Illustration: Brett Ryder
In 2011, Paul Davis took his 4-year-old son to a children's farm outside London. While cooing over stripey Belted Galloway cows, Davis' mind turned to something far more sinister: foot-and-mouth disease, and how it could wipe out all of those animals in an instant. A lawyer and pilot who was raised on a small farm, Davis had long been interested in rare breeds of livestock—and that day with his son, he realized he wanted to do something. "As your family grows up," he says, "you look back to the land and want to make an impact." So he set out to safeguard the world's cattle.
The result is his Manx Ark Project, a haven for rare breeds of cattle, sheep, and goats, carved out of 170 acres of farmland on the Isle of Man. Some of the Ark's species have global populations in the hundreds or fewer and tend to be slow-growing, which is bad for modern farming—but they're also hardy as hell. Plus, if the manure really hits the fan, we might need them. "If animals are all clones of each other, we won't have anything to go back to that's resistant to a new disease," says Claire Barber, a conservation officer at the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, a charity that is partnering with Davis.
Davis already has a number of rare breeds and hopes to build an island-wide network of conservation farms; nine local farmers, many of whom have experience with the breeds, have signed on. He also wants to build upscale lodging for scientists and tourists. Who's to say a zoological Xanadu can't make a little E-I-E-I-dough?