ABSTRACT
Travelling through East Africa, one can see a great diversity of coat-colours among cattle, as well as among goats and sheep. Finch and Western relate this to differences in altitude and analyze it from the standpoint of ecology. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify, using concrete examples from the pastoral Bodi of the southwestern part of Ethiopia, what kind of cultural devices underlie the phenomenon of coat-colour polymorphism in the process of the domestication of animals. In Bodi society there is a myth of the rain being the moon's urine, and it may be that this is related. It would not be an exaggeration to say that without diversity Bodi society itself would be hardly recognizable. The method used in the chapter has been looked at coat-colour polymorphism primarily through the filter of Bodi concepts.
