This card may say it shows a "French Ox", but I was at a loss to identify it. I can find cattle with long horns like this but not this light colour, or light coloured cattle with thicker straighter horns. In fact I asked if anyone had any ideas, and I was delighted to hear from Malcolm Thompson who tells us it is a Bearnaise, a French breed of domestic beef cattle named after the area in which it originates, that being the province of Bearn, in the northern Pyrenees, in south-west France.
It seems to have been a good doer, as they say of horses, easy to look after, and not requiring much in the way of special food nor handling. It was also general purpose, the males giving meat, the females milk, and both being used to pull carts and toil about the farmyard when machinery was still more seen in towns.
In fact our picture is almost certainly a manufactured cow, for in the 1920s a great deal of cross breeding went on, merges between the Bearnaise, Basquiase, and Race, to create a light coloured animal called the Blonde des Pyrenees, then the offspring of those cattle being bred with another light coloured breed, Blonde de Quercy. Finally a little bit of Garonnaise was sprinkled into the mixture to create the Blonde d`Aquitaine, but quite some time later, in 1962
For a while it was thought that the original Bearnaise had become extinct, as had the Basquiase, but some of the Bearnaise were found alive in the Aspe Valley, and it was decided to revive it, perhaps because of those really unusually shaped horns. This soon bore fruit, and a new breed standard and herd book was opened in 1982 Just over ten years later a breeder`s association formed, and the breed started coming back. A hundred new animals were bred between 2010 and 2014,
The back of this card quotes "Top Sellers Ltd. Thurmaston, Leicester", but also says it was "Printed in Italy by Edizione Panini Modena".
We know that there were several versions of this set.
One was retailed in America and Canada and the album shows a brown bear and cub to the front, with tiger cubs on the back cover. The album cost fifty-nine cents, in either country. The stickers cost thirty cents a packet, and contained six stickers, but they did not contain gum. And these sets both begin with cards of prehistoric animals. However, in America, and only in America, which seems odd for an album which was sold in Canada too, the inside back cover offered a sticker exchange, a straight swap, one you did want for one you did not - or you could just buy your missing cards for ten cents each. However in both of these cases you needed to send a dollar to cover postage. And you were limited to swapping or buying a maximum of thirty stickers at a time - which had to be different numbers. The address was Panini U.S.A. Inc., P.O. Box 5308, Dept. AOW, FDR Station, New York, N.Y. 1050-5308.
In Italy it was called "Animali Del Mondo", and though the front cover is the same (with the Italian wording overprinted in red within the yellow box, top left which said "sticker album" on the American and Canadian versions) the reverse shows a shelf unit shaped llike an ark into which you could place plastic figures - these were given in exchange for a completed album. The album in Italy cost a thousand lira. The stickers also differ as their album does not start with the prehistoric animals, it goes straight in to animals of North America