The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 207

'No, it's a Bronze Age cow. Their cows were smaller than they are
today - about the size of Dexters. Now what's this?'
He lifted it up and I took it with both hands. It must have been
eight inches across and have weighed a couple of pounds. I stared
dumbly at it in the light of my torch.
'Atlas vertebra of, of - a mammoth?'
'What, in the Bronze Age?!'
'I - I haven't the faintest idea.'
'It's the same species as the first one.'
He told me that this was the animal from which domestic cattle
were first bred. The wild cows were slightly bigger than those of mod-
ern cattle, but the bulls were massively greater: vast, heavy-shouldered
animals with monstrous horns. As I turned the bone over in my hands,
feeling its weight, feeling the years fall away, feeling myself, in that
cave of Bronze Age junk, fall with them, I experienced what seemed
like an electric jolt. The great weight of the bone, the knowledge of
what it was, the sense - so clean and new it seemed - that the beast
whose head it bore might have been hunted and slaughtered not
3,000 years ago but so recently that I could almost reach out and
place my palm on the sweat and hair of its cooling flank ran through
my arms and fulminated in my head, almost with a flash of light. It
might have been at this point that the imaginative journey began
which, many years later, led to this topic.
The brothers Ludwig and Heinz Heck, respectively the directors of
the Berlin and Munich zoos during the period of Nazi rule - a time in
which zookeeping was a political activity - were not content with
reconstructing the aurochs in their minds. They wanted to create a
real one. 34 Like the scientists in Jurassic Park , they sought to resurrect
this animal, as well as the ancestral horse, from genetic material; but
in this case the material carried by the wild animal's descendants. As
Konrad Lorenz hoped to do with human beings, they tried to strip
cattle of their domestic traits so that the purified, uncivilized beast
within could break, pawing and roaring, out of its degenerate husk.
As was so often the case with the declarations the Nazis made, the
success the Heck brothers claimed for their attempts at genetic rever-
sal was exaggerated. They maintained that, in the space of just twelve
years, they had re-created the aurochs. All they did, in reality, was to