The most beautiful cow in the world: Wagyu from Germany

We are standing in a cowshed and think we are in a claustrum, it’s so monastic quiet and reverent here. No plaintive mooing can be heard, no angry pawing of the hooves, no desperate tugging at chains. Instead, the stable dwellers chew their hay meditatively, as if they were repeating spiritual exercises. There are three dozen cattle of the Japanese Wagyu breed, and they are the friendliest, most docile, most trusting cattle we have ever seen, animals with an almost Buddhist gentle temperament, which also has every superlative for itself when it comes to questions of taste, health and a good conscience can take advantage of.

The most extraordinary of all ruminants

The good shepherd of this flock is called Tobias Becker, studied business administration and early on felt the desire to bring the triumvirate of humans, animals and nature into ethical harmony. However, he had no idea about Wagyu until a friend served him the precious meat, which comes from the most extraordinary of all ruminants: Wagyu are the last ancestral cattle on the planet, which owe their uniqueness to Japanese history. They were not interbred with any other breed during the Empire’s centuries of isolation, and being used only as working animals because Buddhism banned meat from the menu, they developed high levels of intramuscular fat as spontaneous energy reserves for toil. That’s why no other beef is as heavily marbled as Wagyu.

When Japan opened its borders with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the rest of the world also learned about this marvel of taste. And because the Japanese now began to eat meat themselves and the demand could no longer be met with domestic production, Wagyu began to be bred in Australia and North America. But after just six years, Japan ended all experiments in order to protect the national culinary heritage of Wagyu and not jeopardize its exclusivity.

We need new priorities

Today, all Wagyu outside of Japan can be traced back genetically to 270 animals that had previously left the country, including the specimens that are kept in Tobias Becker’s stables and on the pasture in the heart of Thuringia. Together with his brother, a trained farmer and specialist in animal breeding, and two other partners, he founded the company Marblelution in 2015, which wants to do everything better and categorically avoid the cardinal mistake of animal husbandry in Germany. The only relevant criterion in normal breeding is the weight of the cattle for slaughter, says Becker. How happily the cattle grow up, how good the meat tastes, how healthy it is for people, in contrast to many other countries, none of this plays the slightest role. With Marblelution, on the other hand, these parameters are the alpha and omega and the guarantors of future-oriented animal husbandry: According to Becker, we should eat much less, but much better meat from animals that grow up in dignity and enable their farmers to live an equally dignified life.