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 together without any codperation. 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 codperative 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 
