Issues of Declining Livestock Breeds: Revisiting Domestic Animal Diversity in Pastoral Systems

Concerns for the disappearance of local breeds go back to the beginning of scientific breeding and the early national policies of agriculture intensification in Europe at the time of the industrial revolution. That initial Eurocentric framing of domestic animal diversity as ‘local’ breeds, largely the result of natural selection and potentially a useful source of ‘raw’ genetic material, remains dominant. Today, however, the debate around domestic animal diversity has been globalized, and so includes livestock breeding populations and livestock systems that developed outside the European experience. This paper looks at domestic animal diversity from the vantage point of one of such cases: cattle breeding among the Wodaabe pastoralists in Niger. The research is based on a combination of qualitative methodologies standard in social anthropology and quantitative analysis of memorized herd genealogies over a 20-year period. Results show that a competent herder can control cattle mating in over 90 percent of cases. Complex learned behaviour in cattle, particularly related to feeding competence, is a major selection criterion. The Wodaabe specialize in using the short-lived and unpredictable grazing opportunities, which is characteristic of Sahelian rangelands. To successfully interface the unpredictable variability in potential inputs, they breed herds with exceptional levels of within-breed diversity, crucially including epigenetic traits. The common practice of conflating Domestic Animal Diversity (DAD) with Animal Genetic Resources (AnGR), therefore, falls short of adequately representing the relationship between ‘local breeds’ and livelihood in pastoral systems.