THE BEEF BREEDS OF CATTLE 233 



Hereford. However desirable the hornless feature may 

 or may not be (there is a great difference of opinion among 

 breeders on this subject), the elimination of the horns from 

 the Hereford by a natural process has been no easy under- 

 taking. Of the more than 240,000 registered Herefords 

 that have been bred in this country in the past quarter of 

 a century, a very few, possibly less than twenty head from 

 horned sire and dam, have been naturally polled. 



The great rarity of sports of this kind among the Here- 

 fords has made the establishment of a strain of registered 

 Polled Herefords a slow and difficult undertaking. How- 

 ever, several breeders are now devoting themselves to this 

 work with considerable enthusiasm and some degree of 

 success. At the present time there are about one hundred 

 head of all ages of naturally Polled Herefords that are 

 registered in the American Hereford Record. These 

 Polled Herefords are denominated by their breeders 

 Double-Standard Polled Herefords, to distinguish them 

 from a class of polled cattle that are registered in the herd- 

 book for Polled Herefords exclusively, but are not eligible 

 to record in the American Hereford Record. 



The difficulties that the breeders of Polled Herefords 

 have encountered* are two-fold. In the first place, the 

 scarcity of material to work on has necessitated very 

 close breeding, in order to preserve the hornless feature. 

 In the second place, those hornless sports were unfor- 

 tunately not high-class either individually or in breeding, 

 so that in strengthening the desired hornless feature by 

 close breeding, the breeders at the same time were fixing 

 in their cattle some undesirable features in other respects. 

 By careful breeding and feeding, these difficulties will be 

 overcome in time, but it will take a much longer time under 

 the conditions that prevail to establish a strain of Here- 



