Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Zebu were probably fi rst tamed in or near the Thar Desert in Rajastan
in northern India. They are rare in countries with plentiful rainfall, but have
great value in deserts and semi-arid regions. They are the commonest type
of cattle in Asian deserts, in southern Africa, and on the drought-plagued
island of Madagascar.
And, as I can attest, the zebu cattle have retained the great curving lyre-
shaped horns of the aurochs. On a busy street inside the walled fort of Jais-
almer, near the Pakistan border, I was tossed to the side by an irritated zebu
that claimed the right-of-way. I did not refl ect on the evolutionary implica-
tions of our encounter at the time—I was too busy grabbing the zebu's horns
to keep from being skewered. But afterwards I realized that I was grabbing
a piece of evolutionary history. I was being roughed up by this zebu not
far from the spot, 10,000 or more years ago, where the zebu had fi rst been
domesticated.
I encountered zebu again a year later, in the Ambalavao market in central
Madagascar. Cattle herders have brought their zebu to this thriving market
town for centuries.
Zebu cattle are essential to the way of life in many parts of the under-
developed world. The Malagasy zebu are close relatives of the Indian zebu
and show little sign of having been interbred with other strains of domestic
cattle. Thus they may not have originated in nearby southern Africa, where
there has been much interbreeding of zebu with other strains of cattle. They
may instead have arrived centuries ago by a now-lost trade route from Asia.
Regardless of how they arrived, the impact of the zebu on Madagascar's
vive on some of the most abused land on the planet, the sparse grasslands
of Madagascar's central plateau that a thousand years ago were covered with
dense forest.
The people of this vast plain are desperately poor. Each year the herds-
men burn huge areas of the plateau in order to coax forth a scattering of
fresh grass.
When I walked over burned areas of the plateau, with their crisped,
utterly exhausted soils, it was like crunching across the surface of a gigan-
tic crouton. The seared landscape is rapidly eroding, washed away by riv-
