever and ever. Really fascinating set of kind of tensions you've brought together there. So I really appreciate it and thank you once again for all of your work on the animal highlights this season. You put in a lot of work and they were really fascinating. So thank you. Thank for all of your work on the animal highlights this season. You put in a lot of work and they were really fascinating.

Virginia Thomas:

So thank you, thank you, thank you well, thank you for having me and thank you for all your work with the animal turn it's.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It's been a real pleasure and a real honor to work on it thank you to virginia thomas for being an incredible co-host to Animals in Philosophy, politics and Law and Ethics, apple for sponsoring the Animal Turn podcast, where this content was taken from, and to Rebecca Shen for her amazing sketches and design work. I'm sure you will agree that the logo and all of the episode artwork are amazing, amazing, amazing. And if you are interested in having a t-shirt some of it on go and check out our merch store online. This episode was edited and produced by myself. This is the animal highlight, with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.

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