Portugal: cows are returning to the wild

Brut America

Thousands of years ago, cows were domesticated. Now it's time for some of them to return to the wild.   That's the experiment carried out by Portugal and shown in this documentary broadcasted on ARTE.

Transcript

00:00Here, the animals have to appropriate the environment themselves, find the best food,

00:29and hide when they are in danger.

00:32We see that from one generation to the next, they are changing their behavior, they become

00:41real wild animals again.

00:43And even for me, it's incredible to see that this happens in a few years.

00:59The Orocs were probably present all over Europe, and there were huge herds of hundreds of thousands,

01:13maybe millions, dispersed all over Europe.

01:25We are convinced that an animal that looks the most like an Oroc, without being a copy,

01:34has greater chances of survival.

01:37It needs big horns to defend itself against wolves, it needs to be high on the legs to

01:47be able to cover large distances.

01:50We really need these primitive characteristics, which are still present in many races in Europe.

02:20In a lot of cases, it's useless.

02:39Why should you de-domesticate pigs, for example, when you still have the wild boar?

02:44But in the case of horses, and especially the bovine, the wild ancestor is gone.

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