Why Aurochs?

I have a bit of a thing about aurochs, and have for some years.

The great hairy cows of our ancient landscape died out in the 1600s, or more precisely, were hounded to extinction by humans. They are just one of the many lost things that haunt me. Our bears and wolves have gone, we don’t really have beavers. The cranes are being helped to make a come-back because there are European populations to draw on. The small leafed limes that once dominated our woodlands are scarce. Keeping the dead present, is important. Remembering the lost, and being aware that there has been a lot of genocide against species down the centuries. We wipe out so much diversity, destroy so much beauty, and I cannot honour nature without facing up to the awful history of how humans have treated the natural world. And how we still treat the rest of nature.

There are so many things we could lose, or have come close to losing. Our otters are back from the brink, but still vulnerable. Our Scottish wildcats are endangered. We nearly lost the red kits and the ravens. Cuckoos are in decline, our bird and insect populations as a whole are suffering. Bees and hedgehogs, badgers and bats. Reports into UK wildlife this year have been gloomy to say the least. Extinction is forever, and no one should consider that acceptable. (To borrow from the Green Party, we should not go round seeing other species as expendable.)

Aurochs wandered through our ancient landscapes. I’ve seen what smaller, modern cows do to woodland, churning up the soil, eating the saplings and low growth, knocking over the odd smaller tree. What would one creature, two meters high to the shoulder, do in a forest? What would a herd of them do? It would be destructive. And yet, forests are at their most lively and diverse not in the deep treed areas, but on the margins. Most of woodland life happens at the edges, with groves and glades a critical part of that. I postulate, quite simply, that herds of aurochs created groves.

There are many wild flowers that only now thrive in woodland when there are regular cycles of cutting and pollarding to let the light in. Did they evolve in response to human wood management techniques, or something older? How much of the landscape did we lose when we lost our wild cattle?

I picture the power and majesty of the auroch. Little domestic cows are scary enough when they run at you. An auroch would be terrifying, awe-inspiring.

I miss them.

They haunt me, and they carry a message about wildlife, about all that is so precarious just now, all that could be lost. No species is expendable. No species is worth killing off to further some financial end. No road, no building project, no faster train… none of it justifies the loss of a creature, a plant species, a type of insect. Every time we destroy something forever, we wreak unknown havoc on the eco system as a whole. There are trees that will die out because they needed the dodos to germinate their seeds. Without the bees, as a species we will be stuffed. If we can’t be responsible from a sense of duty, we really ought to be able to do it from a place of wanting to survive.