Contradictions of Cattle Herding Behaviour in Twenty First Century Nigeria

Nigeria’s pastoral production of cattle has endured from pre-colonial times to the present. It has however not greatly evolved from its classical roots in transhumance. Cattle invasion of forbidden urban spaces is a regular occurrence. Events of the past few decades on the grazing trail also show a conflicted relationship with other land uses that increasingly manifests a very violent component. The issue has attracted great attention in terms of empirical investigations. It also requires new academic insight from theoretical perspectives. Using a framework of cross-disciplinary ideas in the literature, the current effort interrogates the idealism of an isotropic grazing plane expected to optimize nomads business plans which is not reconciled with the realism of heightening topomorphic revolution. Based on analysis of narratives on herdsmens experiences and those of conflicted alternative land uses, it looks at the herdsman as a landscape luddite fighting a losing war against a helpless landscape evolution of fences and barricades in his fixation with a romantic open field ideal of time past. The paper examines the notion of the land developer as an irritant aggressor in herdsmen’s worldview. The paper concludes that denial of the reality of landscape evolution is at the heart of the conflicted cattle production business across Nigeria and is therefore an unsustainable position in the light of emerging challenges. Keywords: Pastoral; Transhumance; Cattle; Theoretical; Landscape