When Is a Cow Not a Cow?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "cow" (or "cu" or "kowe," among other variants) has referred to the same bovine animals for more than a thousand years. But as is also the case with the latinate labels of scientific taxonomy, vernacular terms can be misleadingly robust. For example, the lives of medieval domesticated cattle were very different from those of their remote descendants, and these differences were reflected in their bodies, their behavior, and their relationships to their human owners. In consequence, to eighteenth-century eyes, the few such herds that continued to lead medieval lives appeared to be wild animals, perhaps even surviving representatives of the aboriginal aurochs. In subsequent centuries, developments in both livestock husbandry and biological science have made it possible to analyze these animals (among many others) anatomically, physiologically, and, most recently, genomically. If the unruly behavior of throwback herds once made domesticated cattle seem wild, genetic analysis has conversely called the wildness of a different bovine species into question. The genome of many current American bison, the beneficiaries of one of the most protracted and successful wildlife conservation programs, turns out to include substantial contributions from domesticated cattle. The implications of this discovery, of course, depend on the weight attributed to genetic essence, since the animals' behavior and physical appearance have remained incontestably bisonlike. In these apparently opposing cases, changes in the animals themselves have been masked by linguistic stasis. And these changes broach larger issues of the nature of domestication and the value of wildness.