The best way to help cows and zebras? Make them live together.

Pedro_P

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In Kenya, cattle reduce tick populations and help protect wildlife.
▼ LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY—No rancher likes to think of their cows sharing space with a lion, or even an impala. But that may be the best way to save Africa’s big game, according to a study reported here this week at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. The counterintuitive approach could help the livestock—and therefore ranchers—as well.
“There’s potential for it to be a win-win situation,” says Steven Seagle, an ecologist at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, who was not involved with the work.
Historically, ranchers have fenced their livestock in to keep wildlife out, fearing their animals would catch diseases, be eaten, or be outcompeted for food. And conservationists have focused on setting aside natural preserves for the wild species they are trying to protect. But as farming spreads throughout Africa, it has crowded wildlife out of almost all its natural habitats.
In Kenya, a few landowners have been experimenting with keeping a mix of wildlife and cattle on their land. Lions, zebras, and other charismatic creatures draw paying tourists, and cattle can be protected at night from predators by crowding them in temporary metal corrals. But it was unclear how the wildlife’s presence affected the cattle and vice versa.
So ecologist Brian Allan at the University of Illinois in Urbana and ecologist Felicia Keesing at Bard College in Annandale, New York, investigated 23 ranches on the Laikipia Plateau in central Kenya. The area, once full of giraffes, zebras, and rhinos, is now divided into cattle ranches sometimes reaching 40,000 hectares—about 75,000 U.S. football fields—in size.
Most of the ranches contained at least some of the wildlife once common in the area, and one-third had about equal numbers of wildlife and cattle. The greater the proportion of livestock to wild animals on a ranch, the fewer blood-sucking ticks found on every animal at the ranch, including wildlife, the researchers discovered.
That’s because ranchers often spray their livestock with chemicals to kill ticks, which can weaken their hosts and spread disease. (When the scientists collected more than 1000 of the pests from the ranches, ground them up, and extracted all the DNA they contained, they discovered that (▪ ▪ ▪)

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parivijesh100

May be in jungle, it can be tried to.  But what about in regions wherein Zebras are not found or in villages & cities where cows milk is used.

chanakyakripa

Nice idea to try out in pilot projects first. Wildlife may be resistant to certain diseases/microbes which the domesticated breeds may not bcoz due to selective breeding, the resistance causing gene may have got mutated & lost its functionality.