From the archive
8 Aug 2026
In 2022 a film crew working on the Lika Plains, near the Adriatic coast of Croatia, pointed a thermal-imaging camera at a small herd of aurochs after dark. A pack of wolves was threatening them. What the footage shows is the bulls moving into a semi-circle, facing outwards, horns to the front, with the cows and calves gathered behind them. Sheltering in the same space was a group of wild horses, among them a foal.
The herd had only been released into the area a few years earlier. Yet the formation the bulls made is one that exists in the historical record. Ronald Goderie, a Dutch ecologist who has spent four decades in the European rewilding movement, says there is old evidence of aurochs defending themselves exactly this way, and of other species taking cover behind them. "That's what we had heard, but it had never been filmed," he says.
The aurochs itself is an animal returned from extinction, and herds are now spreading across Europe, with talk of them reaching the UK before long. The Lika footage matters less as spectacle than as documentation: a defensive behaviour described in historical accounts, filmed for the first time. On the footage, the wolves stay outside the line, showing what Goderie describes as a lot of aggression.
Regeneration International · Read the source