Belted Galloway

The Belted Galloway is a Galloway with a color rule attached.

Galloways come from the hill country of southwestern Scotland, where the native cattle were hardy and thrifty but varied in color, horn and build. Between the late 1700s and early 1800s breeders standardized them into a polled beef animal that kept the environmental toughness, and they became known for doing well on rough forage, mothering well, and producing good beef. The herd book opened in 1877.

Nobody knows where the belt came from. The same pattern turns up in unrelated breeds in different countries, most obviously the Dutch Lakenvelder, which North Americans call Dutch Belted. In some breeds it was actively bred out, and it has gone from the Welsh Black and the Kerry entirely.

The Galloway went the other way. A separate herd book for belted animals opened in Scotland in 1928, and that split by color is what made the Belted Galloway a breed. It is otherwise very close to the plain Galloway, which this catalogue lists separately.

They are polled, long-haired, efficient grazers that take a light bite, and they handle warm climates better than the coat suggests.