Old Cattle Breed Offers Argentina New Benefits : Health: Columbus’ <i> criollos</i> are hardy and may provide leaner, lower-cholesterol steaks.

Maybe Columbus didn’t really discover America--the locals met him on the beach--but he brought a hedge against cholesterol 500 years before anybody started worrying about it.

Argentine ranchers believe criollos , descendants of the hardy cattle Columbus carried across the sea, can be the basis of new crossbreeds that will produce leaner steaks for a diet-conscious age.

“Columbus brought the first cattle to the New World on his second voyage in 1493, and more on his third and fourth trips,” said Dr. Sol L. Rabasa, a genetecist.

“You can accurately say the animals that subsequently populated the Americas, from the Texas longhorn in the north to what we call criollo cattle in Latin America, are their direct descendants.”

Rabasa is president of the 6-year-old Argentine Criollo Cattle Breeders Assn., which is rescuing criollos from near-extinction, and breeds them on his ranch near Villa Canas, 185 miles west of Buenos Aires.

He said the criollo and its crossbreeds convert food to muscle efficiently and produce leaner meat with less marbled fat.

The Spanish word criollo is used throughout Latin America to denote people or animals born in the Americas of European parentage.

Despite nearly five centuries of independent development, Rabasa said, the Texas longhorn and Argentine criollo have the same long, angular, short-haired body and the same colors--brown, red or piebald.

Carlos E. Dawney, a rancher and association officer, said the only real difference is in the horns that give the Texas breed its name--”often 60 inches from tip to tip, longer than ours.”

Rabasa believes Columbus chose the cattle from the arid regions near Spain’s southern ports, selecting animals that were “gentle for easy handling and hardy, to stand the long trip in cramped quarters.”

They were used to establish breeding herds on Cuba and Hispaniola in the Caribbean. From there, they were taken to Mexico, the Isthmus of Panama and to Peru for distribution through Spain’s South American colonies.

Criollos arrived in Argentina in the mid-1500s and soon multiplied into tens of thousands on the pampas, one of the world’s finest natural grazing lands.

Argentina exported hides, but there was no way to preserve meat for export and most of it was left to rot.

Faster ships and use of salt as a preservative made ranching highly profitable by the 1830s. To boost production, cattlemen imported such faster-growing British breeds as the Hereford, shorthorn and Aberdeen Angus.

Zebu breeds from India, slow-growing and tough but resistant to heat and disease, were introduced in semitropical northern Argentina.

Soon the criollo was seen as inferior and began to disappear, absorbed by the herds of newcomers or banished to the least hospitable areas.

Rabasa, 75, is a former university rector noted for research. He became interested in the criollo’s potential 20 years ago when ranchers asked him about the possibility of crossing it with Zebu cattle.

“I had to tell them I didn’t know, and we set out to find some evidence,” he said in an interview.

A herd of Zebu- criollo crossbreeds was discovered on a ranch in northwest Chaco province, and “we found their production levels and meat quality were surprisingly good,” Rabasa said.

Years of research by Rabasa and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology followed, crossing the criollo with Zebu and British breeds.

Studies showed the criollo still had the gentleness prized by Columbus, combined with superior fertility, body structure that facilitates calving, resistance to disease and good milk production, Rabasa said.

“The criollo calf gets up as soon as it is born and begins to drink its mother’s milk, allowing the mother to pass more of her protective antibodies on to the calf during the first 24 hours,” he said. “The other breeds are slower to react and their calves receive fewer antibodies.”

Skin and eye pigmentation protect criollos and their crossbreeds from cancers, conjunctivitis and other ailments provoked by the bright sunlight prevalent in much of the Americas, the geneticist said.

Criollos also need water less often and can spend more time searching for food over a larger area, making them ideal for marginal land.

Rabasa and his associates began a search for pure criollos remaining in Argentina.

They found them in pockets of the arid, thorn-forested Chaco and in La Rioja, a desert province. A wild herd also turned up in the Glaciers National Park of southern Patagonia’s Andean foothills about 185 miles from the Strait of Magellan.

Registered criollo cattle now number between 1,000 and 2,000 and about 50 commercial herds use them as breeding stock.

Rabasa said efforts to preserve criollo cattle are under way in other countries, including the United States, “where a great deal is being done.”