Cattle raiding

Cattle raiding is the act of stealing cattle. In Australia, such stealing is often referred to as duffing, and the perpetrator as a duffer. In North America, especially in cowboy culture, cattle theft is dubbed rustling and an individual who engages in it is a rustler.

History

The act of cattle rustling is quite ancient. Historically, the first suspected raids occurred over seven thousand years ago.

Mythology

Cattle raids play an important part in Indo-European mythology; see for example Táin Bó Cúailnge (Ireland; in English: The Cattle Raid of Cooley), the Rigvedic Panis (India), and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, who steals the cattle of Apollo (Greece). These myths are often paired with myths of the abduction of women (compare Helen of Troy, Saranyu, Sita, and The Rape of the Sabine Women). Abduction of women and theft of livestock were practiced in many of the world's pre-urbanised cultures, the former likely reaching back to the Paleolithic and the latter to the earliest domestication of animals in the Neolithic.