Live Stock Breeders* Association. 233 



We must preserve our pedigree for what it now is, and we 

 must not be afraid to introduce fresh blood, because every man who 

 has achieved anything worthy of historical mention in the way of 

 breeding Shorthorns has used fresh material right and left at 

 times. Mr. Bates, who anathematized everybody else's cattle, 

 found himself obliged to resort to Red Rose blood and Princess 

 blood, and finally to taking the old Oxford cows blood into his 

 strain, in order to build it up and strengthen the resisting power of 

 his decaying Duchess tribe. The Boothes did the same thing. Mr. 

 Cruikshank did the same thing. 



But, of course, a man who has built up a herd until it becomes 

 a family has pride, and a great amount of it. He can not help 

 but feel that it is somewhat of a recognition of the merit of the 

 other people's herds to go to them and take a bull or a cow from 

 them; because the best way is to introduce new blood through a 

 cow. Breed your own bull to a good cow of some other blood, and 

 then breed the produce. That is what Bates, Booth and Cruik- 

 shank all did, and that is what they all told us to do. We seem in- 

 clined to repeat the errors of the past and to tie ourselves to one 

 particular strain because it is fashionable. Often because a com- 

 paratively inferior strain is fashionable it may bring a higher price 

 than a more worthy strain, and men discard all their, perhaps, 

 more worthy and magnificent material for it. Nine-tenths of their 

 stock we sometimes see men discard as worthless. This is all 

 wrong. I want to see the American Shorthorn — not the Scotch 

 Shorthorn or the English Shorthorn. (Applause.) 



I believe that by properly using this great mass of new blood 

 we have in this country and by properly breeding them, regardless 

 of family or strain to which they belong, we can produce animals 

 superior to those of all other countries, just as I believe the Ameri- 

 can citizen is superior to all others, just because he is bred in pre- 

 cisely the same cosmopolitan way. (Applause.) The American 

 citizen is composed of a tremendous aggregation of bloods, and he 

 has all the vigor and vitality that necessarily comes from that 

 kind of intermingling. And I want to see this great strain of cat- 

 tle brought up the same way, until we can show the old world 

 what we have wrought out ourselves. 



In 1882, as I said awhile ago, I was importing, and for a num- 

 ber of years thereafter, cattle from Mr. Cruikshank. I never 

 dreamed of carrying those cattle along in the way they had been. 

 But I wanted to infuse new blood that would strengthen my herd 

 and give our cattle a better constitution. It was simply an addi- 



