AO Wants to Know is an ongoing interview series where we ask experts in extraordinary subjects to share their knowledge with us.
When I first meet Jeannette Beranger over Zoom, she’s getting ready to deliver fresh eggs from her chickens to her coworkers. But the glossy black birds that Beranger raises on her home farm in North Carolina, with hornlike red wattles and fluffy crests obscuring their eyes, are not just any chickens. They’re Crèvecœurs, a rare French breed that’s been around since the 12th century.
“When other chickens are not laying, mine are laying like gangbusters,” Beranger says proudly. Crèvecœurs produce flavorful meat, are highly resistant to disease, and have the nifty habit of laying eggs in the middle of winter, traits that once made them the most popular chicken in France. But like many historic, or heritage, breeds of livestock, the Crèvecœur declined with the rise of modern intensive farming, which favors higher-yielding, faster-growing animals. A 1995 census recorded less than 1,000 of the shockheaded black chickens worldwide. Though populations have increased significantly since then, the Crèvecœur remains at risk of disappearing.
“People don’t realize that farm animals could be endangered,” says Beranger. A former head zookeeper at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island, Beranger has worked with dozens of species whose survival in the wild is threatened, from elephants to anacondas. But in her present role as the senior program manager of The Livestock Conservancy, she helps ensure the survival of rare domestic breeds—some of which, she says, “are far more endangered than giant pandas.”
The first organization of its kind in the United States, the Conservancy was founded in 1977 in response to a decline in breeds that had been part of America since its founding. “The country was built on these animals’ backs,” says Beranger, in some cases literally. She points to the American Mammoth Jackstock, a large, strong donkey developed by George Washington himself with construction labor in mind.
The Conservancy scouts the U.S. for relict populations of heritage breeds and documents their genetics. Sometimes, owners may not even realize how rare their animals are. Beranger describes several breeds, like Oklahoma’s Choctaw Hog, that were thought to be extinct before being rediscovered by chance in the hands of unknowing farmers. Once a detailed census of a breed has been taken, a plan can be made for its survival. Since the Conservancy’s founding, none of the more than 100 breeds on their Conservation Priority List has gone extinct, and 14 have graduated from the watchlist.
But the value of heritage breeds is not just historical. The animals are a living reserve of genetic diversity, with traits that could help future livestock survive climate change and adapt to new environments. As a result, says Beranger, conserving rare breeds “has real impact for the future of agriculture.” Atlas Obscura spoke with Beranger about why heritage breeds—from four-horned sheep to dreadlocked donkeys—are important to our past as well as our future.
When did people first start working to preserve heritage breeds?
It started with the Bicentennial [in 1976]. There were a bunch of living history museums up in New England that wanted to exhibit some of the livestock that the early settlers had. One in particular was the Milking Devon cow. Milking Devons came over to the original Plymouth colony. They were super important for the Northeast, and there used to be tons and tons of them. You could call them “the Cadillac of oxen,” because they have a faster pace of walking than other cattle, so you could actually work more land in a shorter period having Milking Devon oxen.
So [in 1976] they went looking for the Milking Devon, and they couldn’t find any! When they finally did find a few, that red flag went up, and they were like, “Jeez, if Milking Devons are at risk, what else is at risk?” The following year, The American Minor Breeds Conservancy [now The Livestock Conservancy] was founded. They hired a director and she went around the country, talking to people and trying to identify what breeds are at risk.
How would you describe your job?
My job is, I think, fascinating, because I do all kinds of stuff, from technical writing, to documenting breeds in the field, to doing scientific research. And every day is different. I could be in Oklahoma pulling hairs on Choctaw Hogs, or I could be doing a study with Highland ponies up in Virginia. My zoo experience gives me a leg up with a lot of the farmers, because I can say that I’ve worked with all these breeds and their exotic counterparts.
Our work has a three-pronged approach: discover, secure, and sustain. We’re out there discovering what’s left. Securing is doing the studbooks [lineage records], organizing breed associations, making sure we’re accounting for every bit of biodiversity for that breed. The sustain part is more difficult, because you’ve got to have strategies for these animals to have jobs. A lot of times, that means they need to be eaten. That’s where people get confused, like, “How can you eat a rare breed?” But being lawn ornaments is not going to save a breed. If they’re just show animals, they’re never going to survive in the long term. So we help farmers with marketing, and we teach breed associations how to function properly.
Why are heritage breeds important?
You’ve got to look at these animals as a reservoir for the future. The animals we work with are genetically distinct. If we lose those breeds, we lose those genes, and that’s it. There’s no way to get it back. And we don’t even know a fraction of what we’re potentially losing. We did a study with the DNA of different rare-breed chickens compared to commercial chickens, specifically looking at the DNA that represents immune function. What we found was, there are a whole bunch of gene variants within the rare breeds that are completely nonexistent in commercial poultry.
A lot of these breeds are really tough animals. They don’t need antibiotics to survive. Animals like the old Texas Longhorn, they can go a lot longer without water than your typical European cattle, and they can defend their babies. They’ve got horns, they know how to use them. If you’re a farmer up in Montana, where you’ve got grizzly bears and mountain lions, that is a pretty nice trait to have in your cattle. A lot of cattle breeds have been bred for docility, and when it comes to predators, maybe they don’t have as strong of an instinct.
Holstein cattle represent 90-plus percent of dairy production in the U.S., and they’ve got a lot of problems. They have problems calving [giving birth], they’ve got foot problems—you can generate a list of issues with Holsteins that are nonexistent in some of these other breeds. But just because they don’t produce as much milk as a Holstein, they’ve kind of been outcompeted, because we’re all about producing a lot of product in a short period of time.
Agriculture has created this model that is very short-sighted. Where these other breeds come in handy is if you look at the long term. The average life expectancy of a Holstein cow is two and a half lactation periods. That means, by the time they’re four or five years old, they’re done. Whereas some of these old breeds, they can be highly productive into their teens. They might not produce as much milk in the short term, but in the long term, the money is better with some of these breeds that are longer-lived and don’t have problems with calves.
Another aspect of it is that these breeds really are part of American culture, and historically important. For some people, it’s deeply ingrained in their culture that these breeds have always been there, and families have kept them for generations. And I think that’s worth saving as well.
Heritage breeds were developed when agriculture was very different than it is today. Is there a connection between preserving heritage breeds and changing our practices of agriculture?
I don’t know if agriculture is ever going to change. But I think that, as things become more challenging environmentally, these breeds may become useful in places where it’s no longer possible for commercial production to be profitable. In places that get unbearably hot and dry, or incredibly cold, a lot of times, the commercial animals just can’t thrive in those environments. We have a lot of [heritage] breeds like Pineywoods Cattle: They’re adapted for living in the deep Southeast, so they’re adapted to high humidity and heat, they’re resistant to the parasites there.
The short-term [solution] that a lot of folks do is crossbreeding [heritage and commercial breeds], to get some of those characteristics transferred into that first generation. The problem is, that’s highly dependent on somebody else doing the pure breeding of the rare breed, which isn’t as profitable. But if crossbreeding is the answer for getting animals to live in more challenging places and temperatures, we can’t risk the loss of diversity.
How do you maintain genetic diversity when the surviving population of a breed is very low?
The best way is to first document what’s left. When we’re out in the field, we’ve always got our eyes and ears open talking to people. I spent several years working on Marsh Tacky horses in South Carolina, which we thought were extinct. Marsh Tackys are a Spanish horse, documented in the Lowcountry since the early 1700s. But one of our members happened to visit a farm not far from Savannah, Georgia, and he called us, and said, “You really should take a look at these horses, because we think they’re Marsh Tackys.”
So we find a population. And as it turns out, [the owner] knew some other people that had them, and they had sold horses to other people, so we started finding a network of people that had pockets of them here and there. For three years, I documented and took DNA samples from every single horse that I found. And then from that, we were able to identify which horses were likely Marsh Tackys. We created a studbook, and from that we were able to analyze the population to see what bloodlines were there, and which animals were unrelated to the others. It helped us preserve what genetics were left, and move the breed forward. When we started the project over 10 years ago, there were maybe 150 of them. Now there’s about 500, and we’ve been able to not lose a single bloodline, because people listen to us when we say, “You gotta breed this horse now. He’s not related to anything else!”
Do you have a favorite heritage breed?
My favorite is the Poitou Donkey, a rare breed from the middle to middle-south of France. They’re the donkeys with the dreadlocks. I wrote a piece for Atlas Obscura on the Asinerie du Baudet du Poitou, which is the French national stud [breeding facility] for the Poitou Donkeys. You can see them there, but the largest herd of Poitous in the world is actually in Texas.
The thing that’s really amazing is, they are the sweetest things. They make terrible guardian animals because their temperament is just so sweet. You can walk into the middle of a herd and there’s no kicking, no biting, they just want to get loved on. They were created to produce the finest working mules in all of Europe, because when they’re crossed with horses, they produce these big, powerful mules that have the personality of the Poitou.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
