Fogera

What do Fogera cattle look like?

Fogera cattle are humped cattle of the zebu kind, placed in the Bos indicus subspecies in breed records. They take their name from their home, the Fogera Plain of Ethiopia. The coat is black, recorded as stained, and the horns grow to a medium length. Their most telling feature is the foot. The hooves, the hard feet of the animal, are broad, which spreads the animal's weight and lets it walk with ease over soft ground. On the marshy plain where they live, that matters every day. Both cows and oxen are kept as working animals, giving milk, meat and pulling power.

Where does the Fogera come from?

Ethiopia sits where cattle moving into Africa have long passed through: zebu types arriving from India and Arabia met humpless taurines from the Near East and Europe, while herding peoples carried West African taurine blood eastwards. The country's varied climates and farming systems then bred further variety, making it a secondary centre where livestock kinds multiplied. One home-grown group, the sanga, arose from crossing local long-horned taurines with Arabian zebus. A later second wave of Indian zebu blood over these sanga herds produced the zenga, or zebu-sanga, breeds. The Fogera belongs to this group, and its home ground is the Fogera Plain east of Lake Tana.

What the Fogera is known for

The trait that marks the Fogera out is its foot. Broad hooves carry it surely through the wet, soft ground of its home plain, where narrower-footed cattle would struggle. Beyond this, the breed faces hard times: growing towns take over land, civil wars have disrupted life, and droughts and the ruin of ecosystems press on it. A cattle plague, a panzootic or sickness sweeping across whole countries, has also struck the region's herds, and crossing with the related Arado type blurs the Fogera line.

How the Fogera is bred and kept

Preserving the Fogera is the work of the agricultural research centre at Woreta, which specialises in keeping this line true. Its efforts matter because the breed is pressed from several sides: cities spreading over farmland, war, drought and damaged ecosystems, and above all mixing with the Arado, a closely related Ethiopian type, which slowly dilutes Fogera blood. Keepers and researchers therefore face the task of holding on to the distinctive line, with its broad hooves and its place in the zenga family of zebu and sanga crosses, while farmers go on using the cattle for everyday work.

What the Fogera is kept for

Fogera cattle are kept for three purposes at once: milk, meat and work. As draught animals they pull and haul; the word draught simply means such work, done by trained oxen. Farmers around the Fogera Plain milk their cows, raise stock for beef, and rely on the animals for everyday labour. A triple-purpose breed like this suits mixed smallholdings, where a single animal must give milk for the household, meat from time to time and muscle for farm work, earning its keep in more ways than one.

The land and climate of the Fogera

The breed's home is the Fogera Plain, lying east of Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Much of this ground is marshy, and the Fogera's broad hooves are an adaptation to it, spreading the animal's weight so it can move through wet, soft land more easily than other cattle. The plain's wetlands and pastures have suffered, though: pressures on the breed include droughts and the destruction of ecosystems, alongside the spread of towns. Within this landscape the Fogera serves its keepers as a working, milking and meat animal.

Related breeds and crosses

The Fogera's nearest kin named in breed lists is the Arado, another Ethiopian type. The two are so close that crossing between them is counted among the pressures on the Fogera, blurring its distinctive line. More widely, the breed sits in the zenga group, the Ethiopian cattle that combine sanga ancestry, themselves a blend of long-horned taurine and Arabian zebu, with later Indian zebu blood.

Numbers, conservation and the herd book

The preservation of the Fogera rests chiefly with the agricultural research centre at Woreta, which devotes itself to the breed. It works against a long list of pressures: urbanisation and civil wars on the human side; a panzootic, that is a cattle plague spreading across countries; droughts and the destruction of ecosystems; and cross-breeding with the Arado type. Together these make the Fogera one of the Ethiopian breeds whose future depends on deliberate, careful keeping.

From the Fogera

Questions people ask about Fogera

Good reading and sources

• Fogera cattle on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data