Talk:British White cattle

Bovine historians
It seems a little unfair to describe the historians as bovine. Could we not substitute "historians of cattle breeds"? Jatrius 22:09, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Article structure and content
We've had several edits with reversions recently. I thought I'd explain my position...

Like every WP article, this one needs to start with a definition and summary of the subject: the modern cattle breed, the British White. Like all breed articles, it then needs needs to describe the physical and other characteristics of the breed, its uses, and its history.

The breed does have a long history, but only those facts which can be supported with reliable references belong in this article. For example, there is no direct evidence of a connection between British Whites and ancient Celtic cattle (in fact the same goes for the White Park). There may be a connection, but it could just as easily be a superficial similarity, and we must stick with demonstrable facts, not speculation and hopeful interpretation. Likewise, references from the 10th century to white polled cattle do not show that these were British Whites. As a British BW breeder, I would dearly love to believe that my cattle are direct descendents of the cattle kept by what might have been my own ancient ancestors – but my romantic dreams are not encyclopaedic.

Having said all that, I don't see why the information on ancient white British Isles cattle should not go elsewhere on WP. It is interesting historical and anthropological information which is academically respectable: we do know that there is a very long tradition of valuing white cattle with red or black points, there are references to support this knowledge. However, we don't know what happened to those cattle – for all we know they have no descendents, and the modern white breeds come from elsewhere or arose spontanously. So I think the ancient cattle material belongs in its own article, not in those about surviving breeds whose origins cannot be proven. How about calling it "Ancient white cattle of the British Isles"? The most we can say at present about British Whites (and White Parks) is that in some way they continue the ancient tradition – but that can easily be dealt with by a "see also" link to an ancient white cattle article.

I would be happy to see a direct connection with ancient cattle mentioned if references can be found proving that there is a direct link – for example, if a white, colour-pointed Bronze Age skin was found and its genetic material analysed, it might be shown to be more closely related to modern White Parks or British Whites than to other modern cattle. However, unless such references are provided, the material cannot be included in an encyclopaedia. Richard New Forest (talk) 21:39, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Ancestry and reffed material
It has been quite a while since I looked at this Wikipedia description of British White cattle. I find it interesting that some author has seen fit to edit out/exclude the hard verifiable data (which I provided here long ago with all proper citations) from the author, Hall, which clearly states the horned White Park are the product of among other breeds, the Longhorn, etc... Yet the author has seen fit to include, without reference, the vague statement of Shorthorn introduction into the polled Park cattle, known as British White cattle since the mid-40's or so, and thus inferring they are the product of Shorthorn additions and less genetically pure.

In reality a shorthorn bull was used in one herd a very long time ago, the Woodbastwick herd, and unlike the White Park cattle association and members in the UK, this fact is not hidden. And this fact in no way makes the British White less pure of a descendant of the ancient Park cattle than the horned White Park, but rather, in my opinion, makes them more genetically pure and connected with their ancient white, hornless, and gentle bovine ancestors.

Just because the White Park cattle folks in the UK wish to ignore the real facts of the breeds background, and continuously try to say they are genetically distinct from the polled British White and more 'pure' than any other in the UK -- a source such as this article should not fall into that trap of believing the propaganda. Historically, the posturing of the horned White Park breeders has been refuted by many researches for almost 200 hundred years. Further, the specimens of horned White Park used for any so-called genetic testing many many years ago, would have been genetically different from the polled Park cattle given the strong influence of the English Longhorn in perpetuating the horned Park cattle's existence. A simple review of historical photos reveals the various horn lengths and shapes found over the years, fairly obvious they are not 'pure'.

As well, it has been speculated for over a hundred years by agricultural writers that the polled Park Cattle/British White are in fact the ancestor of the Shorthorn, not the other way around.

Jimmie West 98.20.50.32 (talk) 15:10, 30 September 2010 (UTC)


 * This is clearly not the article in which to discuss the ancestry of the White Park: it's not about that breed but about the British White. Also, Wikpedia talk pages are not the place for inter-breed bickering.  If you consider that facts included in this article are incorrect, please tag them as requiring citations.  Richard New Forest (talk) 17:31, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Move discussion
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Anglo-Nubian which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 13:44, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Requested moves 19 December 2014
– All of these are descriptive of genuine human ethnicities or populations, and only animal breed experts would intuit that they don't refer to people, so the existing names fail WP:PRECISION policy (and probably also WP:RECOGNIZABLE, since only experts in obscure breeds of particular kinds of livestock, not agricultural animals generally, will recognize them at all). We routinely (and WP:NATURALly) disambiguate animal breed names in any cases where confusion may result. See months of previous RMs, and the contents of Category:Cattle breeds, Category:Goat breeds, Category:Rabbit breeds, etc. There was a previous, less focused, RM at Talk:Anglo-Nubian in October, which failed to come to consensus, so I'm relisting the ones that are definitely applicable to real humans, not just possibly mistakable for them. In detail, the first four are terms for someone respectively of primarily black (African) or white (European) ancestry in the regions in question; Anglo-Nubian may refer to mixed-race persons in Africa or the African diaspora during or after the British Colonial period; Nicastrese refers to anyone or anything from Nicastro (it's simply an adjectival local geonym like "Dubliner" or "Parisian"); the Argentine Criollo people are an extant regional ethnicity, and the breed doesn't even seem to be named after them (rather, they're a Criollo cattle breed of Argentine stock); Indo-Brazillian and Indo-Caribbean are real ethnicities, arising from the intermingling of Indic manual laborers ("coolies") with the extant population during and after the construction of the Panama Canal and various railway and mining projects in South and Central America (the strong regional presence of these people south of Mexico is why curry is a common dish in many Latin American and Caribbean cuisines). NB: The move to Anglo-Nubian goat has been requested, uncontested, since 2011 for the same reason given in this RM; see its talk page. PS: The "Black" and "White" cases are also covered by the previous RM at Talk:Flemish Giant rabbit, which concluded in favor of WP:NATURAL disambiguation of animal breed article names that are simply adjectives that could refer to anything; given this, Uzbek Black should also move to Uzbek Black goat. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  14:09, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * British White → British White cattle
 * Welsh Black → Welsh Black cattle
 * Florida White → Florida White rabbit
 * Anatolian Black → Anatolian Black cattle
 * Anglo-Nubian → Anglo-Nubian goat
 * Nicastrese → Nicastrese goat
 * Argentine Criollo → Argentine Criollo cattle
 * Indo-Brazilian → Indo-Brazilian cattle
 * Oppose. The proposal, for all of its wordiness, appears to boil down to the argument that one needs to be an animal expert to not think the current titles refer to people. This is not at all complimentary to the average reader's intelligence. I am by no means some kind of rabbit specialist, yet I would never think an article titled "Florida White" would be about people of European descent that happened to live in the state of Florida. It is hard to imagine that someone would. First of all, under what circumstances would we even have such an article? Why would we need an article that discusses people of one specific ethnicity in one state? Is there something demographically special about Florida, or might we also have Wisconsin Asian and Maine Hispanic? Secondly, in the very unlikely event we did have such an article, why would we ever call it "Florida White"? Wouldn't it be something like White people in Florida? Thirdly, under what circumstances would the proposed confusion exist? Is it anticipated that someone will see a link to it in context in an article, talking about rabbits, and think it's about people? Will someone looking for information about white people in Florida enter "Florida White" into the search bar? So, as the proposed article it is suggested it would cause confusion with does not exist, has no reason to exist, and would not be called that even if it did exist, and it is difficult to imagine the actual circumstances where one would see this title and think about the other article that does not exist, etcetera, this does not appear to be a necessary move. As all the moves are based of this same argument, and the argument does not make sense, I oppose all of them. If there is one where the nominator feels the "this might be a person" argument is especially strong, they should make the case for that separately, rather than lumping it in with such dubious arguments as the one on Florida White. Egsan Bacon (talk) 15:13, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't see any policy basis for this "oppose". You're mistaking my argument. I am not making any kind of proposal about what the name of an article about, e.g., Floridian European-Americans should be titled, so whether we might ultimately put such an article at White people in Florida isn't really germane. This is about what readers are apt to think an article title like Florida White refers to. It's noteworthy in this regard that a lot of people, especially leftists, consider it conventional to capitalise ethnicities and demographic groups, including "Black" and "White", though it's not the majority use in modern publications. Thus, the fact that breed names are capitalised here [for now, for better or worse, and this could be revisited] makes it more, not less, likely for confusion to result, in cases like Florida White, British White and Welsh Black. To make matters worse, our linking system makes cases like " " a fairly likely wikilinking error. Anyway, few are likely to think any of these are an animal breed who do not already know that, which is nearly no one, in the scheme of things.  Without looking above, I can't even remember except in one case whether it's a pig or goat or what, and I've been editing these articles for months.  Many breeds across various species have confusingly similar, indistinct names (they're not even always very distinct within the same species; cf. previous disputes about the various "Park" cattle breeds, "White" pig breeds, etc.). So, even already knowing the article is about an animal breed, the name is still too vague to be useful.  I already covered this problem as well, in referring to previous RMs that concluded to clarify names such as these, that could refer to just about anything because they're just descriptive adjectival phrases using common words.  You also appear to be presupposing that every WP visitor is already familiar with our naming conventions ("in [geographic location]" phrasing, appending "people", etc.), but they are not. Next, we already have many articles on regional ethnicities, one of the more obvious being African American.  Note in particular that this is a singular adjective phrase, like the titles in this RM, and does not have "people" appended. The very fact that we're still inconsistent in naming ethnicity articles is further evidence that the article names in question here will be confusing to some readers.  We have no crystal ball and cannot predict what article splits may occur tomorrow or in five years, under WP:SUMMARY style, but national-level ethnicity articles would certainly be likely to split along lines of subnational entities, e.g. US states like Florida.  But again, this is not about what ethnicity articles should exist and be named what, it's about interpretation of the vague titles listed in the RM.  Also, please do not confuse ignorance and stupidity.  This has nothing to do with "the average reader's intelligence". Possession of specialist knowledge like the names of obscure agricultural categorizations is unrelated to IQ.  This is a matter of how English language phrases are parsed, within their cultural context. The extant titles are confusingly vague.  We also cannot think only of the "average" WP reader, if such a person exists.  Children use this site, as do many non-fluent learners of English, and we try to account, in our redirect system, for likely alternative search terms. PS: I'm unclear what point was intended in making a brevity complaint in a post of approximately the same length as that being complained about.  The RM is not of excessive length, and covers the necessary background for the issue at hand.  Animal breed article naming has been the subject of some contention, and clarity is more important here than being as brief as possible.   — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:47, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Support per nom And if we have ethnic/demographic articles with the ones that are also used as demonyms/ethnic labels, we should consider instead redirecting those there after these are moved ( Criollo people from Argentina, Indians in Brazil, Brazilians in India, English people in Nubia, Nubians in England, Nicastrese people ) -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 05:31, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, but for now some disambiguation hatnotes should suffice, e.g. .  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:47, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Support – these certainly lack recognizability, even to someone generally familiar with animal breeds, because they are so ambiguous. The changes suit our WP:CRITERIA better.  Dicklyon (talk) 05:58, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Support as per nom and other supporters. GregKaye  ✍ ♪  06:29, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Support. The current title is ambiguous unless already in the context of cattle.  Of course, in the context of cattle, "cattle" will be dropped instead of being repeated in nearly every sentence.  Encyclopedia titles does not exist primarily in the context of cattle.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:53, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, and that'll be an important consideration in future animal breed article moves. Several editors who focus on these articles as much as or more than I do are contrarily very resistant to adding the species name to the article titles, because they seem to fear that it would lead to always using the longer phrase ("Siamese cat", whatever) in mid-sentence in article prose. But of course there is no actual reason for us to do that at all, and it won't happen; the article on the cat breed would continue to refer to "the Siamese", after the title and lead sentence have made it clear we are not talking about the historical human population of Thailand. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:22, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Support when I put an obscure breed of animal on my watchlist I often forget what species it is next time I see it, this will make my watchlist more useful Siuenti (talk) 12:53, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

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