A Very Different Farmyard

As a new keeper, I used to spend a lot of my leisure time (of which I had very little, ever), dreaming of having my own zoo.  Money, of course, would be no issue since I would somehow acquire the support of some endlessly wealthy philanthropist who would unquestioningly sign the checks.  This, alas, is a species that, in its rarity, is somewhere between a Sumatran rhinoceros and a passenger pigeon.

My zoo would be like no other, of course, with all sorts of revolutionary new exhibits, the likes of which would never have been seen elsewhere.  Among my proudest achievements (if we are defining scribbles in a notebook as "achievements") was the farmyard.

Taking care of domestic animals in my early days, I frequently found myself bored by the limited scope of my work space and already dreaming about working with the more exciting animals elsewhere in the zoo.  I would sometimes pretend that the animals I was taking care of were wilder versions of themselves, that I was slopping up after warthogs instead of domestic pigs, of tending ibexes and markhors instead of goats.

That got me thinking - every domestic animal is, really, just a version of a wild ancestor.  What if there was a farmyard exhibit that featured the wild ancestors (or their approximate equivalents) of domestic animals?  That would be a neat spin on things, to say nothing of a fascinating lesson in artificial selection and how humans impact the natural world.  It wouldn't be a petting zoo, for sure.

• Domestic Cow - the wild ancestor, the Aurochs, has been extinct for hundreds of years  Perhaps it could be substituted by the banteng or gaur, wild cattle of Asia?  Or perhaps with the Heck Cattle, artificial "bred-back" wild cattle developed in Europe in the last century?
• Domestic Horse - again, the Hecks tried to breed-back the ancestor of the wild horse, the Tarpan.  The only true wild horse remaining is the Przewalski's wild horse of Mongolia
• Domestic Donkey - the African wild ass, or possibly the onager
• Domestic Sheep - the mouflon
• Domestic Goat - the wild goat, or one the ibex species as a substitute
• Llama - the guanaco
• Domestic Pig - the wild boar
• Domestic Dog - the gray wolf
• Domestic Cat - the African wild cat, possibly represented by one of its more endangered affiliates, such as the sand cat or the black-footed cat
• Domestic Chicken - the red jungle fowl
• Domestic Duck - the mallard
• Domestic Goose - the graylag goose and the swan goose
• Domestic Turkey - the wild turkey