56 Western Live-stock Management 



When all of the men running cattle in the same territory 

 are progressive and on peaceable terms, they may com- 

 bine and agree to use only bulls of a certain grade. This 

 plan is hardly as successful as when each man has his 

 cattle to himself, but is much better than running the 

 cattle togethei- without any cooperation. It also tends 

 to lessen another great evil of the open range — the prac- 

 tice of some stockmen to run too many cows in propor- 

 tion to their number of bulls, and depend on the service 

 of their neighbors' bulls. These cooperative associations 

 usually require one bull with a certain number of cows, 

 the number being usually one to twenty-five. 



No bull is too good to use on scrub cows, and there is 

 no danger of paying too much for a bull, so long as one is 

 paying for real beef-producing merit and not for popular 

 blood lines or fancy points which have no great value 

 beyond the limits of the pure-bred trade, but which are 

 often the basis of the extraordinary prices that are some- 

 times paid. Figuring one bull to twenty-five cows, $100 

 added to the price of a common bull will accomplish more 

 toward improving the calf crop than $4 a head added to 

 the price of common cows. There will be a marked dif- 

 ference between the progeny of a $150 bull and of a $50 

 bull, while the calves from $49 cows will be but a very 

 slight improvement over those from $45 cows. From 

 the calf standpoint, the money invested in the bull goes 

 about twenty-five times farther than when invested in the 

 cows. It often happens that fine beef bulls are off type 

 in some fancy point of the breed, or are of an unpopular 

 family. Such bulls can be purchased cheaply, and should 

 be watched for by the man who is breeding grades for the 

 beef market. Then again, good bulls of mature age are 

 often sold because their calves are coming into breeding 



