CATTLE, HOW TO BREED. 
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At least the males must be strictly confined, so they may not intermix 
with others. Where farms join, divided only by fences, this will not bo 
found practicable in a majority of cases. One’s neighbor may fancy scrub 
stock. They are notoriously breachy. Once they intermingle with a 
pure breed, the taint of their blood is not only found in the calves, but 
in the dams themselves. In the calves and their progeny, it may never 
be bred out. We see the Kyloo cross in some families of Short-Horns, 
even to this day, cropping out in single individuals after a lapse of nearly 
a century. The writer so saw it at the last fat-stock show in Chicago — . 
that of 1879. The animal was a most excellent specimen ; fully as per- 
fect as many of the very highest breeding, yet the taint of the family 
was there and the breeder of ‘ ‘ high caste Short-Horns ’ ’ would not have 
bred from such a cow or to a bull showing the taint, at any price. 
About General Utility. 
Just here is where the difference comes in, as between breeding for 
general utility or absolute purity of blood. The breeder for general util- 
ity cares not so much about a particular strain of blood, as he does to get 
certain characteristics that will furnish him, at the least expense, either 
the most beef, the best working oxen, or the most and the best milk. 
Those who undertake breeding, or in fact any other business* in a hap- 
hazard way, always fail ; the only exception to the rule being pure luck. 
Luck is not a good business integer to depend upon. Like lightning, it 
never strikes twice in the same place. 
There is another tiling in connection with luck that it is well to bear in 
mind. It is as apt to mar as to mark. The farmer, therefore, who 
undertakes the breeding of stock, with a view to the money they mil 
bring from the butcher, or from the sale of dairy products, must be 
guided by an entirely different set of rules from that of the breeder who 
breeds solely with a view to selling sires and dams to other breeders of 
pure stock. So particular, now-a-days, have breeders of this class 
become that some of them will breed only particular families. Some 
will not allow a Booth cross, others abstain from the Bates blood. 
Many high caste breeders are pretty well agreed that a top cross of 
what are known as seventeens, and some other sub-families of later 
importations, and also of particular bulls of pure breeding, but which 
have been consider? d more or less coarse, must be rigidly excluded. 
They have their particular fancies. To gratify this fancy they mil pay 
extraordinary prices, while the great mass of really superior and really 
pure Short-Horns will be passed unnoticed. It would be unadvisablc foe 
the ordinary farmer, or oven the Short-Horn breeder to buy thee» 
