I’ve said before that I thought the animal genetic resources community had got its act together a bit better than us plants people as far as information and communications are concerned. But now I’m having second thoughts. Let’s start with FAO’s Animal Production and Health Division. It has a webpage on Implementing the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources. One component of that is the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS). So far so good. But that includes a database of breeds. And so does ILRI’s Domestic Animal Genetic Resources Information System (DAGRIS), though admittedly this one has trait information too. And I haven’t even begun to dig into the national and regional stuff. Is this the beginning of Livestock Breed Database Hell? Oh, and ILRI also has a separate site on Animal Genetic Training Resources (AGTR).
Ox-cart racing in the Punjab
This wonderfully evocative piece on ox-cart racing in Pakistan was originally posted to DAD-Net by Dr M. Sajjad Khan, professor in the Department of Animal Breeding & Genetics at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan. It is reprinted here, along with a photograph of the event, by kind permission of the author. Our thanks to him, and our best wishes for his work.
I thought to share a very learning experience of organizing (more correctly, witnessing) an ox-race competition. The competition was organized in connection with University’s golden jubilee celebrations this year at one of the sub-campuses of the University (Toba Tek Singh), some 90 km from Faisalabad and 200 km from Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. This was part of the Technology Transfer Day and Kissan Mela. I had seen a few ox-related competitions before, including fast ploughing, load pulling, circular speeding, speed threshing, ox-walk etc etc. This was ox-cart racing.
Some 60 ox-pairs (with cart behind), driven by an experienced rider, competed in 10 heats and a final. There were no written rules but everybody understood them. Judges did not have any special uniform but their decisions were final. No grass on the ground. No pistol and no flag at the starting point, just a call by the starter (who has been doing this since his teenage years). No lines except the finish line (marked by white lime powder and redrawn just before the final, the eleventh race). No police to control the mob of thousands (all volunteers plus few boy scouts that we had added).
The high ground near the finish line had by this time been covered with tents and chairs for a few of us and for guests (who cannot sit on feet for hours). The ground was some 1540 feet long. The roar of mob indicated that the race had started. Each race lasted for less than a minute, and ended with thousands of people running after the participants. Then one could only hear the loud voice of drums and see the storm of dust moving and settling. The oxen were covered with decorated clothes again. The Rs bills are thrown into the air repeatedly and many dance around the winners. The festivity would continue for about half an hour with the last fifteen minutes also used for reorganizing things for the next heat. Villages were competing with villages, casts with casts, localities with localities, and there were some individual clashes as well. Some of the heats were a photo-finish and a video camera did help to resolve which foot (not nose) touched the white line first.
Two indigenous breeds were generally represented: Hissar (mainly) and Dhann (which is the main breed in such competitions held in northern Punjab). Some were crosses between nondescript Desi and Dhanni. I did chat with at least a few who had been competing for decades. I recall that when I was doing the State of the World report for Pakistan, I thought breeds historically used for ploughing might fade out soon, but now my feeling is that it will take a lot longer than I had thought. People are taking care of some of the indigenous breeds very differently. Most of the bulls had a price tag of a million Rs. Judging for beauty was a challenge but I found many experienced hands helping me to go through it honorably without a feud.
I am really exposed to a new world yet again (after the goat show). Yes, we should encourage these activities and help people to have improved and humane utilization of indigenous resources. At the University, we are likely to develop an ox-cart race track in near future and it will be fun to be part of such festivities.
The photos of the event will be posted on the project website soon.
Nibbles: Bees and climate change, Native American seeds and health, Sustainable harvesting and cultivation, Tree death, Grass and C, Vegetables, Fishmeal, Big Milk
Today: Connections Edition, in which we pick low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, and join up the dots.
- The return of a US bumblebee. Is it due to climate change?
- “These foods have meaning” for a Native American tribe (and for Africans for that matter). So will they be able to check out their seeds? And sequence the hell out of them, like rice?
- If you want to harvest palm heart sustainably in the Colombian Andes, only take 10% of any population a year. Is cultivation an option?
- Trees are dying in the Sahel. And yet boffins don’t know how to kill them. No word on what the grass is doing.
- Vegetables and nutrition: the theory and the practice. Of course, a lot of them are grown in cities.
- Why is so much fish made into fishmeal rather than eaten? Location, location, location. Of markets, that is. Kind of like for milk.
Nibbles: Maize and beans, Kenyan stories, Mesopotamia, Rice Domestication, Food economics, Pest control
- The climate change boys have been looking for places where maize and beans will, and will not, thrive.
- An Australian journalist reports from Kenya, courtesy of The Crawford Fund.
- Rewriting the metanarrative of The Fertile Crescent.
- Dorian Fuller goes on to examine recent papers on rice and millet domestication … so we don’t have to.
- Back40 previews Tyler Cowan’s new book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. Can I wait until April?
- How to control stemborers and striga with agrobiodiversity. Undated. Is it new?
- Arche Noah revitalized? Again, is this new? C’mon people, date those suckers.
How endangered are Shropshire sheep?
You may have seen stories in the past week or so of a flock of Shropshire sheep that authorities in Canada have threatened with destruction. The sheep belong to Montana Jones, who raises them at her Wholearth Farm, near Hastings in Peterborough. Five years ago she sold a ewe to a farmer in Alberta, and that sheep has been diagnosed with scrapie. As a result, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency wants to destroy other animals from the same flock who are infected or suspected of being infected.
One problem for Montana Jones is that the test “is only about 85% accurate”. So the sheep that tested positive may not have scrapie, although I have no idea what that 85% figure actually means. False positives? False negatives? What?
It is a long time since I last had to get my ahead around scrapie, the risks to humans (it is not “mad sheep disease”), the different breed susceptibilities, and the different approaches to eradication. All of those are important issues, I am sure. What concerns me about Montana Jones’ case is whether the appeal to the rarity of Shropshire sheep justifies not taking the precaution of slaughtering some of the flock.
Of course it is heart-breaking to lose animals you have lavished care on, especially when you feel that the action is not justified. But while Shropshires may be very rare in Canada, with all kinds of historical attachments, they are in pretty reasonable shape elsewhere, for example at their home in the UK. (Here is a wool nut’s view of the UK Rare Breeds Survival Trust’s rankings.) I wonder, too, how much genetic diversity the Canadian flocks represent. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone were able to genemap all the Shropshires around the world, in order to be able to show the CFIA just what we would be losing if they go ahead with their plan to cull half of Montana Jones’ flock?
By all means go ahead and sign the petition to save those Shropshires, but consider, too, that evidence of their genetic importance might just carry more weight.