Wild life

Laikipia

My new pride and joy is a pedigree Boran bull named Woragus 317. We know him as Ollie. Sired by the famous 956 Segera from the legendary Gianni line, he was bred on Mark and Nicky Myatt-Taylor’s stud in Tanzania’s distant southern highlands. I recklessly bought him on the strength of a photograph, bidding by email at a recent Boran Cattle Breeders’ Society of Kenya auction. I was in the bush in South Sudan when I heard I had won — and then it sank in that Ollie has cost me the price of a Volkswagen, or a family holiday to Bali.

The Boran is ‘God’s gift to cattlemen’, the experts say. It is the finest of all Africa’s zebu-type beef breeds: hardy, fertile, docile, with ‘excellent fleshing qualities’. The Boran’s history is an amazing tale of African achievement, a combination of indigenous breeding over perhaps 1,500 years, together with modern European ranching techniques. Nearly a century ago, Kenya’s early British settlers began improving what they called Frontier cattle from Somalis and the southern Ethiopian Borana tribe. In the 1950s, my late father was a founding member of the Boran society and a judge at the Nairobi show. Ollie comes from a line originally bred by my father’s friend and neighbour Miles Fletcher.

I know I paid over the odds for Ollie. My neighbour Tom immediately sent me an incredulous sms. ‘You didn’t really just buy a bull for (price of a Volkswagen)?’ Some days later, after too many beers together, we almost quarrelled about it. Tom has been a good friend and given me lots of good advice over the years, but I was defensive. Until now I was too scared to bid high in a bull auction, provoking one Boran aficionado to joke, ‘Do you want a cheap one?’ No longer.