Age-old dance of hunter and the hunted

THE other day I went for a walk with my son Sam and our dog. It ended up with a bit of an incident. We were crossing a field full of cattle when suddenly the cattle attacked and the dog decided to defend.

They darted forward in an offensive phalanx and the dog protected us with much barking and aggressive behaviour. It wouldn’t have been very significant apart from the fact that I noticed that the herd of cattle included a bull. I don’t believe in messing with bulls. They kill a surprising number of people every year. Sam and I retreated but we had considerable difficulty in persuading the dog to join in our strategic withdrawal.

Sam was cross with the dog for being disobedient. So was I, but I was also fascinated by what was going on because the patterns of behaviour in the field had a very ancient ancestry.

The cattle, like all cattle everywhere in the world, were descended from a wild animal called an aurochs. The aurochs was once widely distributed in Europe, eastern Asia and north Africa. But its numbers dwindled because it was hunted, the meadows it grazed on were appropriated by farmers and, possibly, because of inter-breeding with domestic cattle.

By the late Middle Ages, wild aurochs were only found in Poland, which at the time included some of the Baltic states. They survived there because feudal Poland had very strict hunting laws. Only the King was allowed to hunt aurochs, and he didn’t seem to do this very frequently. In between times his gamekeepers zealously guarded the herds.

Despite this, the last wild aurochs in the world, a female, died of natural causes in 1627.

The origin of dogs is not quite so clear. Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian biologist who founded the science of studying animal behaviour in the first half of the twentieth century, believed that most dogs were descended from jackals rather than wolves. He was a very brilliant scientist but he worked at a time before the development of modern genetics and it seems that in this instance he was wrong. Dogs are, in fact, largely descended from wolves.

The aurochs was first domesticated quite recently, less than 10,000 years ago. Wolves were domesticated long before, perhaps as early as a 100,000 years ago.

IT’S generally assumed that early Stone Age people domesticated wolves to help them to hunt large game, like aurochs. There is another theory which is rather more humiliating. It suggests that these early people were such inefficient hunters, and wolves were so good at it, that bands of humans followed wolf packs around and fed on the left-overs from their kills.

However, the first association came about, there’s no doubt that dogs and men hunted cattle together over vast periods of time and that this activity has probably left genetic traces.

Wolves, given the opportunity, specialise on preying on animals larger than themselves — deer, musk-oxen, bison, and, at one time, aurochs. The hunt takes a long time. The wolves worry and harass the herd, wearing it down and trying to isolate a weak or young animal. They have immense stamina.

The aurochs would defend themselves by forming a phalanx, with the weak and young animals on the inside, and the strongest individuals at the front, facing the wolf pack and trying to intimidate it. If you watch a television documentary about lions hunting Cape buffalo in Africa, you will see exactly the same patterns of behaviour.

But what really fascinated me was watching this age-old game being played out in real life in an ordinary field in rural Ireland. The descendant of the wolf, the descendent of the aurochs and the descendant of the Paleolithic hunter locked into an ancient pattern.

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