Hump Oxen

@Bumpus 11915 wrote:

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I know cattle like Brahmans, Zebus, and some others with large humps on there shoulders, and short hair on there bodies grow quite tall in size, and can withstand a lot of hotter weather than most other cattle can, and have a strong resistance disease.

They are used in many countries as oxen ( A Beast Of Burden )

I was wondering if anyone used them on logging jobs now a days.
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Bumpus,

You would think that if anyone was using Bos Indicus based cattle to log it would be in the states that border the Gulf of Mexico, or in the Southeast … Carolinas etc. I personally know of very little animal powered logging in Texas, but I understand that it is fairly common in the more northern areas of East Texas for people to use horses, primarily Belgians. I have never seen it with my own eyes though. It would make sense that it would be in that area of the state; as it is more of mixed hardwood and pine area than is Southeast Texas, which is mostly pure yellow pine.

I did have a guy tell me that a few years ago he was in Northern Louisiana, I think up between Alexandria and Monroe, and was driving down the road one Sunday morning when he came upon a guy with about 10 oxen pulling a massive log down the shoulder of the road. He said they appeared to be either straight bred Brahman or F-1’s. He said he didn’t stop and talk to the guy, so I don’t know if the fellow actually works in the woods for a living or if he was just giving his animals something to pull.

@Ixy 11967 wrote:

I don’t think for one minute anyone would farm them here, but we’d certainly have afew as pasture pets/oddities though! We don’t get regular really hot weather (only sometimes) but equally it doesn’t get super cold either. Well, we think it’s cold but it isn’t really, on a global scale. It’d be no problem to house them in cold weather – most of our cattle come in over winter anyway. We are quite unusual in that we only house from january-march. Most people house november-april

House? 😉 No ma’am! Most eared cattle don’t have the temperament to be kept in a barn. I guess if you just had just a few and you raised them real gentle like from small calves they MIGHT be calm enough to come inside. Most won’t even take to being corralled unless you have one heck of a corral; steel pipe, heavy cable wires, etc. They are generally more like wild animals than they are like domesticated cattle, at least when being handled. Usually they can be somewhat calm while out in the pasture, with no one fooling with them. Start bringing them in however and the rodeo is on.

Of course I am not talking about oxen, which I know you are into, but rather commercial cattle. Since I don’t know anyone that has ever raised one for an ox I couldn’t say how well they would take to it. I guess it can be done, because bivol has posted videos of people using them so. Interestingly though the straight bred cattle seem to be more docile than the ones that are crossed with bos Taurus cattle; they can be TOTAL idiots when you start trying to work them.

@Bumpus 11977 wrote:

The reason of them being wild is mostly because in the U.S.A. the hump
and long eared cattle are turned loose on large tracts of land
and people do not fool with them.

People who raise and use them over seas including children,
have no real trouble with them because they tend there cattle often.
Even young children can control and work them in the fields.

It’s not the cattle themselves, it’s the ones that people turn loose and never
fool with that are wild.

Mostly in Florida all the way to California in the lower states
where it gets hot.
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That is true Bumpus; there is a vast difference between the TLC that oxen get compared to southern range cattle. Still, the closest thing that I have seen to the handling that oxen get is show cattle. These are pampered, groomed, washed, and handled beauty queens (and kings). In all the years I was around the show ring the ONLY animals that I ever saw melt down and go on a wild eyed, snot slingin’ tear had a hump on their back. Of course there are all sorts of bos Indicus breeds around the world, and the breed we know as the American Brahman is actually a composite of 3 Indian breeds, so there could still be differences in temperament within the various breeds.

A breed that intrigues me from a temperament perspective, conformation and heat tolerance perspectives too is the Afrikaner. They are a Sanga breed meaning they are a hybrid between the Zebu cattle of the east and the native taurine cattle of Africa. The interesting thing is once DNA testing started some researchers in South Africa attempted to determine the genetic makeup of this breed and they found that the indicine alleles are almost entirely present only in the XX chromosomes. This would indicate that the foundation animals were not randomly bred as previously believed, but specifically mated; indicine females with taurine males …with few exceptions. Some how they were also able to determine that the breeding of the foundation animals was stabilized by about 950 to 1,000 years ago. Some animal scientists have thus classified this breed as bos Taurus Afrikanis rather than bos Indicus as previously classified. This has not been universally accepted.

The funniest thing is that Dr. Bonsma had stated, for various reasons, some 40 or 50 years ago that the only way you should develop a taurine-indicine cross would be to use bos Taurus males on bos Indicus females. It is ironic that the ancient breeders of these animals came to the same conclusion.