Watusi cattle of Wilson Hill (photos)

And on Wilson Hill Road, Stubbs Ranch, are some extraordinary African Watusi cattle. Mama bathing her calf, I suspect the older calves are hers too by the way they hang on her every breath. No, she’s not a hermaphrodite. They have weird bellybuttons. Bulls also have dewlaps on their necks, and brahma style humps on their backs. Check out those horns! Those horns are used somewhat like a car radiator to cool their blood, not to gore you. But the Watusi cattle are related to the original longhorns, that is, the Egyptian Hamitic longhorn, also ancestor to Mexican (and Texican) longhorns.

The following article on Watusis was so windy it was practically a hurricane, so I paraphrased it. You’re welcome.

“Ankole-Watusi cattle with their distinctive large-diameter horns, trace their ancestry back more than 6,000 years, and are referred to as "cattle of kings."

Long-horned, humpless domestic cattle were established in the Nile Valley by 4000 B.C. Egyptian or Hamitic Longhorn, appear in pictographs in Egyptian pyramids. Over the next 2.000 years, the Egyptian Longhorn migrated from the Nile to Ethiopia, and to southern Africa.

By 2000 B. C., humped cattle (Longhorn Zebu) from Pakistan and India also reached Africa. When the Zebu reached Ethiopia and Somalia, they were interbred with Egyptian Longhorn to produce the Sanga -- the breed spread to the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, eastern Africa, becoming the base stock of indigenous African breeds. The Sanga had Zebu characteristics, pendulous dewlap and sheath, upturned horns, and a neck hump. Modern descendants of the Sanga, however, vary greatly in size, conformation, and horns.

Particularly remarkable are the cattle found in Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. In Uganda, the Nkole tribe's Sanga variety is known as the Ankole. In Rwanda and Burundi, the Tutsi tribe's Sanga variety is called the Watusi. The Rwanda common strain of Watusi is called Inkuku.