1921.] 



Dairy Catti/E in Denmark. 



601 



from among his cows the healthy and well-built animals giving 

 the highest yields, and breed from these, and in order the better 

 to secure these characters in the progeny he will use in-breeding 

 or line-breeding, and thereby form families. It is not enough 

 for him to know that the cows he breeds from have the produc- 

 tive qualities he desires to find again in the progeny ; it is equally 

 or even more important that he should know whether the cows 

 have the ability to transmit these qualities to the progeny, either 

 female or male. The greater the number of high yielding 

 animals a cow can count among her ancestors the more likely 

 she is to pass on the quality of high yield to her progeny. It 

 therefore became of the greatest importance to farmers to 

 know as much as possible about the descent of their dairy cattle, 

 and for this reason family herdhooks were introduced, and the 

 value of these depends to a great extent on the work of the 

 milk recording societies. These family herdhooks are a special 

 Danish feature, and are now kept by about 2,000 breeders, 

 naturally including the very best of them. 



Private herdbooks w^ere kept by a few prominent breeders as 

 far back as the sixties of last century, with the object of breeding 

 cattle true to race or breed. The Family Herdhook is an inven- 

 tion of Mr. Morkeberg, or rather, it is the result of his idea of 

 putting into practical shape what he had learnt from prominent 

 breeders in Great Britain during his early visits. Breeders spoke 

 to him about " families " or " tribes " within their herds, and 

 by families they meant the descendants from a certain cow 

 tracing the descent only through the female side . These families 

 differed from one another in certain characters. It was easier 

 to keep in one's mind a picture, so to speak, of a large herd, 

 v/hen the animals in it were grouped in tribes or families. This 

 led Morkeberg in 1891 to draw up a family herdbook for the large 

 and excellent herd of dairy cattle at Ourupgaard, belonging to 

 Mr. Tesdorpf , who had kept records of the milk yield of his cows 

 since 1860. The milk records were entered for each cow in the 

 family herdbook. At that time there was no practical means of 

 estimating the richness of the milk. These family herdbooks 

 acquired an additional value for the breeding of dairy cattle for 

 milk production from the time when the milk recording societies 

 furnished reliable information on the yield of milk of individual 

 cows by quality as well as by quantity, which information is 

 noted in the herdbooks. Further, the milk recording societies 

 did not restrict their action to furnishing figures for yield : 

 they made the headings in their journals comprise all the 

 information required for the family herdbook. 



