21. Unsurprisingly, the Nazi Super Cows Were Murderously Aggressive
As Derek Gow described his imported cows: “We have had to cut our herd down to six because some of them were incredibly aggressive and we just couldn’t handle them … The ones we had to get rid of would just attack you any chance they could. They would try to kill anyone. Dealing with that was not fun at all. They are by far and away the most aggressive animals I have ever worked with“. It turned out that the Heck breed was initially produced by German zoologists commissioned by the Nazis. The Nazis, nostalgic for the days when “pure” Germans wandered Europe’s dark forest, wanted a breed of cattle based on the aurochs – a big wild European bull, hunted into extinction by the seventeenth century.
So they used selective breeding to extract wild genes from cattle descended from the aurochs. The result was the Heck super cows, which had a muscular physique, dangerous horns, and a fierce and aggressive disposition. They also had a powerful and menacing look about them, that the Nazis just loved. So they were used in propaganda posters as symbols of the Third Reich’s purity and strength. Most were killed during WWII, but a few survived, to carry their Naziesque aggression and murderousness into the present.
