LIVE STOCK breeders' ASSOCIATION. 187 



POLLED -HEREFORD CATTLE. 



(Hon. B. O. Gammon, Des Moines, Iowa.) 



It seems indeed like labor lost to bring word of an improved type 

 of Hereford cattle to Missouri. Missouri, birthplace and home of the 

 mighty Defender, peerless leader of a peerless breed; Missouri, whose 

 five hundred pure-bred Hereford herds make it the very Hereford- 

 shire of America, who would presume to improve upon the Missouri 

 Hereford? But at the invitation of your program committee I am 

 here to discuss what the world must deem an improved type of the 

 "whiteface," the Polled Hereford. 



The ultimate outlet for the products of every herd of beef cattle 

 is the shambles. Whether we produce breeding cattle or feeding cattle, 

 we all meet on the road to the slaughter pens. If we are to succeed we 

 must be ever ready to supply the demands of the butcher, our final 

 common patron. Between us and the butcher there usually come two 

 important intermediaries, the feeder and the shipper. And all these' 

 men, feeder, shipper and butcher, are demanding today, as never be- 

 fore, that beef animals shall have no horns. The men who handle the 

 steer while he is preparing for the packing house note some essential 

 and very well defined differences between the horned and the horn- 

 less beef. The feeder knows that the hornless animal will gain faster, 

 needs less shed room, is more docile and altogether more pleasant and 

 profitable than the horned one. The shipper has learned that there 

 are no broken horns, gouged eyes or disemboweled cattle when a load 

 of hornless ones reaches market, and he has felt, too, the cut of $1.00 to 

 $3.00 per head that the buyer gives the horned steer, and he avoids it 

 as a plague. The butcher notes the bright carcass, free from bruises, 

 and the evenly marbled flesh of the quickly-fattened steer and unites 

 with the others in demanding a hornless beef. 



Although this demand has been recognized in the past, and more 

 especially in the recent past, the breeder of Herefords has had no way 

 of meeting it save by the saw. And the dehorning sa\^ has its very 

 great disadvantages. On the range it presents serious practical diffi- 

 culties, and everywhere it results in a temporary check to rapid growth, 

 often in losses by death, and is always accompanied by the frightful 

 brutality of intense pain. No matter how humane the operator or the 

 method, dehorning is a disgusting, unpleasant job, detested by every 

 lover of animals, and what successful stockman does not love them ? 



