156 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



hide and hair resistant to the touch, a hide which clings 

 to the ribs and is covered with stiff, coarse hair, has a di- 

 gestive apparatus that there is something wrong with, 

 either temporarily or permanently. She may eat a lot of 

 feed at one time, but she does not digest it sufficiently; 

 there is a large portion passes on undigested and wasted. 

 She is not an economical cow and certainly not a high-pro- 

 ducing cow, because she wastes her feed. 



The third essential point is nervous temperament or 

 we might call it dairy temperament. The question is 

 whether the cow is a worker or a loafer. A loafer is not 

 profitable in any family or in any class of animals. Our 

 cows must be workers if they are going to be high pro- 

 ducers. The cow that stands in the shade of the tree and 

 in the pool of water, fighting flies while the other cows 

 graze back and forth across the pasture, gathering green 

 food and nutrients, is a loafer and is not a profitable cow. 



The indication of nervous temperament is first, the 

 head. This cow is broad between the eyes, well dished in 

 the face. She has large, bright, prominent eyes. Those 

 are the first indications of dairy temperament or the in- 

 herent power and ability to work. Then as we pass on 

 back we ask that the cow be free from beefiness over the 

 top of the back. Along this cow's back is an absence of 

 beef and fat over her backbone. The spinal vertebrae are 

 very prominent. There is her hip, there is her rib, not an 

 ounce of beef on the cow's body. She has converted it into 

 milk and butter fat. 



Whenever I reach this point I always stop just long 

 enough to say that this absence of flesh should not be an 

 evidence that the cow has not had enough to eat. A good 

 dairy cow properly developed in nervous temperament will 

 be free from beefiness over the top line and over the hips 

 and ribs, even though she has eaten enough feed in a year 

 to feed two or three steers. 



The dairy cow has been bred for generations for the 

 purpose of manufacturing her feed into milk and butter 

 fat, and milk and butter fat are not made over the top line 

 or over the ribs; they are made in the udder, so that the 



