Photo: facebook.com/zapovidnyk2018
In a few years, the herd has grown to 20 animals.
Animals live well without owners and do not even need milking – their lactation cycle is normalized and tied to the birth of calves.
Near Chernobyl, in Polissya, there lives a herd of cows that have become feral after the death of their owners, self-settlers. They graze in the wild, do not offend calves and do not even need to be milked. They told about free and independent cows in the Chernobyl radiation-ecological biosphere reserve, whose employees observe the life of the herd.
The cows of the Ukrainian Black-and-White dairy breed common in Polissya belonged to two families of self-settlers who settled in Chernobyl and the village of Lubyanka near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In 2016, their owners died, the herd began to live in freedom and gradually became wild. By the beginning of the war, it had grown to 20 heads.
Cows have learned to survive without people, because their ancestors come from the wild. After some time, the animals became so wild that when a person or a car appeared, they began to quickly run away into the nearest thickets. Without owners and a shepherd, they live quite well, according to the staff of the reserve – this is confirmed by the monitoring of scientists and photographs from camera traps.
There are many abandoned buildings on the territory of the exclusion zone, where cows wander to protect themselves from wind, rain and snow. They find food for themselves, since there is enough food on the territory of the reserve: even in winter, when it snows, animals dig dry grass with their hooves. In addition, cows do not need to be milked, unlike domestic cows: their lactation cycle is normalized and tied to the birth of calves.
“Since the end of 2018, specialists from the reserve have been monitoring the unique inhabitants of the zone. Their conclusion is that the cows are healthy and able to protect themselves and their calves,” the employees say.
Recall that in the liberated from the occupation of the Chernobyl zone, a brown bear was recorded twice in 2022. The animal was captured by a camera trap on May 24 and August 19, 2022.
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