BELTIES
by Anita Rafael
Lookin’ good! Friendly cows with excellent fashion sense.
Seriously, did you really think they are called Oreo cookie cows? True, their crisp black-white-black coat patterns might make you think of your favorite snack, but they are called belted cows, and the ones you can see from the roadside at the Swiss Village Foundation farm on Harrison Avenue are the eight Dutch Belteds or a lone Belted Galloway.
All the cows look alike to most passersby, but livestock manager Sarah LaFreniere can easily tell which are which. “The one Belted Galloway we have,” she says, “is shorter and stouter than the others which are the Dutch Belteds.” The Dutch Belteds are more angular and a little skinny, she adds. From time to time, their small herd of nine animals also grazes over at the nearby pastures at Hammersmith Farm.
In the bovine family tree, Dutch Belteds have a distinguished pedigree with strong ties to Holland that date back for centuries. The Dutch, some say, may have originally taken the "Gurtenvieh” out of the mountain pastures meadows of Tyrol into the Low Countries to supplement their own butter and cheese making industries.
In the 1700s, Dutch noblemen particularly prized this breed for its milking and fattening traits so much so that they seldom sold any to others. They also fiddled with animal genes enough to produce belted rabbits, goats, poultry and swine, presumably to match their cows. Someone in the Netherlands must have parted with a few head of cattle, however, because by 1840 the showman P.T. Barnum charged circus-goers to see a small herd that he had on display along with his two-headed snakes, midgets and bearded ladies. Less than 100 years later, Dutch Belteds wowed milkers at the California State Fair where one cow, Julia Marlow-1187, made history. She gave the most butterfat at each milking for five consecutive days to win first place over all other breeds.
To ensure genetic consistency, the Dutch Belted Cattle Association of America, an organization that claims it has the oldest continuous registry for belted cattle in the world, keeps a herdbook. Since 1886, every registered Dutch Belted, including the ones at the SVF, is born with its heredity fully documented. According to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, they are considered critically rare in North America, with fewer than 200 registered animals in the country and about 1,000 worldwide. LaFreniere, who has been with the SVF for more than two years, says that the farm raises belted cattle for two reasons: the most important one being their germplasm (the genetic material that carries the inherited characteristics of the breed) which is stored for future reproduction.
As for the Belted Galloways, sometimes called ‘belties,” there is not much proof about how or when the breed evolved, but cattlemen surmise that it was from a cross of the Dutch Belteds with the solid-colored Galloways that occurred in Scotland during the 16th century. They are sometimes red, brownish or dun colored, as well, and are valued as beef animals for their tender, lean (about as much fat content as chicken) and flavorful meat rather than as dairy cows. Canada had belties in 1939 and in 1950 a herd was brought into the United States.
Like thoroughbred racehorses, every characteristic of registered cattle is judged for specific traits. Here is what one expert, Lord David Stuart wrote in his 1970 book An Illustrated History of Belted Cattle about the Galloway’s coat, for example, "The skin should be mellow and moderately thick, covered with soft, wavy hair with a mossy undercoat… Hard, wiry hair with no undercoat is objectionable, and so is a jet-black coat. This should be black with a brownish tinge." With double-layer hair that protects the cows from the driving rain, biting wind and icy snow of a Scottish highland winter, it is no wonder that farmers used Galloway hides as cozy floor rugs for their homes or, before Gore-Tex®, sewed hides into impermeable outerwear for themselves.
LaFreniere believes that, historically, belted cows were raised in the Newport area as far back as the early 1900s. She says that both the Dutch Belted and the Galloway breeds are easy to work with and even easier to halter-break because of their docile, friendly nature.
Oh, are you left pondering what could be the other reason why the SVF keeps belties? “Well,” LaFreniere says, “we just like the way they look.” Yep we’ll second that.
