l88 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL RBPORT. 



Hence, we see the crying need of a naturally hornless or polled strain 

 of Herefords. 



To supply this need the American Polled Hereford Cattle Club 

 was organized at Des Moines, Iowa, in 1900, for the purpose of estab- 

 lishing and building up such a strain. We at first held the opinion, 

 so prevalent among breeders, that our only method would be to make 

 use of an outcross with some established polled breed, such as the 

 Polled Durham, Angus or Galloway, coming back immediately to the 

 Hereford and continuing to infuse Hereford blood until such high 

 giades were attained as would be practically pure bred. In other 

 words, we expected to produce just such a breed as is the Single Stand- 

 ard Polled Durham, cattle practically pure bred, but with just enough 

 alien blood to give the polled head. However, upon a study of Darwin's 

 "Origin of Species," in which we became much interested about that 

 time, wc were convinced that there must be freaks or sports among 

 pure-bred Herefords as among all other species of animals, and that if 

 they could but be located there were probably in existence sport or freak 

 Herefords having no horns, though of pure-bred horned ancestry. We 

 determined to make a search for such freaks, and by correspondence 

 ■with the members of the American Hereford Cattle Breeders' Associa- 

 tion, we located seventeen such animals, four males and thirteen fe- 

 males. We bought the four males and seven of the females and mated 

 for the first time in history a hornless Hereford bull with a hornless 

 Hereford cow for the express purpose of producing polled progeny. 

 We were successful, and from that small, though far from insig- 

 nificant beginning, we have gone on in our operations until we now have 

 a promising start toward a fixed and, we believe, increasingly popular 

 strain of beef cattle. 



Though two of the original four males have proven worthless as 

 breeders, we have located two more, and so have four unrelated bulls 

 to use in avoiding detrimental inbreeding. These males and their oldest 

 calves are busy in good herds of cows possessing some of the best 

 blood lines in the Hereford Herd Book, and are producing polled 

 calves of high merit. In our own herd we had twenty-two polled calves 

 this year, thirteen being males. There are males in use in well-selected 

 herds in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Wyoming and Canada. 



While we were breeding the single standard cattle many became 

 interested in them, and we now have upwards of fifty breeders raising 

 this class of cattle. Under the rules for entry of cattle in the Single 

 Standard Polled Hereford Record, the cattle offered must be sired by 

 cither a registered Polled Hereford bull or a pure bred Hereford bull, 

 and their dams must be sired either by a registered Polled Hereford bull 



