Gaushalas play a vital role in safeguarding the cattle wealth of our country. It is primarily occupied with providing shelter to cows and caters mostly the needs of non-lactating, weak, unproductive and stray cattle. This paper describes cattle herd structure and herd dynamics from a data set of 40 gaushalas selected form Karnataka state based on certain criteria. These gaushalas, an important source of indigenous germplasm, were maintaining more than 6640 heads of cattle. Herd structure of these gaushalas indicated that about 25.00 percent of the gaushalas possessed small herd size (below 50 cattle) and 30.00 percent with large herd size (above 150 cattle) followed by 45.00 percent medium herd size (between 51-150 cattle). Majority of the gaushalas comprised of more than 90.00 percent of indigenous cattle and around 5.00 percent of crossbred cattle. The total inflow of cattle due to cattle left by owners/donated, stray cattle brought and purchased by gaushala was 37, 150 and 350 in small, medium and large sized gaushalas, respectively. Whereas, in case of outflow of cattle due to death/mortality, selling and donation was 26, 69 and 98 in small, medium and large sized gaushalas, respectively. The study will be helpful in identifying gaushalas as conservation centre and formulating conservation strategies for improvement of cattle genetic resources.

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