The banteng is a critically endangered wild ox that also lives on as Bali cattle
In the forests of Java and Cambodia roams a wild ox with a white rump patch, where bulls turn nearly black and cows stay chestnut. Its wild numbers have more than halved in recent decades. Yet domesticated banteng, known as Bali cattle, are common farm animals across eastern Indonesia and beyond.
Banteng are big animals. Wild bulls typically weigh 600 to 800 kilograms and the largest exceed 900, while domesticated ones are far lighter, often under 400. Both sexes carry horns, usually 60 to 95 centimetres long. Herds of two to forty generally include a single bull, and the animals graze and browse on grasses, sedges, leaves, flowers and fruit, drinking often when they can but able to go without water through dry spells. After about 285 days of pregnancy, roughly a week longer than ordinary cattle, a cow bears one calf.
The largest wild populations survive in Java, Cambodia and possibly parts of Borneo and Thailand, with feral herds in Sabah and Australia's Northern Territory. Domestic stock is raised mainly for meat. The wild form is classed as critically endangered, threatened by poaching for food, sport, medicine and horns, by habitat loss and by disease, and it is now largely confined to protected areas. It was also the second endangered species to be cloned successfully, and the first clone to survive beyond infancy.
The German naturalist Joseph Wilhelm Eduard d'Alton described it in 1823 from two skulls from Java, taking its name from the Javanese and Sundanese word. The female skull caused lasting confusion: an 1845 revision mistook it for a young male, an error repeated for years. Fossils from Thailand show the species lived there in the Middle Pleistocene alongside the elephant relative Stegodon.
Genetics has complicated the picture. A 2015 study found that the mitochondrial DNA of the Bornean banteng sits closer to the gaur than to other banteng, hinting it might be a separate species. A 2021 analysis including the likely extinct kouprey concluded that gaur, kouprey and banteng are distinct species whose ancestors interbred, and suggested some East Asian zebu cattle carry banteng ancestry.
Source: Banteng
