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NO MORE than 20 large animals in the world have been domesticated to
provide food. That leaves almost 200 species of large, herbivorous animals
which have not been domesticated. What is wrong with all these wild species?
Have they ever been investigated and found wanting, or has no one ever explored
their qualities? Might some of them have qualities which would justify bringing
them under an appropriate form of economic management? The Indian nilgai,
Boselaphus tragocamelus, has many qualities to recommend it. It is the largest
antelope in Asia, and the largest bovid in the world that regularly produces
more than one offspring, and it is very flexible in its requirements. This
could make it a much better choice for farming than the red deer, Cervus
elaphus, the most highly regarded of the ‘new’ domestic animals. Nevertheless
no one has seriously taken up the idea of farming nilgai.

Almost all the world’s domestic animals originated in Asia. Domestication
began with goats and sheep in the Near East and what is now Iraq soon after
the end of the last Ice Age, and was well established by 7000 BC. Over the
next few thousand years, the process continued, until by 2000 BC all the
main modern domestic species – except deer – were established.

Those 5000 years were a time of tremendous technical and cultural progress
in Asia. People settled down and became farmers, growing wheat and barley.
With the invention of irrigation, food production took a great stride forward,
and cities grew up with social classes remote from the business of agriculture:
priests, soldiers, artists, builders and merchants. It was a time of great
technical discovery: weaving, pottery, metalwork and the wheel were among
the innovations. With such a ferment of discovery going on, it is hard to
believe that people were prepared to settle for the domestication of just
a few species, and did not also explore the possibilities of many of the
other wild animals available to them.

Curiously, archaeologists have never found any trace of such experiments.
If any innovative farmers tried out nilgai, or any other species, the record
of their experiments and any lessons that they may have learnt have been
lost. To make further trials today, we need to start again from the beginning.

Deer are the only large animals to have been domesticated for at least
3000 years. All of the species involved (red, rusa, fallow, sika, reindeer
and wapiti) except the North American wapiti originate from Eurasia. Modern
deer farming seeks to exploit two qualities in which deer outshine other
domestic animals: they grow very quickly on a diet of summer grass, and
they have a very lean, healthy carcass. Nilgai have a very similar carcass;
the meat of adult nilgai bulls contains only 0.8 per cent fat, and that
of females contains 5.2 per cent. Commercial beef carcasses contain 20 per
cent fat. Although the lack of fat makes nilgai flesh less succulent than
beef, it also makes it attractive to consumers worried about calories and
cholesterol. Taste panels in Texas pronounced it as tender and tasty as
venison from red deer.

Once widespread throughout India, nilgai now survive predominantly in
the semiarid northwestern states of Rajasthan and Haryana. Bulls weigh up
to 280 kilograms, and cows about 180 kilograms – about the size of a slim
Jersey cow. In contrast to most other species of antelope, nilgai look plain
and somewhat ungainly. They have never attracted much interest from either
agriculture or biologists. Possibly, this is because Hindus regard nilgai
as a form of cattle, and treat them with the same respect, refusing to slaughter
or eat them. Even the hunting-crazy sahibs of British colonial rule had
little time for the nilgai. Its head is unimpressive as a trophy: only the
male has horns, and these amount to no more than 20 centimetres of straight
daggers.

Tracing the ancestral antelope

Such simple horns mark the nilgai’s position in evolution. Of all the
ungulates – the hoofed mammals – living today, nilgai most closely resemble
the creature from which the entire bovid family is thought to have descended.
This ‘protoantelope’ lived in Miocene times, some 15 million years ago.
Some time before 10 million years ago, new lines began to diverge from the
nilgai type, and later evolved into the various groups of cattle, buffalo,
antelopes, goats and sheep that are now classified within the superfamily
Bovidae.

So, the nilgai’s short, straight horns are a primitive feature. Elaborately
curved or spiralled horns are characteristic of more recent species, and
the complicated shapes are thought to have developed as a result of rivalry
between males of the same species. With more elaborate horns males can interlock
their headgear in head-to-head combat without much chance of goring each
other. Males of every species of bovid apart from the nilgai fight by engaging
their horns and pushing.

If nilgai, with their straight, dagger-like horns were to engage in
head-to-head combat, there would be a serious risk of one party being gored
to death. Consequently, they are the only surviving species of bovid in
which the males fight by entwining their necks, testing their weight and
strength by trying to wrestle each other to the ground. Both males go down
on their knees, which has the effect of forestalling a powerful forward
lunge that could prove fatal. As extra protection against inadvertent goring,
the skin on a male’s neck and chest is greatly thickened.

Another sphere in which the nilgai seem less ‘developed’ is their behaviour.
In Texas there is a large, free-ranging population of more than 15 000 nilgai,
the descendants of a few zoo animals introduced in the 1940s. The Texan
animals have been studied in more detail than any in other parts of the
world.

Dominant bulls do not defend a territory on a fixed patch of ground.
The most that they do is to aggressively maintain a personal space of several
hundred metres, which amounts to a roving territory. During the three months
of mating activity solitary adult males roam apparently at random, occasionally
crossing paths with a group of two or three females and their calves. On
these occasions the male attaches himself to the female group for just a
few hours, during which he will mate with any female that happens to be
on heat, and then drift off on his own again.

In Texas, biologists fitted nilgai with radiocollars and tracked groups
of females with calves, and bachelor groups. They found that neither was
attached to any form of home range; like the solitary bulls, they seemed
to wander at random. It was not even possible to describe the movements
of groups consistently, because the membership of groups changes so often.
Individuals would drift into a group and stay for a few hours or days, before
drifting off again and eventually joining up with another group. The only
stable social relationship was between a cow and her calf; calves stayed
with their dams until nearly a year old.

In many antelopes, mating behaviour involves complicated rituals of
challenge and appeasement, but not so in the nilgai. A rutting bull simply
walks up behind a female in oestrus, nuzzles and licks her genital region,
and when she finally stands still for long enough, he mounts fleetingly.
Immediately afterwards the bull wanders away, while the cow continues to
graze. Not much here to excite the student of animal behaviour.

As with mating behaviour, all other forms of communication in the nilgai
seem to be very limited. Vocalisation consists of a sort of grunting cough.
Nothing at all is known about their chemical communication. In common with
a host of other antelopes, nilgai have scent glands in front of their eyes.
But while many other species use these glands to place a personal scent
mark on grass stems and twigs, no one has ever seen nilgai use them this
way. The nilgai also has active secretory glands in the hind feet, but again
no one knows if they play any part in communication. The most recent research
paper containing any discussion of those glands was published in 1918! In
common with many other antelopes, nilgai often return to the same spot to
defecate and urinate. We can assume that this is some form of territorial
marking. In Texas, however, cows and calves contributed to faecal piles
almost as often as dominant bulls. Why an animal with neither territory
nor home range should return to established faecal piles remains unclear.

There is nothing very remarkable about the diet of the nilgai. They
can thrive on variable proportions of grass, herbs and browse, subject only
to a minimum requirement for protein, which must not fall below 8 per cent
of their intake. Because they evolved in a subtropical climate, nilgai are
not well insulated by fur or body fat. Outside their native lands, they
respond to cold and wet conditions by increasing their metabolic rate to
generate body heat – so they need good-quality forage. During the exceptionally
severe Texan winter of 1972-73, 1400 nilgai died. The only fodder available
was some coarse fibrous grass with little protein in it. Coarse fibre takes
so long to digest and pass through the gut that an animal can consume only
so much in a day: they can starve on what appears to be a full stomach.
The researchers believed fewer animals would have died if there had been
more food of a reasonable quality available; it was not the cold that killed
them, but starvation.

It is all the features that the nilgai lacks that give it one tremendous
advantage: flexibility. This is precisely what is required for herding or
ranching, which is why the nilgai presents such an exciting prospect for
a farmer. The lack of rigid requirements for territory and home range, a
flexible attitude to group composition, the absence of any elabo rate behavioural
requirements as a prerequisite to mating, and a catholic approach to diet
make nilgai ideal ranch animals. They might adapt and prosper under a wide
range of ranching conditions. A similar flexibility and adaptability is
undoubtedly one of the main features that led cattle to become the pre-eminent
species of domestic animals.

In sharp contrast to all the nondescript features of the nilgai, there
is one item that makes the animal outstandingly interesting: its powers
of reproduction. The nilgai regularly gives birth to twins; it is the largest
bovid in the world to do so. In many parts of the world there is a rapidly
developing industry in deer farming, founded mainly on the red deer, Cervus
elaphus. Red deer rarely produce twins. The nilgai presents a carcass of
similar size and taste to that of the red deer, but it is capable of producing
twice as many calves each year. The economic advantages are clearly enormous.

One of the most reliable records of nilgai productivity over a long
period comes from the herd at Whipsnade Park, a part of London Zoo. The
herd was started in 1964 with six animals imported from Calcutta Zoo, and
they have been kept ever since in a single, large paddock. In the early
years, the number of births averaged out at less than one calf per cow per
year, but more recently the score has sometimes reached two calves for every
single cow.

The recording is accurate, but subject to one piece of explanation.
A large proportion of calves – some 30 per cent – die before the age of
6 months; most of these deaths are soon after birth. When this happens the
cow comes into oestrus again and may soon be mated. Following a gestation
of 7.5 months, the cow can give birth again during the same year, with the
result that two births are recorded from the same cow during a single year.
The effect of this is to slightly exaggerate the productivity of the cows.

The free-ranging nilgai in Texas also show a high rate of twinning.
Of 10 culled cows that were pregnant, half were carrying twins. Prolonged
observation with binoculars revealed that 35 of 60 cows at large with their
calves had twins at foot, one had triplets, and the rest had singles. (More
calves would have been born, but a significant number would have died soon
after birth.) The high mortality of calves warrants closer examination.
Among the ‘wild’ nilgai in Texas, about 20 per cent of the calves die each
year; at Whipsnade the figure is around 30 per cent. No figures are available
for wild nilgai in India, but there is evidence that this is the normal
rate of loss for wild populations of many species of ungulate. At Whipsnade
Park, the policy is to treat the herd essentially as wild, so that the animals
receive as little veterinary interference or management as possible. Commercial
ranching does not aim to emulate natural conditions, so we can assume that
with more veterinary care and management the death rate would fall considerably.

In India, the wild population of nilgai shrank to its smallest ever
in 1972, but has been increasing in recent years. The non-Hindu population
used to hunt the antelopes for sport, but in 1972 the Wildlife Protection
Act came into force, forbidding the killing of any of India’s native animals.
The act was enforced so effectively that the numbers of nilgai in Rajasthan
and Haryana States have increased to around 7000 in each state. In places,
these unchecked nilgai are serious pests, raiding the crops of the local
farmers.

The solution to the farmers’ problems would be culling to trim back
the wild nilgai to acceptable numbers, and then maintain them at that level.
This would not only protect the farmers’ crops, it would also provide a
valuable and regular supply of meat for the local community. But most of
the local farmers are Hindu; many of them are Bishnoies, a sect that rigorously
requires its followers to protect all animals and avoid any killing . Bishnoi
farmers prefer to tolerate the raids on their crops rather than slaughter
the nilgai. So it is unlikely that any scheme to crop or ranch nilgai for
local consumption will ever work in India.

In Texas, things are different. The present population of more than
15 000 nilgai run free on 21 ranches, and it should be a simple matter to
organise a sustained culling programme for meat production. The fact that
no one is ‘harvesting’ these nilgai is partly historical. When the animals
were first introduced, the initial stock were surplus animals from a zoo,
and if they had not been set free on ranchland, they would have been shot.
They were fostered, purely for the pleasure of seeing them run free on the
open range. The aesthetic interest lingers on despite the massive increase
in their numbers.

Out of the 21 ranches, only three make deliberate commercial use of
them by selling hunting licences. There is little prospect of developing
the nilgai hunting industry as most hunters are usually satisfied to bag
just one nilgai in their career. As for meat, Texas already has a surplus
of beef, so there is no incentive to cash in on the prodigious potential
of the nilgai.

The most suitable way to develop the nilgai as a producer of meat would
be to farm them along the lines of red deer. At present there are 35 000
red deer held on 250 farms in Britain. In 1987, as an experiment, a deer
farmer in Wales began the first commercial nilgai herd with surplus zoo
animals, six cows and one bull. Early in 1989, however, the farm’s deer
were infected with tuberculosis, and the nilgai had to be slaughtered to
eliminate all risk of the disease spreading. By then, the trial had already
shown that it was perfectly possible to farm nilgai in the same paddock
system, and to handle them through the same system of passages and holding
pens as the red deer.

Nilgai do have some drawbacks, the biggest of which is their temperament.
The antelope are apprehensive and nervous, and the males can be dangerous.
If an adult male is confined in a tight space with a group of females, during
a round-up for instance, he may vent his panic on one, or more, of the females
and gore her to death. Perhaps it was this problem that led any prehistoric
farmer who experimented with nilgai to abandon his attempts to herd or control
them.

On the other hand, the first commercial herd in Britain began with surplus
zoo animals, drawn from a very limited and relatively inbred population.
No one had tried to select out the most manageable blood lines. Selective
breeding could ultimately weed out the nervous strains and produce a breed
of more manageable animals.

Of the 200 or so species of large, wild herbivores, the nilgai has probably
had the lowest profile in scientific and agricultural studies. And yet it
has the most exciting potential as a new, domestic, meat-producing species.
Its flexible behaviour, its catholic diet, the healthy quality of its meat
and, above all, its spectacular reproductive potential make it worth looking
at more closely. It might become the first new domestic animal of the next
millennium.

The twenty-nine steps to conservation

THE MAIN surviving population of about 15 000 wild nilgai live in the
land of the Bishnoies, in the arid parts of Rajasthan and Haryana states
in northwest India. The Bishnoies are a strictly vegetarian Hindu sect of
peasant farmers. Largely thanks to their protection, the populations of
all the desert antelopes – nilgai, blackbuck and chinkara – have increased
recently.

The sect was founded by a 13th-century sage called Jambhoji. He gave
his followers 29 precepts to live by, hence the name ‘bishnoi’ which is
Hindi for ‘twenty-nine’. A number of these precepts dealt with purely practical
matters, such as ‘Begin every day with a bath’.

Jambhoji was concerned with the whole of the natural environment, hence
the 17th precept: ‘Have respect for all living plants, and never cut down
a growing tree’. Number 20 is the most relevant for the antelopes: ‘Protect
all the animals and show them consideration’. Though no species was singled
out for a special mention, the Bishnoies value the blackbuck especially
highly because Jambhoji told his followers that after his death he would
return and remain with them always, in the form of a blackbuck.

The nilgai benefits not only from the precept to protect all the animals,
but also from the general respect all Hindus show for cattle. The nilgai
is regarded by Hindus as a form of cattle: the name nilgai means ‘blue cattle’
in Hindi.

In some parts of Haryana, the animals destroy as much as 75 per cent
of the total crop, but in spite of this costly damage the Bishnoi farmers
will not countenance any form of control that involves killing the animals.

Russell Kyle is a vet who teaches at the Farm Animal Practice Unit of
the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. He is the author of
A Feast in the Wild, Kudu Publishing 1987.