Concerns for the disappearance of local breeds, including in highlands and mountain areas, go back to the beginning of scientific breeding and the early national policies of agriculture intensification in Europe at the time of the industrial revolution. Against this background, ‘local’ breeds were understood as a natural resource, both necessary to the new breeding techniques and threatened by agriculture intensification. This early perspective rooted in European history remains dominant; today it informs a global debate on domestic animal diversity where the majority of so-called ‘local breeds’ were developed in livestock systems outside the European experience. This paper looks at domestic animal diversity through the lenses of one of such systems: cattle breeding among the Wodaabe pastoralists in Niger. The research is based on a combination of qualitative methodologies standard in social anthropology and quantitative analysis of memorized herd genealogies over a 20-year period. Results show that a competent herder can control cattle mating in over 90 percent of cases. Complex learned behaviour in cattle, particularly related to feeding competence, is a major selection criterion. The Wodaabe specialize in using the short-lived and unpredictable grazing opportunities, which is characteristic of Sahelian rangelands. To favourably interface the unpredictable variability in potential inputs, they breed herds with exceptional levels of within-breed diversity, crucially including epigenetic traits. The common practice of conflating Domestic Animal Diversity (DAD) with Animal Genetic Resources (AnGR), therefore, falls short of adequately representing the relationship between ‘local breeds’ and livelihood in pastoral systems.