Cattle raiding
act of stealing cattle
Cattle raiding is the act of stealing live cattle, often several or many at once. In Australia, such stealing is often referred to as duffing and the perpetrator as a duffer. In parts of the country, however, especially in Queensland, the practice is known as poddy-dodging and the perpetrator as a poddy-dodger. In North America, especially in the Western cowboy culture, cattle theft is dubbed rustling and one who engages in it is a rustler.
Historical cattle raiding
The act of cattle-raiding is quite ancient, first attested over seven thousand years ago, and is one of the oldest-known aspects of Proto-Indo-European culture, being seen in inscriptions on artifacts such as the Norse Golden Horns of Gallehus and in works such as the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge ("Cattle Raid of Cooley"), the paṇis of the Rigveda, the Mahabharata cattle raids and cattle rescues.
Cattle Raiding in Ancient Greek Mythology
Cattle raiding played a major part in Ancient Greek mythology. Hermes, for example, raided Apollo's cattle when he was newly born. An early story of Oedipus from Hesiod's Works and Days had him die in a cattle raid and not blind without a kingdom like in the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. Heracles raided the cattle of Geryon; which in Plato's Gorgias Callicles used as an example to say the 'might makes right'. In the Odyssey, Odysseus' men chose to ignore a warning not to rob the cattle of the god Helios because of hunger and were cursed to die.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cattle raiding” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.