Movement Takes Hold to Save Rare Domestic Breeds : Agriculture: Belted cows and fainting goats are among domestic animals that are fast disappearing. Now there’s an effort to identify and preserve this genetic diversity.

Ask anybody who knows turkeys and you’ll get a dumb turkey story. Turkeys are so dumb they’ll look up to watch the rain falling and stay transfixed until they drown. Turkeys are so dumb that in a rush to make it back to the coop, the first one in will stop just inside the door, while the rest of the flock piles up behind it in a massive heap of poultry flesh and feathers.

The plain truth of the matter is that turkeys aren’t bred to be smart. In fact, they’re not even bred for breeding. Turkeys are bred to be roasted for Thanksgiving dinner, sliced on a sandwich or even ground into an ersatz burger. And that means they’ve got to have lots of breast meat.

“These are turkeys with no brains but big breasts,” said Donald E. Bixby, head of the American Minor Breeds Conservancy. The breasts are so large they interfere with mating, and the turkeys must be artificially inseminated--all part of modern-day turkey production.

Today, the vast majority of livestock that supplies the seemingly insatiable demand for food and fiber in this country is, like the turkey, bred to serve a single purpose and to be amazingly--and dangerously--similar.

Out of a multitude of breeds of turkeys and chickens, for example, as few as a dozen breeds ever make their way to America’s dining tables. Whereas a colorful variety of cows once were raised for meat and milk, two breeds now dominate: Holsteins for milk and Angus for beef.

While agribusiness relies increasingly on fewer and fewer breeds of animals, dozens of breeds of livestock have become extinct in the last century and 100 or so more have become endangered in the United States alone. Among them, red, brown and even “belted” cows, fainting goats and six-horned sheep, hairy pigs and wool-less lambs.

These are animals whose traits gave them value in America’s rural past and, many conservationists now say, make them valuable to agriculture’s future.

Increasingly, through regulations and public attitudes, modern agribusiness is being asked to be less hazardous to the environment, more sustainable and more careful in its use of resources--including animals. Many of the livestock breeds discarded on the way to high-production specialization are better suited to such goals.

What they are not necessarily suited for, however, is economical farming. Some of those who raise endangered farm animals have been successful in finding niche markets for their livestock; others are diluting the bloodlines of their rare animals to make them more cost-effective to raise.

Armed with the knowledge that the loss of genetic diversity brings the loss of adaptability, the U.S. government is now preparing to include domestic livestock in its overall programs of conservation. Scientists, bureaucrats and even Congress are joining together to formulate guidelines for which breeds to save, and how, so that their genetic traits will be available for future breeding.

The Department of Agriculture has recommended a conservation program that would include assessing the attributes of various breeds, a genetic mapping effort similar to the current ongoing program to map human genes, establishment of a data bank and preservation through sperm and embryo storage and live conservation of some animals.

But the government is a latecomer to the issue of genetic diversity in livestock. On farms, in back yards and historical parks scattered from California to Maine, animal fanciers and offbeat conservationists have for decades been saving rare and “minor” breeds of livestock from extinction, often in stubborn defiance of the economic doctrines of modern agribusiness.

For the last 15 years, the American Minor Breeds Conservancy of Pittsboro, N.C., has been at the forefront of livestock conservation efforts, amassing a storehouse of knowledge about neglected breeds and matching animals and people.

Often, the people are as quirky as the animals. Bixby, a veterinarian who is the executive director of the conservancy, said the group fields calls from folks in search of a particular breed. “We do a lot of exterior decorating,” Bixby said, telling of inquiries from a woman who wanted to know about buff-colored animals so she could color-coordinate her farm. Or from a couple from Czechoslovakia, now settled on a Kansas spread they call “Checkered Acres,” who wanted black-and-white checkered animals.

To Cary Fowler, a conservation activist and conservancy board member, “these things make you want to laugh and cry. But some of these breeds,” he said, “really require people who are sort of crazy to save them.”

The American Minor Breeds Conservancy has established a ranking system for the most-neglected breeds. Breeds are placed on a “watch” list if their numbers have shown a steady decline over 25 years. “Rare” is the most endangered classification; “minor” applies to breeds whose numbers fall in between the two classifications.

Animals on the list include the now-rare Navajo-Churro sheep, a staple of the Navajo economy until it was decimated in the 1800s by a U.S. government program to end the Navajo’s self-sufficiency; the Guinea hog, a short, fat, black and often hairy porker; 20 breeds of horses and more than 15 breeds of cattle, such as the milking Devon, a horned cow of rich mahogany red. Once highly prized by American farmers for its milk, meat and use as draft animals, there are now fewer than 500 adult milking Devons and fewer than 50 purebred animals born each year in the United States.

Another is the Dutch belted, a cow favored by Dutch royalty as early as the 1700s because of its appearance. It has a wide band of white across its midsection, with solid black borders at either end. In the 1840s, legendary showman P. T. Barnum, who had a keen insight for Americans’ quirky tastes, imported six Dutch belts for his traveling show.

American farmers soon discovered that the belted cows were good milk producers. By the end of the 19th Century, Bixby said, Dutch belts and belted Galloways from the highlands of Scotland had become important to America’s dairy industry.

But as the population grew, so did the demand for milk and beef. Farmers began specializing, breeding cattle for either milk or meat. Dairy farmers began favoring the Holstein, a higher-producing cow believed to be a close genetic relative of the belted cattle. True belts began disappearing from American farms.

There are now few, if any, purebred Dutch belteds in their native Netherlands. In a post-World War II program designed to achieve food self-sufficiency, the Dutch government licensed all breeding bulls--and only Holsteins were licensed. All other breeds were crossbred or slaughtered.

In the United States, Holsteins now account for 82% of all dairy cattle. In California, with its highly productive system of agriculture, 95% of the more than 1 million milking cows are Holsteins.

“What happened to the brown Swiss, and Guernseys and milking shorthorns?” asked Roger J. Gerrits of the Agriculture Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “They’re disappearing, and that’s happened without any coordinated conservation program. . . . What has happened is exactly what (the U.S. agriculture industry) is saying it was forced to do” to meet demands for milk.

Now, the country needs a conservation program, said Gerrits, who is directing the Agriculture Research Service’s program on animal genetic conservation.

It could already be too late for the Dutch belts. Although there are many crossbred cattle called belts, perhaps less than 500 purebred Dutch belts remain.

In California, there are about 400 belted cattle; most of those can be found on the Sonoma County farms of Dick Gray and his son, Richard.

The younger Gray’s herd of about 160 belted cattle, grazing along the shamrock-green, undulating hills on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, has been known to stop traffic. “They’re such striking animals. . . . They’re just really something else,” he said.

But Richard Gray’s belts are not purebred. For years they have been crossbred with Holsteins, and two years ago the dairyman began a breeding program for the cattle that will mean his cows eventually will be more Holstein than belt--and most of them will lose their distinctive markings.

“I found it economically necessary to do that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be in business and none of the cows would exist,” Gray said. The Grays like the belts because they are good grazing cattle, better able to convert forage grass into food--attributes that meet goals of sustainable agriculture.

In most of California’s large dairy operations, the cows seldom, if ever, spend time outside the barn and are fed a high-nutrient blend of hay and grain--a practice that critics say diverts more than 60% of the grain production away from the consumer market.

Yet other economic factors weigh against the belted cattle. Although they give richer, more nutritious milk than Holsteins, they give less of it. From his belts, the younger Gray said he gets about five gallons of milk a day; a Holstein produces 6 1/2 to seven gallons a day.

But Gray believes that there will always be some belts around. “Whether they can ever come up to a number where (they wouldn’t be) endangered anymore, that would be a major undertaking that would take decades. We tried here. But for really good animals, they’ve got to be good commercially, and it’s really hard (without) a good gene pool.”

The American Minor Breeds Conservancy helps people with rare and minor breeds contact each other and locate new sources of breeding stock. It helps livestock raisers form breed associations, which set standards for the breeds and register the animals. And it also helps them find commercial outlets for the animals.

“A lot of our work has to do with marketing, developing market niches and production methods that work best with these breeds. Grass-fed beef and lamb are two examples of market niches where there’s a demand,” Bixby said.

Hand-spinners and weavers crave the wool of the Jacob sheep, a wonderfully individualistic animal with two, four or even six horns; each has its own distinctively patterned, shaggy fleece. This demand among craftspeople has helped make raising these sheep economically feasible.

Not all the minor and rare breeds have obvious commercial value. Some, such as miniature pot-bellied pigs, have become popular as house pets. Others, such as the Tennessee fainting goat, are almost novelty items. But serious livestock conservation activists disdain such fads.

At 17, Gabriella Nanci of Valley Center in rural northern San Diego County is already a serious conservator of livestock. Her menagerie of rare and minor breeds includes Dexter cattle, a miniature black cow; Guinea hogs, a miniature, hairy porker; Navajo and Barbados sheep, pygmy goats and Tennessee fainting goats.

Fainting goats, when startled, collapse in what appears to be a faint. Researchers believe that it is a genetic defect that causes the goats’ leg muscles to lock up--and the goats to keel over--and are searching for possible links to epilepsy in humans. But some collectors seem interested in the goats merely as a sort of party trick.

“There’s a fine line between exotics and rare breeds,” Nanci said. “A lot of people are attracted to rare breeds because they look unusual, but they are fly-by-nights. The commercial breeders breed the exotics to get a high price, and breed the heck out of them. Then, when the market drops, they move on to the next fad animal.”

Nanci won’t sell the goats, or any of her animals, to people she suspects might mistreat or exploit them. Her pigs are mostly outdoor animals. “They like to do their pig stuff, smell the flowers or whatever,” she said.

Guinea hogs are a hardy breed, get along well with the cows and “can raise their babies,” she said. None of her animals require high-cost feed, pampering or regular doses of antibiotics, as do many animals bred to meet high-production goals.

Nanci and other livestock conservationists believe that a budding trend toward sustainable agriculture will make such traits, and thus the breeds, important again.

Michael S. Strauss, a scientist involved in research on agricultural diversity as director of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science’s Global Change Program, said: “The numbers in terms of population and food needs now, and in the future, are such that we’re not going to be able to return to the agriculture of the past. We’ve got to feed too many people.

“On the other hand,” he said, “there are lessons about sustainability in the agriculture of the past that we need. There are genetic characteristics in some of that livestock that might be important.”

Whether those characteristics are saved in herds of animals or in gene banks is one of the questions facing those who are fashioning the nation’s livestock conservation program.

Strauss called it a dilemma between preservation and utilization. “It’s nice to say, and it makes you feel good to say, ‘Let’s save everything.’ But there’s just so much money and resources, and the question is how to set priorities.”

The Agriculture Department’s Gerrits said that is where the genetic mapping will help. Many breeds of cattle, for instance, may be closely linked genetically, though distinctive in appearance, behavior or other attributes.

“There is no need,” Gerrits said, “to keep large populations of these animals--rare breeds--if, in fact, we can maintain genetic diversity by eliminating half of them.” He said the 1990 Farm Bill, which authorized the development of a livestock conservation program, calls “for a system to conserve and utilize (genetic diversity) as it relates to the production of food. That, of course, is the principal mission of the Agriculture Department.”

Such a pragmatic approach to livestock conservation would avoid the pitfalls that critics say are disabling other conservation programs--the mandate to “save everything” without sufficient resources and without the flexibility to weigh the impact on human lives and the economy.

And yet, said the Minor Breeds Conservancy’s Bixby, “one of the important parts of this issue--the same as it is for whales and elephants--is that the human experience will be diminished if we lose these animals. . . . It is an issue of stewardship. It would be pretty arrogant to squander these away, either intentionally or unintentionally.”