POLLED BREEDS 157 



double faculty of meat and milk production is very easy indeed 

 to lose. The Red Poll breeders may well be reminded how easy 

 it is to lose milking qualities without necessarily improving the 

 fleshing capability of their stock. The Shorthorn breeders' 

 experience ought, it is suggested, to act as a wholesome warning 

 to the owners who still are fortunate enough to own herds of 

 dual-purpose Red Polls. It was a common experience fifteen 

 years ago, it is still unfortunately far from rare, to breed a 

 Shorthorn that gives the smallest possible amount of milk and 

 yet cannot be classed higher than as a second-class beef-pro- 

 ducer. The live-stock literature of the seventies is full of the 

 surest evidence that certain Shorthorn families were then ex- 

 cellent milkers. Unfortunately these families were in some 

 cases mated, through several generations, with sires that had 

 been bred solely for beef, and so the cows of the tribes which 

 in the seventies had been famous for the dairy had lost class 

 as milkers in the nineties. At the beginning of this century, or 

 thereabouts, when a determined and successful effort was made 

 to re-establish the dual-purpose Shorthorn in all her glory, the 

 folly of the previous method of breeding became only too 

 apparent. 



Within the last ten years I have bought for grazing, in a good 

 midland farming district, a truck-load of pedigree heifers at less 

 cost per head than I could have bought non-pedigree steer 

 stores from Ireland. There was not a heifer in the whole bunch 

 whose pedigree was not good. The volumes of the Live Stock 

 Journal and Fancier's Gazette for the years 1875 to 1880 bear 

 testimony again and again to the good dual-purpose quality 

 of cows that were the progenitors of these heifers which, 

 through the use of pure beef bulls, had lost all aptitude to milk 

 and had not thereby gained one scrap of flesh. This was no 

 uncommon experience. There are to-day very few Dairy Short- 

 horn herds in which, after years of careful selection, an occasional 

 specimen, such as I have just described, does not appear. The 

 Red Poll breeders will, therefore, be well advised to preserve 

 the dual-purpose character of their stock with the greatest 

 possible care and to guard against using bulls, however blocky 

 and full of flesh they may be, whose female progenitors are not 



