In a paddock near Taree on the central coast of New South Wales a small herd of burnt orange cattle represent both hope and despair.
The cattle are Tarentaise, a breed that until recently was thought to be extinct in Australia. But hope springs under the watchful eye of Yan Kleynhans.
“I can proudly say I have the 20 remaining females [in the country],” he says. “There was only one bull left but he was related to all the females, so I imported semen straws from Europe. The first five cows have given birth and all calves are bulls. Now we have five pure Tarentaise bulls in Australia.”
Kleynhans is a director of the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, which has been responsible for the compilation of a national livestock census on behalf of the Australian agriculture department and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The number of livestock breeds in the world is shrinking at an unprecedented rate – according to the FAO, the proportion of breeds classified as being at risk of extinction increased from 15% to 17% in the 10 years to 2016. Australia is playing a role in reversing that trend.
“Australia is really a closed herd,” Kleynhans says. “We are seen as a safety net for vulnerable breeds of livestock.”
The trust has surveyed 98% of purebred livestock in Australia in the past 12 months. The results are not encouraging. “Unfortunately, some of the rare breeds are becoming more rare, and we have lost quite a few breeds altogether,” Kleynhans says. “From a cattle perspective, we’ve lost the Afrikaner, Australian Sahiwal and Australian Milking Zebu. Both those last two breeds were created in Australia. But it is a similar story across all species.”
The Rare Breeds Trust keeps a watchlist for seven species of livestock (cattle, donkeys, goats, horses, pigs, poultry and sheep), rating them on a scale from lost, through to critical, endangered, vulnerable, at risk, or recovering.
In northern Victoria, Katy Brown is preserving rare horse and pig breeds. She has 24 Scottish Highland ponies – a breed that is listed as endangered in Australia and globally – as well as four Dartmoor ponies, and a Caspian mare, both breeds that are listed as critical. Her pigs are Tamworths, a breed that is also on the critical list in Australia.
“All of the rare breeds have developed in isolation and developed ways of coping in various climatic conditions,” Brown says. “I think with climate change we may find that having that genetic diversity to draw on will benefit commercial animal production. Once you start selecting a limited number of production traits – meat quality and quantity for example – you often lose other traits. By having a hearty gene pool of rare breed animals you can cross-breed traits such as thrift and vigour back in.”
Having genetic diversity in pigs may mitigate the severity of disease that can be transferred to humans, Brown says. The Japanese encephalitis virus outbreak in 2022, which was discovered in 80 piggeries and led to 40 reported cases of the virus in humans, six of which proved fatal, is just one example of the severity of such diseases.
Due to the prolific number of pig diseases around the world and the pig’s propensity to transfer these diseases to humans, Australia has a closed-door policy on the importation of live pig genetics. That places all eight remaining pig breeds in Australia on the Rare Breeds watchlists. “Even though people think there are heaps of Large Whites and Landrace in the commercial piggeries because they are all white pigs, they are actually different strains and the original species are vulnerable,” Brown says.
‘Insurance against disease or disaster’
On the northern outskirts of Brisbane, Cathy Newton shares her life with a range of poultry listed on the Rare Breeds watchlists – endangered Orpington and Khaki Campbell ducks, critical Magpie ducks, and vulnerable Mallards and Cayuga. She also has rare Silver Laced and Gold Laced Wyandotte chickens.
Newton says high production demands and a preference for fast-growing birds led to the development of hybrid poultry species which today make up most commercial poultry flocks.
“If any problem were to happen with those, we have the rich genetic resource of the pure-breed flocks to fall back on,” she says. “Our rare livestock breeds may be thought of as insurance against disease or disaster and should be preserved for biological, agricultural and scientific purposes.”
While the recent census shows we are losing many of these rare breeds, it is not all doom and gloom. Some breeds, such as British White and Ayrshire cattle, have increased in numbers to a level where they have been removed from the Rare Breeds lists.
But while other countries have a livestock gene bank, Australia does not. The Rare Breeds Trust is calling for funding to create an Australian gene bank, but lacks the government support. “We have no financial backing and unfortunately cannot get registered as a charity as we don’t fit into the existing descriptions,” Kleynhans says. “We’re a volunteer trust so we don’t have a lot of money to go around buying [genetic] straws.”
In the mean time, Newton says back yard livestock and poultry owners can help in the preservation of rare breeds by choosing their next animals carefully.
“As the price of eggs continues to rise more people will see the value in keeping hens or ducks,” Cathy says. “And if keeping them, why not keep some beautiful and special rare breeds?”
