The Pinzgauer breed takes its name from the Pinzgau, a district of the Salzburg region in Austria. Originally, it was kept as a three-purpose breed for meat, milk and labour. In his work “Endangered Livestock Breeds”,Hans Hinrich Sambraus gives a detailed description of the breeding history of the breed, which we can only summarise here: „At the beginning of the 19th century, the breed began to spread in all directions from its country of origin in the province of Salzburg. A further wave of spread was brought about by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and affected all its member countries, including northern Italy. It then spread to other countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The breed also spread to Bavaria and, until shortly before the First World War, to northern and central Germany. The great collapse in the population occurred after the Second World War, particularly in the 1960s. According to Sambraus, there are Pinzgauers in over 25 countries worldwide and their numbers exceed one million. It should be emphasised that the breed is now traditionally kept as a dual-purpose breed in some countries and as beef cattle in others. In some countries, such as Austria and Italy, there was a phase of crossbreeding with Red Holstein in the 1980s in order to increase milk yield.“ In Italy, the breed was first bred locally in South Tyrol according to specific herd book guidelines. The herd book was officially recognised at the beginning of 2011. Herdbook management was initially entrusted to the AIA (Associazione Italiana Allevatori) and in December 2019 to the National Association of Breeders of the Grey Cattle Breed. . In 2021, the Technical Commission revised the herd book regulations for the implementation of the breeding programme, which was approved by the Ministry of Agriculture in March 2022. The breed is bred purely in Italy.