10 DUAL PURPOSE CATTLE 



The ox was kept for plough and draught, a few were kept for fatting, but I 

 consider that the amount of stock regularly fatted for the table was a very small 

 percentage of the whole. They would be consumed only by wealthy nobles and 

 wealthy corporations, and as a matter of fact, fresh beef was put on the table only 

 for a few months in the year. Much was killed and salted in November, but this 

 beef was of grass-fed cattle. The ox, quit of skin, head and offal, did not weigh 

 on an average more than 400 pounds, and was worth about 11s. to sell. There was 

 no attempt to improve the breeds of cattle. The maintenance of the bull was a 

 necessity, and the use of the cow was for the dairy. I do not assert that there were 

 not different breeds, but I am sure that the difference was in the size, not in the 

 quality of the animals, and that there was no distinction made in the character 

 of the breeds. 



There was hardly a sensible difference betiveen these old rates 

 at which farm stock was sold and those when the 14th century closed. 

 Dairy products were a little cheaper. In the course of time sheep 

 breeding became the more profitable to the husbandman. The cot- 

 tager found his advantage in his cow on the common until common 

 lands were enclosed, in the 18th and early part of the 19th century, 

 and the era of high rents and low wages set in. 



THE NEW DEVELOPMENT 



Dual Purpose is a modern descriptive term. When applied to a 

 cow it is expressive of her inheritance of a tendency to yield milk 

 that has a fair percentage of fat as a constituent of its solid contents, 

 and an equal tendency to lay on flesh when fed for that particular 

 purpose. It would seem to have been the ideal of the first improvers 

 of the Longhorn Cattle of Derby Sir Thomas Gresley and Mr. Prin- 

 cep. Their ideal was fairly attained. But their successor in the work, 

 the famous Robert Bakewell, of Dishley, Leicestershire, sought rather 

 "the qualifications of beauty and utility of form, quality of flesh, and 

 aptitude .to fatten," neglecting to accompany these with the fostering 

 of the equally important milk inheritance. Bakewell's methods of 

 selection and in-breeding, as a means of improving cattle, are said to 

 have been attractive to the brothers Charles and Robert Collins, who 

 applied them to what was then known as the Teeswater breed, later 

 as Durhams, after Charles Collins had, in 1783, visited Dishley. Some 

 twenty years later Thomas Booth, of Killerby, and Thomas Bates, 

 of Kirklevington, severally continued the work of improving the Dur- 

 ham, by then termed the Shorthorn. Booth held to the Collins ideal, 

 Bates preferred that of the dual purpose. At the same time John 

 Reeve, of Wighton, Norfolk, began his work, first by hybridisation 

 and then by selection, practically following on what we now know 

 as the Mendelian law. His ideal correponded with that of Bates, but 

 his material was of quite another type, so that the dual-purpose cow 

 would seem to have been the Reeve ideal from the outset. Some two 

 years before he retired from farming he selected of "Durham" stock 

 a young bull and five cows. He may have desired to try his ideal on 

 this variety of cattle, but he could not carry it out, for they were sold 

 with his other live stock in October, 1828. Sir Charles Knightley, at 

 Fawsley, held to the dual-purpose in the Shorthorn herd which he built 

 up in thirty years from about 1826, attaining "a splendid uniformity 

 of type and abundant milking properties." Mr. R. W. Hobbs, of Kelms- 

 cott, is quoted as saying: "I consider that the Shorthorn should be a 

 dual-purpose cow; that is, she should give a good quantity of milk, 

 and, when dry, quickly make a good carcass of beef; and in this ca- 

 pacity the dairy Shorthorn is excelled by no other breed." 



For some fifty years after the judges for the Royal Agricultural 

 Society, in 1839, set what they deemed to be the standard points of 

 Shorthorn cows and heifers that were competing as breeding stock, 



