Blessed Event in The Bronx

After an implant, a rare Indian ox is born to a Holstein

It looked a typical barnyard scene, when a Holstein dairy cow named Flossie gave birth at New York City's Bronx Zoo last week. Flossie, as would any good bovine mother, promptly began licking the calf, hovered protectively over it, and within an hour started to nurse it. But for zoo officials--indeed, for all animal lovers concerned with preserving endangered species--this blessed event was something very special. Flossie's offspring was not an ordinary black-and-white Holstein calf but a baby gaur (rhymes with flower), a rare type of wild ox that lives in the remote forests of South Asia from India and Nepal to the Malay Peninsula.

Hunted for their meat in some countries and crowded out of favorite hideaways by an expanding human population, no more than about 2,000 of the animals still roam freely in the wild. The dark, white-stockinged creatures are the world's largest wild cattle. Fully grown, a male gaur may measure 6 ft. from hoof to shoulder and weigh nearly 2,000 Ibs. Perhaps wisely, no one has really ever bothered to domesticate the beasts.

The cross-species delivery in The Bronx is only the second on record involving a wild and a domestic animal. The first took place in 1977, when two wild Sardinian sheep were born to a domestic sheep at Utah State University. But other attempts involving such kindred creatures as lions and tigers have inexplicably failed. In any case, last week's success raises hopes that similar transfer techniques can be used to ensure the survival of other endangered species as well. The Bronx Zoo hopes to perform the same feat with a rare Arabian oryx.

The cow-ox birth is the result of some extraordinary modern midwifery by Veterinarian Janet Stover, 29, and her colleagues. To increase the gaur's chances of survival, they picked a likely mother from the zoo's own small gaur herd--its 17 members, including the latest addition, account for about 10% of all the gaurs in captivity. The chosen female was then treated with hormones that stimulated what fertility researchers call superovulation--the release of more than one egg at a time. Finally, last fall they let the animal breed normally with a gaur bull.

Eight days later, University of Pennsylvania Veterinarian James Evans, who earlier this year had supervised another miracle of animal husbandry--the birth of the first "test-tube" domestic cow--flushed five embryos from the gaur's womb. Four of these were transferred into four Holstein cows, selected in part because their calves are larger than gaur calves. Though the reproductive cycles of all five animals had been synchronized with drugs, one cow did not accept the embryo. Another aborted after five months. The third delivered a dead fetus at 9 1/2 months. But two weeks later, Flossie produced a normal gaur calf of about 70 Ibs. (A normal Holstein calf would weigh up to 90 Ibs.) Zoo officials, who hope that it will be only the first of a number of gaurs that Flossie may bear, promptly named the shaggy brown calf Manhar, a Hindi word translated roughly as one who wins the world's heart.

Manhar will remain with his surrogate mother until next spring, when he will be weaned and introduced to the rest of the zoo's gaur herd. Jokes Stover: "After all, we don't want him to grow up thinking he is a Holstein."

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