Laikipia
My new pride and joy is a pedigree Boran bull named Woragus 317. We know him as Ollie. Sired by the famous 956 Segera from the legendary Gianni line, he was bred on Mark and Nicky Myatt-Taylor’s stud in Tanzania’s distant southern highlands. I recklessly bought him on the strength of a photograph, bidding by email at a recent Boran Cattle Breeders’ Society of Kenya auction. I was in the bush in South Sudan when I heard I had won — and then it sank in that Ollie has cost me the price of a Volkswagen, or a family holiday to Bali.
The Boran is ‘God’s gift to cattlemen’, the experts say. It is the finest of all Africa’s zebu-type beef breeds: hardy, fertile, docile, with ‘excellent fleshing qualities’. The Boran’s history is an amazing tale of African achievement, a combination of indigenous breeding over perhaps 1,500 years, together with modern European ranching techniques.
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