Bricket Cross - A Case of Mistaken Identity?
April 14, 2012
For years, I have puzzled over the breed identity of the most influential of the Anglo-Nubian foundation sires, Bricket Cross. Two of the other bucks were listed as breeds that are well recorded. Sedgemere Chancellor was a Jamnapari/Jamunapari from India. The Jamnapari is the premium modern Indian dairy breed, and is also used in Indonesia for that purpose. Sedgemere Sangar was the elegant Egyptian Zaraibi, which is now a rare, potentially extinct breed. Bricket Cross was listed as “Chitral buck, horned.” I own the beautiful book Goats of the World, and looked in vain for the Chitral breed, or an equivalent, in the India and Pakistan section. Nothing matched. I concluded at that point that the breed was either extinct, or had changed names between 1904 and now. With nothing more to go on, I dropped the search for a while.
Later I was able to find an old photograph of the buck, and at about the same time was the first year my folks had high speed internet, which broadened my search base. I put "Chitral" and "goat" into the search engines in attempt to find the elusive goat. The goat photos were scarce, and the few I found were old (mostly black and white) and of poor quality. But I did learn that Chitral was in fact in Pakistan, not India, in the far north of the country. Progress, but not much. *Transition sentence*
The last step in the process of investigating the buck's origins includes the unlikely tool of Facebook. This spring I have been expanding my collection of drawings to include a variety of foreign breeds, in hopes of using them in displays at the few fairs where I exhibit my girls. I like to turn out accurate portrayals of whatever I'm drawing, and therefore use photographs to bring my creations to life. One excellent source of photographs is the internet. I happened to be looking for some good ones for Pakistani breeds, and came across a photo of a beautiful red and white buck who reminded me strongly of Bricket Cross. I plugged in the breed name (“Chishti”), 'goat' and 'Pakistan', and came up empty-handed. I found a more recent list of Pakistani goats, and even went so far as to search for each of the listed breeds in case there was a match to either the Chitral or the Chishti.
For years, I have puzzled over the breed identity of the most influential of the Anglo-Nubian foundation sires, Bricket Cross. Two of the other bucks were listed as breeds that are well recorded. Sedgemere Chancellor was a Jamnapari/Jamunapari from India. The Jamnapari is the premium modern Indian dairy breed, and is also used in Indonesia for that purpose. Sedgemere Sangar was the elegant Egyptian Zaraibi, which is now a rare, potentially extinct breed. Bricket Cross was listed as “Chitral buck, horned.” I own the beautiful book Goats of the World, and looked in vain for the Chitral breed, or an equivalent, in the India and Pakistan section. Nothing matched. I concluded at that point that the breed was either extinct, or had changed names between 1904 and now. With nothing more to go on, I dropped the search for a while.
Later I was able to find an old photograph of the buck, and at about the same time was the first year my folks had high speed internet, which broadened my search base. I put "Chitral" and "goat" into the search engines in attempt to find the elusive goat. The goat photos were scarce, and the few I found were old (mostly black and white) and of poor quality. But I did learn that Chitral was in fact in Pakistan, not India, in the far north of the country. Progress, but not much. *Transition sentence*
The last step in the process of investigating the buck's origins includes the unlikely tool of Facebook. This spring I have been expanding my collection of drawings to include a variety of foreign breeds, in hopes of using them in displays at the few fairs where I exhibit my girls. I like to turn out accurate portrayals of whatever I'm drawing, and therefore use photographs to bring my creations to life. One excellent source of photographs is the internet. I happened to be looking for some good ones for Pakistani breeds, and came across a photo of a beautiful red and white buck who reminded me strongly of Bricket Cross. I plugged in the breed name (“Chishti”), 'goat' and 'Pakistan', and came up empty-handed. I found a more recent list of Pakistani goats, and even went so far as to search for each of the listed breeds in case there was a match to either the Chitral or the Chishti.
I was unable to find the "Chishti"
breed, so I decided to change tactics. I instead looked up the location of the
Chishti's place of origin. Although unable to find the exact village, I was
able to find the nearest large city, called Faisalabad. I then used Google Maps to also locate Chitral in
order to see how close those two places were. I was disappointed, as it was too
far for there to be a high likelihood of the two animals being the same breed.
Per Google Maps, Faisalabad is a 10 hour drive south of Chitral. I was also able
to find a photograph of a herd of Chitral goats...also a dead end. They had
long hair like the Golden Guernsey and shorter ears than Bricket Cross, who is
decidedly short-haired, with beautiful long ears that a modern Nubian breeder
usually only dreams of owning.
As I was looking at the discouraging information in front of me, it occurred to me that I had a Facebook friend who was from the Pakistan area. I thought about it for a bit and decided to see if he, or one of his contacts might know something that would help. I posted the photograph of Bricket Cross with the little bit of information I had about the buck, his reported place of origin, about the similar looking animal and his known location. I was very pleased when I got several replies, mostly from other contacts that the Pakistani had. By and large, they too believed, as I was now suspecting, that he couldn't have been a Chitrali goat. Most of the dialogue agreed that the animal was a low-land variety, likely a Beetal or a Beetal cross. Some of the comments:
- "In multan we dont have any chitrali goat, but in karachi some times we see a long haired small size goat termed as pahari"
- "This doesn't look like a Chitrali to me but does bear some faint resemblance to the Betel breed from Faisalabad."
- "Its body,tail,height and mouth support it is Beetal breed but ears and thickness of body says it is Teddy breed...i think it is a hybrid of both breeds."
- "Mountain goat breeds are very distinctive in Pakistan, and the ones from Chitral are even more so and they look nothing like this specimen. This almost certainly a breed from the plains, in fact a combination of a couple of different breeds. They may have called to Chitral goat in order to play up the romance of its origin."
- "He looks like a Desi goat from Punjab(Roman nose,wrinkles around neck,short coupled,shape of tail)Desi is like an umbrella under which different strains exists including Beetal,these same Desis went to Africa and were used in creating Boer goats."
So, chances are, the esteemed Bricket Cross was not what the records show. Was he sold by a nomad who happened to take his goats into the mountainous area and the British fellow didn't bother to double check the bucks breed (he IS just a goat)? Did the British buyer in Pakistan deem the villages of low lands Punjab as not exotic enough for his clientele, and therefore embellished the buck's history? Obviously we will never know, but I think it's interesting to finally learn the probable genetic base of one of the most important Nubian sires.