FIFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART IV 301 



Do not understand from what has been said that I do not appreciate the 

 value of a bull's pedigree — far from it. In no class of animals is the pedi- 

 gree of such great importance as in the diary sire. The reason for this is 

 that in all other classes of animals by inspecting the sire something can be 

 told of his individual merit for the purpose for which he is kept. The speed 

 stallion can be tested on the track, the wool ram bv examining and weighing 

 his fleeced, and all flesh producing animals by the development of the high 

 priced portions of their bodies, while the ability of the untried dairy bull to 

 produce good milkers must be determined almost entirely by therecord of his 

 ancestors. To show the importance of keeping records of cows I wish to 

 call your attention to the fact that in no class of animals do we have the op- 

 portunity to determine the individual merit of the females from the standard 

 of production as in dairy cattle. An exact record of the yield for the entire 

 year may be easily kept and the animal's worth be determined while com- 

 paratively young, and without destroying the animal, as is necessary in the 

 block test. 



IMPORTANCE OF LONGEVITY. 



Is the average life of our cows of sufficient length? Few breeders seem 

 to pay any attention to this important point. In advertising a bull for sale 

 how frequently is great stress placed upon the record made by his dam in 

 someone week of her life; this is given to the fraction of an ounce and a sim- 

 ilar record is frequently given of his other female ancestors for several genera- 

 tions. All this is valuable and I would not detract from it, but is it not of 

 equal if not of still greater importance in selecting a bull to head a valuable 

 herd that something be known of the longevity of his ancestors? Yet who 

 ever saw anything of this kind mentioned in sale "ads", or in giving the 

 breeding of bulls that head some of our great herds. Why breeders of the 

 different breeds of stock have lost sight of this important point I am at loss 

 to know, but the fact remains that they have done so. This shortness of life 

 in the breeding stock is a very serious drawback indeed with some dairy 

 herds, and the breeders themselves do not seem to realize it. 



To illustrate let me compare for a moment the offspring from two cows, 

 A and B. Suppose cow A drops two calves and then either dies or fails to 

 breed and each of her female decendants do the same. On the average one 

 of these calves will be a male and the other a female. For the purpose of 

 illustrating this we will take the females only. No matter how long this 

 family may be bred it will be represented by but one female of breeding age, 

 and the family will simply maintain itself in the one female. 



For comparison with this, suppose that cow B and each of her female 

 decendants had twelve calves in their lifetime. As with cow A, on the aver- 

 age half of these would be females. In the second generation there would 

 be six females, in the third generation each of these six would produce six 

 other females making thirty-six, and so on until the end of the tenth genera- 

 tion they would aggregate 60,000,000 or more than three times the number 

 of dairy cows in the whole United States, all the decendants of the one cqw 

 B, ten generations before. This may be shown more plainly in tabular form, 

 as follows. 



