The First Breed of Cattle

Chapter 3 interrogates the concept of a “native” breed within the context of pedigree cattle breeding in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. It centers on Hereford cattle, which began their career as a hardy regional breed of varied appearance. As cattle breeders increasingly turned towards recorded pedigrees as guarantees of value, and pure-breeding (mating closely-related animals to narrow a genotype) became the became the desired goal, if not always the practical norm, within the industry, Hereford cattle increasingly failed to measure up against “improved” varieties like the Shorthorn breed. “Nativeness” initially operated as a proxy for purity in the case of Hereford cattle, as the close connection between type and place worked in favour of the breed, but over time, breeders turned to other measures. Phenotypic uniformity became paramount at mid-century by which time all Herefords displayed red coats and white faces, and its “native” character began to expand beyond its original region to take on national trappings in conjunction with a growing national taste for British beef.

Much Ado about Mutton

This chapter examines the fraught attempts to acclimatize Spanish merino sheep in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Proponents of the merino were motivated by the commercial value of merino wool, which is and was exceptionally fine, but the debate over the merino’s place in Britain ultimately came down to its flesh. The breed’s opponents argued that merino mutton was inferior to that of British breeds like the New Leicester, and further that the fineness of merino wool was dependent upon Spain’s climate and environment. The long and acrimonious controversy which attended the merino’s attempted naturalization in Great Britain revealed the degree to which competing understandings of the relative influence of climate or environment and anthropogenic selection in sheep-breeding unsettled the very category of breed itself. Ultimately, attempts to acclimatize merino sheep in Britain failed, as its wool (although finer than that of “native” British breeds) grew coarser under Britain’s damper climate, and its leaner carcass offended the proud palates of British diners.

Introduction

This chapter uses the case of Soay sheep, one of the United Kingdom’s most ancient and remote breeds of sheep to pose the central question of the book: what is the relationship between place and type in both the practice of and rhetoric surrounding British breeds of sheep and cattle in the nineteenth century? This relationship pivoted on the notion of the “native” breed, a category whose meaning shifted over time but nonetheless structured efforts to selectively breed sheep and cattle in both Britain and its empire during the period of study. Attention to breed as a category, this chapter argues, can revitalize scholarly conversation and inquiry around animals and environmental history, much of which has focused on the level of species, and thereby overlooked some of the most important features of ecological imperialism in the nineteenth century.

A Universal Type

This chapter addresses the wholesale exportation of Hereford cattle to North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1870s as part of a concerted effort to feed Britons with “British” meat bred and raised abroad, and returned to the metropole as frozen meat. In their enthusiasm to profit from foreign demand for British stock, Hereford breeders allowed their (quasi-)colonial competitors to establish their own reservoirs of the breed’s genetic potential. After American breeders severed ties with their British counterparts over the lack of stringency in English pedigrees, these two branches of the bovine family tree developed in isolation. While English Herefords increasingly gained status as a national breed, shedding their regional association with the county of Hereford for a perceived Britishness, Herefords in America became a new, quasi-colonial “native” breed, much like New Zealand’s Corriedale breed of sheep.

Native Colonials

Chapter 4 turns to colonial New Zealand where questions about the relationship of type to place played out on an imperial scale. As the global price of wool plummeted in the 1860s, pastoralists in New Zealand reconfigured their predominantly merino flocks to serve a new refrigerated trade between Great Britain and her Australasian colonies. Where New Zealand breeders had predominantly focused on wool production, with the advent of refrigerated shipping in the early 1880s, they began to breed for meat as well as wool. Colonial producers throughout Australasia discovered that British diners preferred the meat of British breeds: merino mutton from the colonies did not find a ready market in London. To satisfy the contradictory demands of colonial climate and topography, which varied from Britain’s, and metropolitan demand, New Zealand breeders constructed novel colonial breeds, like the Corriedale, forged out of a cross between British longwool stock and merino sheep. They touted these types as “native” colonial breeds, thereby adding another layer of complexity to the concept, and making a rhetorical claim as settlers of a distant land only recently wrested from the indigenous Maori people.

The Return of the Native Breed

The developments outlined in Chapter 5 set the stage for the late-twentieth-century invention of “Traditional” Hereford cattle, defined as those animals whose entire lineage could be traced to individuals bred only within the British Isles. Traditional Herefords became central players in rare breeds conservation—a revival of interest in “native” British breeds, many of which had been pushed to the side lines of the livestock industry in favour of larger, faster-maturing, and meatier foreign breeds. As Canadian and American Herefords returned to their erstwhile native land beginning in the 1970s, proponents of the English variety privileged environmental factors over shared genetic roots in their delineation between Traditional and modern Herefords. Such a stance implicitly denied imperialism as a reciprocal process in which the creole formations of the colonies come “home” to roost.

A Breed in Any Other Place

This chapter explores “native” British breeds within the context of agricultural improvement at the turn of the nineteenth century, arguing that the idea of a native breed arose at the same time and in opposition to that of an “improved” breed. Breeds were understood to encompass the relationship between heredity, anthropogenic selection, and the influence of climate or environment, although which of these factors was understood to take precedence could and did vary. As breeders increasingly selected their animals for early maturity, meatiness, or particular kinds of wool in the case of sheep in conformation with market imperatives, “native” came to signal a type of livestock defined more by its relationship to a particular place within Great Britain than by its degree of breeding. A growing propensity for moving animals from place to place, and combining existing breeds into new types of livestock, such as Shorthorn cattle or New Leicester sheep, informed these developments.