Banteng

What do Banteng cattle look like?

A banteng has the general shape of ordinary cattle, but the two sexes differ so sharply they can look like separate animals. Bulls grow dark brown, turning nearly black with age, thickset and tall, while cows stay slim in a light brown to chestnut red coat. Both share a white rump patch, whitish legs below the knee and a pale face set off by a black muzzle; females and young also carry a dark stripe along the spine. A bull's shoulders ride high because his chest vertebrae grow unusually long, so his back rises like a hump. His horns are long, slim and smooth, sweeping up and a little forward; a cow's are shorter and curl in at the tips. Wild cows stand about 1.4 m at the shoulder and can weigh 670 kg; farm animals are far lighter.

Where does the Banteng come from?

The German naturalist Eduard d'Alton named the species in 1823 from a male and a female skull sent home from Java. The word banteng is the Javanese and Sundanese banṭéng. Early scholars squabbled over the pair of skulls: an 1830 name, Bos leucoprymnus, appears to rest on a wild-tame cross, while an 1845 revision called them Bos sondaicus and, in a mistake repeated by later writers, took the female for a young male. Fossils from Middle Pleistocene deposits in Thailand show the animal lived alongside gaur, Stegodon and wild water buffalo. Today three or four subspecies are accepted: Javan, Indochinese or Burma, Bornean, and the domestic Bali cattle. A 2015 genetic study found the Bornean form so distant from taurine and zebu cattle that it might count as a species in its own right.

What the Banteng is known for

Banteng shun people and are hard to approach in the wild, staying alert in herds of two to forty animals led by a single bull, while aged males wander in twos or threes. They are busy both day and night, more so at night where humans come and go, and rest and hide in thick forest. Cows and calves move briskly and slip through tangled growth with ease. Smell and hearing are sharp: scent warns of tigers and dholes, the Asian wild dogs that hunt adults, and keeps the herd in touch. Tame banteng are nervous creatures that fret under rough handling and need calm, careful stockmanship.

How the Banteng is bred and kept

Banteng breed all year in captivity and in Myanmar, but on the Cobourg Peninsula mating crowds into October and November, and in Thailand it peaks in May and June. A cow carries one calf for close to 285 days, roughly a week longer than taurine cattle. Bull calves weigh 16 to 17 kg at birth, heifers 14 to 15 kg, and the young may nurse for up to sixteen months. Domestic females can be fertile from thirteen months old; wild females mature at two to four years and males at three to four, bulls filling out fully at five or six. Losses among young calves run high in the first six months, then fall away quickly as the animals grow. Banteng can reach twenty-six years of age.

What the Banteng is kept for

Where people keep banteng, they keep them chiefly for beef. The meat of the tame Bali cattle is much sought after, and this demand accounts for most keeping of the animal, whether on Bali itself, across the eastern Indonesian islands of Sulawesi, Sumbawa and Sumba, or in Malaysia, New Guinea and Australia. Work comes second: banteng do serve as draught animals, pulling and carrying where oxen are wanted, but far fewer are worked. Wild herds are another matter altogether; those in Java, Cambodia, Kalimantan and Thailand survive as protected wildlife rather than stock, and the feral groups of Sabah and Australia's Northern Territory live untended, descended from escaped or turned-out domestic animals.

The land and climate of the Banteng

Banteng manage on a wide spread of country: open deciduous woodland, semi-evergreen forest, woods on lower mountain slopes, grassland and even farms gone fallow. They graze mostly by night in open ground, pausing every two or three hours to chew the cud, and climb to higher forest when the rains come. Their food is grass, sedges, young shoots, leaves, flowers and fruit, with bamboo and tree bark turning up in droppings studied in Sabah. Drought bothers them less than it would most stock: they can go days without drinking, though they take water freely when pools are about. They seek out salt licks, and where none exist they have learned to drink sea water, even browsing seaweed in northern Australia.

Keeping Banteng cattle

Tame banteng startle readily, so gentle, unhurried handling matters more than with ordinary cattle. Breeding performance is nonetheless good: conception rates of 80 to 90 per cent have been recorded in northern Australia. Cows nurse their young for many months, sometimes until the next calf arrives. Wild instincts linger in the tame ones too; they stay watchful and do best in calm, quiet surroundings rather than busy yards.

Related breeds and crosses

The banteng stands close to the gaur and the kouprey, the latter now probably gone; a 2021 genome study still counted all three as separate species, their shared ancestry having muddled their maternal lines. East Asian zebu cattle may themselves carry some banteng inheritance. The domestic Bali cattle, subspecies domesticus, is the form most people ever see, and crossing between wild and tame banteng has clouded the boundary in herds where both occur.

Numbers, conservation and the herd book

The wild banteng is in deep trouble: the IUCN Red List gives it the most severe of its ratings, critically endangered, and numbers have more than halved over recent decades. Hunters take animals for meat, sport, horns and supposed medicine, while farms and settlements chop the forest into ever smaller pieces; disease adds further pressure. Every country within its range grants the animal legal protection, and most surviving herds are crowded into reserves, Cambodia possibly excepted. The strongest wild populations remain on Java and in Cambodia, with sizeable numbers likely too in East and North Kalimantan and in Thailand. A banteng clone made history as the second created from an endangered species and the first to live past infancy.

Questions people ask about Banteng

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle
• The increasingly realistic prospect of ‘extinct animal’ zoosBBC, Article
• Livestock report 2006FAO, Article

• Banteng on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data