TYPES AND MARKET CLASSES OF LIVE STOCK 143 



ciated with the open- jointed conformation desired in the dairy 

 animal, and is a feature found in many of the record-holding 

 cows. 



The front legs should be fairly short, should come down 

 straight, and the toes should point straight ahead. The pas- 

 terns should be strong. There should be no coarseness of shanks 

 or joints. Very often the knees come quite close together, the 

 legs being crooked, and the toes turning out, but this is a faulty 

 position and often indicates a narrow chest and lack of con- 

 stitution. 



The chest gets its capacity from depth more than from 

 width. However, the fore-rib should have at least a medium 

 degree of arch; breeders of Holstein-Friesian cattle place much 

 emphasis upon a pronounced arch of rib. The fore-rib should 

 carry down deep to give plenty of room for the heart and lungs. 

 Beef cattle should fill up full and smooth with flesh behind the 

 shoulder, but dairy cattle typically show some slight depression 

 just behind the shoulder, although the heart-girth must be very 

 large to insure a strong constitution. The distance between 

 the front legs is a fairly accurate measure of the width of the 

 chest floor, which should not be cramped, but ample, with the 

 front flanks well filled out. In making a large flow of milk, 

 the heart has to pump great quantities of blood which the lungs 

 must purify, thus demanding that the dairy cow have an excel- 

 lent constitution. 



The back should be straight and strong, and have mod- 

 erate width, and a fair degree of length. Dairy cattle seem 

 put together somewhat loosely; it is not desired that they should 

 be closely coupled or short in the back. A sway-back is some- 

 times said to indicate true dairy type, but there is no good 

 argument in support of this view; it is logical that cows with 

 big middles should have straight, strong tops. Some dairymen 

 also desire that the backbone shall stand up prominently along 

 the back, loin, and rump, and terminate in a long tail. The 

 argument is that a well-developed backbone encloses a large 

 spinal cord, and as a large nerve branches off at the last dorsal 

 vertebrae and goes to the udder to control operations there, a 

 large spinal column is accepted as evidence of proper develop- 

 ment of the nervous system, which, in turn, is supposed to 

 signify increased efficiency on the part of the cow as a milk 

 machine. Whether the size of the brain, spinal cord, and branch- 

 ing nerves, rather than their quality and texture, determines 



