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 
bead 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- 
