Having selected the cows, successful breeding demands some knowledge of genetics; some farmers have an uncanny ability almost to know by looking at a cow and a bull whether they will milk well if mated. But such ability is only for the few whose animal instinct amounts to genius. Mr. George Odium, the famous breeder of the Manningford Friesians, in his writings and lectures says much about transmission, recessive factors, genes and other involved genetical theory, but in spite of his immense and detailed knowledge I credit much of his breeding success to a mixture of genius and good luck.

   Those of us who can expect neither of these are left with ample opportunity to acquire good judgement and wide experience. Both grow with use and in that respect we may score over the mere lucky genius.

   But there is no need to wade through the many books on the subject of animal genetics in order to acquire the knowledge which makes a good livestock breeder, though it is well worth any breeder's or herdsman's while to get as much book knowledge as may be obtained from the excellent little book, Breeding for Production, by Brian Branston (Faber). This will cut out a few of the unknown factors in the practical breeding side—but the only real way of learning breeding is to breed. Put Bull A on cows B, C, and D, and see if the results are AB, AC, AD. Study the progeny beside their parents and see for yourself which characteristics have been inherited from which parents, and which appear to have come from nowhere. With an old breed like the Jersey it is a fairly safe gamble that A on B will produce AB, but with some breeds, especially dual-purpose breeds which carry both flesh and milk factors, not even an Odium can forecast the result. Consistent breeding of dual-purpose cattle can without question be achieved, and some of our leading Red Poll and South Devon herds in particular are outstanding examples of consistent breeding, but the process is longer and the beginner may expect consistent results more quickly and more easily from the breeds which have concentrated on milk or butter yields, and have produced animals with only one, or at most production purposes.

   Far more can be learned about breeding by looking at cows and bulls, their progeny and their records, than by looking at books. Many a townsman has scoffed at the farmer wasting his time 'leaning on the gate', but if his animals are in the field, that is how he learns and improves upon his skill as a livestock breeder; that is how he improves upon his crops. Farmers nowadays have all too little time to lean on the gate and think, which is a pity, for I am quite sure that moments of contemplation and moments observing the growing crop or the grazing animal are the farmer's most profitable moments, materially as well as spiritually.

   I could tell you the sire of any of my home-bred females, merely by looking them hard in the face, and I have eight bulls in use. Admittedly this is not easy in the first days of a calf's life, but as the calf grows to maturity the characteristics of both parents become plainly evident to the observant. This kind of observance is the only way to know exactly whether the breeding policy is working out right or wrong.

   Because I think Mr. Branston has provided in farmer's or herdsman's language the essential knowledge of genetics, I will quote some valuable extracts which I endorse. I hope these extracts give an outline of an excellent and absorbingly interesting book which will make every farmer, breeder or herdsman who reads this book, read also, for the full story of sensible breeding, Brian Branston's book. In any case they provide the 'heart' of the subject which will enable readers of my book to grasp the basic knowledge of animal genetics necessary for the practical man:

'Hereditary

   'An animal which may breed one way or the other for a certain factor I shall call a mixed-breeder for that factor. (The geneticist calls such animals heterozygotes.)

   'The practical breeder of animals for utility must always be on the look-out for animals which are mixed-breeders for the factors which help to make his living so that normally he can bar those animals from his breeding plans; just as he must search for and retain those animals which are self-breeders (homozygotes) for the factors he needs. . . . What is the breeder to do when the outward appearance of animals is similar but their breeding performance is different?

   'An example to illustrate outward similarity and different genetical make-up can be taken from Mendel's sweet-pea experiments. Mendel found that some peas were self-breeders for red flowers and some for white flowers: when he crossed a red with a white he got all red offspring. But if he mated two of these first-generation reds together he got offspring in the proportion of three reds to one white.

   'Obviously, in this coupling the first cross red offspring only appear to be like their red parent, because no matter how many self-breeding red parents you mate together you will always get red offspring: if you had only red marbles in a bag no matter how often you shook up the bag you would always pick out a red one. But in mating together red offspring of sweet peas where the one parent was self-breeding red and the other self-breeding white you get a proportion of three reds to one white. When a trait in one of the parents dominated another, as the red dominates the white in the red and white pea parents, Mendel called that trait dominant. The white he called recessive because although it had disappeared entirely in the first cross offspring, it nevertheless came out in the crosses between those offspring : it had only receded into the background.

   'If we were to continue breeding from the second-generation flowers we should find that one red would be a self-breeder for red; two reds would be mixed-breeders for red and white in the proportion 3:1, and the white would be a self-breeder for white . . . one red breeds true, two reds breed untrue, and one white breeds true. In other words, the appearance of two of the reds is not what it seems. This comes home to the dairy farmer, say, when he realizes that some of his best yielders for both milk and butterfat may possess those qualities only as the first cross sweet peas possessed the colour red: they may be mixed-breeders for both factors. This is indeed tragic when one remembers that the average number of calves born to dairy cows in this country at present is only a little over two. Both of these may quite easily be the two mixed breeders out of the four. If, in addition, the farmer's bull should turn out to be a mixed-breeder for milk and butterfat then he could do great damage in the herd. It is unfortunate that it is impossible by looking at a cow or a bull to tell whether it is a mixed-breeder or a self-breeder for milk yield and high butterfat. We cannot tell this even by looking at its parents or grandparents ; nor by studying its pedigree; nor, if it is a female, by studying its milk yields (that is only comparable to looking at the red first cross of the red and white sweet peas and seeing that it is red); nor, yet again, by studying the records of the milk yields of its dam.

   'The only sure way of distinguishing a self-breeder from a mixed-breeder is by sampling their offspring: the inescapable conclusion is that you can only tell how an animal breeds by finding out how it has already bred. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.'

   'Since a farmer needs as far as possible to keep animals which are self-breeding for the most perfect set of inherited qualities, and since a start has to be made somewhere, he must get together complete data about the breeding performance of his animals used for reproduction. There must be no hiding of defects. A farmer who tries to work without records is playing blindman's buff among his cattle. A pedigree breeder who hides defects in the stock he intends to sell is Agriculture's Fifth Columnist. . . .'

'Inbreeding

   'Inbreeding is the one certain way to bring into being self-breeding groups of animals, to diminish variability, to give uniformity.

   'Inbreeding will always result automatically in self-breeding animals ; but the important thing for the practical breeder to realize is that those animals can be self-breeding for defects as well as for good qualities. The farmer must decide and then select those animals which are to be inbred, his purpose always being to bring together the greatest number of good qualities and the least number of bad qualities which will be fixed in his self-breeding stock. Breeders should never start inbreeding with inferior stock, in fact they should never start inbreeding with a group of animals in which the best are not quite as good as their owners would wish them to be.

   'Inbreeding coupled with selection is the quickest way to produce self-breeding animals—animals which will transmit as they express.

   'Neither is selection the same thing as culling. Culling is the traditional method of raising the standard of a dairy herd or a laying flock of hens—and it is wrong as a standard method for a number of reasons. Culling (as in the case of recessive "reds") does nothing to raise the quality of the flock or herd; if the breeders remain untouched then another crop of culls must automatically come along. Economically, culling alone as a standard practice year after year is foolish. In a dairy herd, for instance, low yielders are culled after they have made their low yields (more often after two or three low yields than just one—because they have been given "another chance"). This means they are culled after the owner has lost money. The sort of herd a commercial dairy farmer will have fifteen years from to-day depends not on the cows he culls but on the sort of bulls he uses in the meantime. It is bulls not culls that are important. In present conditions the commercial dairy farmer with a small herd of up to fifteen cows would be better off not culling but using his worst yielders to breed beef stores.

   'The owner of a pedigree herd of milk cattle on the other hand needs to cull and cull hard to eliminate the low-yielding individual and even more so the low-yielding family. But he must cull with a knowledge of the genetical make-up of his animals—he must cull from a knowledge of the individual's power of transmission as well as its expression. When he does this he turns culling into selection. Culling is a negative practice and leaves the situation much as it was; selection is a positive thing and makes for improvement. . . .

   'Part of the stigma which appears to be attached to inbreeding is not due to man's own conventions of morality, it is a result of economic loss from aberrant offspring which have cropped out where inbreeding has been tried.

   'These aberrant offspring are not caused by inbreeding, they are caused by aberrant factors being present in double dose in the material used for inbreeding. The only way to get rid of such material is not to stop inbreeding, but to continue it more intensively until all the scum has found its way to the surface and been skimmed off. Or else, of course, to discard the aberrant stock entirely . . . .'

'Out-Crossing and Line Breeding

   'Inbreeding reduces variability and makes for uniformity. Sometimes it may build up a uniformity like a prison wall with the genes inside as prisoners: as inbreeding is continued the genes can group together among themselves but have no contact with other genes in the outside world. The faculty for self-breeding produced by continued inbreeding is the prison wall which confines the genes.

   'We may find it necessary to bring back within the walls genes which have escaped before the coping stones were put on; or to introduce genes that have never been inside. Or else we want to remove an obnoxious prisoner gene. The way in which we break down the prison wall so laboriously built is by out-crossing. The unfortunate thing is that we cannot control the exact type and number of intruders through the breach we make in our prison wall, nor can we be certain that some of the model prisoners we wish to retain will not escape while the wall is down.

   'In straightforward language and forgetting the flowers—out-crossing is an evil—sometimes a necessary evil. The object of animal breeding for utility is to make the group self-breeding for the inherited make-up of the best individuals; out-crossing destroys self-breeding and reintroduces mixed-breeding individuals. We may get the factor we want, but we shall undoubtedly get a number of factors we do not want, and so the slow process of turning out the unwanted ones begins again.'

'Minimizing the Risks Involved in Out-Crossing

   'If you are bound to out-cross, first make certain that the out-cross animal really is a self-breeder for the gene or factor you want to bring in. Next, confine the effects of the cross to a small number of the group you wish to change. The hybrid offspring must then be bred back to the pure-bred group, and from the offspring of such matings only those few which show the most improvement in the factor required should be kept.

   'These few animals should again be bred back to the pure-bred group, and this procedure continued for four or five generations—more if possible.

   'With the exception of animals needed for the work, those produced by the repeated back-crosses should be discarded for breeding purposes—even though their quality be above average.

   'In polygamous animals no males derived from an out-cross should be used for at least four to five generations: the new genes being introduced through the female lines where the impurities they bring handcuffed to them can do less hurt. The common sense of this is obvious. A bull will spread himself quickly through the herd, but a cow can be made to confine her impurities to three or four daughters.'

'Where to go for an Out-Cross

   'Where should the anxious breeder go for an out-cross? Preferably he should stay within the breed if he can locate a strain which is outstanding in the qualities needed to be introduced or improved.

   'Provided the breeder knows how heredity works and what the results of his actions are likely to be, then out-crosses from other breeds may be used with success. And a breeder who has had an eye open for the need at some future time of out-crossing may have prepared his way by line-breeding.'

'Line Breeding

   'You always find somebody who asks " What's the difference between inbreeding and line-breeding?" and there is always somebody else at hand to give a senseless though "fly" answer.

   'The truth is inbreeding and line-breeding are essentially the same process. A breeder practises line-breeding who, instead of inbreeding his whole flock or herd, inbreeds them in separate self-contained groups. He produces parallel inbred lines.

   'Then if the necessity blows up he has the chance of reintroducing genes from one parallel line to the other without recourse to a violent out-cross and with far less danger of bringing in impurities.'

'Out-Crosses and Show Points

   'For utility animals the faculty for self-breeding is the main aim after quality.

   'For show animals the individual and not the group brings home the cash: so an out-cross may introduce just that exaggeration of fancy points which will catch a judge's eye.

   ' But such an individual will leave a long smear of impurity behind it if bred from. Such animals are the prize-winning slugs of the utility farming world. ...'

'Test Mating and Progeny Testing

   'Progeny testing is a method of finding out the general efficiency of a dairy bull (for example) for producing the kind of daughters a breeder requires.

   'It simply entails the registration of the performance of his female descendants. If it is not possible to take figures for all a bull's daughters then a random sample should be taken, say the first-born ten or twenty. The progeny must in no way be selected or any value the record might have will have been destroyed at the start.

   'A bull's certificate to continue as pilot of the herd, to continue breeding, should be the excellence of his breeding report. The statement of his breeding value should show the number of female calves horn, the number raised, the number discarded, the number of days milked of every heifer and the results in yield and butterfat.

   'A proven bull is not necessarily a good bull; but a proven bull which is prepotent (that is to say "self-breeding") in the factors which make his owner's livelihood and the country's prosperity and health, is worth his weight in gold. . . .'

   My first Jersey bull had three outstanding characteristics which he transmitted to every one of his daughters and a fourth hidden characteristic which he carried from his dam. The first, cocked horns and a rather plain face were rather annoying and valueless, except as an indication that the old boy was transmitting something of himself consistently. The second, a colossal barrel with widely sprung ribs and deep belly were admirable for a herd such as mine fed on home-grown foods. The third, strong, squarely placed straight legs—both back and front. Neither belly nor udder will stay the pace without sound legs to carry them and to carry them a long way when the cow has to graze her own food. The fourth is of course considered the most important—a good udder—though I think the stomach capacity more important. A good udder is useless without the stomach capacity to fill it. Many a bad udder has produced a lot of milk through a big belly but I've had perfect udders under flat-sided barrels which have produced unbelievably poor yields.

   Having found that my bull transmitted the important conformation characteristics the question was what to do about the bad head. It is usually argued by the milk-at-all-costs boys, 'Why worry about the head?' But I have found that an intelligent, though not necessarily a pretty face, denotes the ability to produce efficiently. I have never known a cow which is an efficient milk-producer to have an unintelligent face, which may sound a tall story to the man who hasn't spent as long as I have looking cows in the face, and who may consider all cows' faces patently dumb anyhow. But I suggest, if you have an eye for an animal which looks deeper than first impressions, that you make a study of the heads of your best milking cows, and particularly the cows which are known to be efficient converters of food into milk. You may think that milk production to a cow is an automatic process, which is little or not at all affected by her state of mind or her standard of intelligence, but I am convinced that the profitable utilization of food, and the efficient conversion of food into milk, requires a special kind of intelligence in the cow which places it well above the average intelligence of its species, and that this special intelligence is observable in the facial expression of the cow. For further confirmation of this theory compare the faces of beef animals with those of milk-producing animals. Getting fat doesn't require much intelligence, and the process of becoming fat has a dulling effect on the intellect. It may be a fine point, but to the successful breeder it is an important one. Further, I had to look my cows in the face every day! My next step then was to decide whether I should try to eliminate this undesirable characteristic or to concentrate upon the good factors. It was as yet too early to say whether sufficient milk had been transmitted, or whether the bull had improved on the progeny's dam's yields of milk and butterfat. As far as production transmission was concerned, I felt that given big barrels, sound legs and good udder it was safe to assume milk—and this assumption in all my breeding, buying and judging of cattle has never failed me. It is on such experience that I disagree with the milk-and-water wallahs who say that showing is a waste of time, and that it is impossible to judge a cow's productive capacity merely by looking at her.

   I decided that the way to deal with the problem of eliminating the undesirable head, while at the same time retaining the good bodies, legs and udders, was to follow the old bull with his own son out of a cow with the same good body but a more attractive head.

   I found that this worked perfectly. I retained and indeed fixed all the old bull's good characteristics and yet improved the quality and intelligence of the head. By this time it was clear that the old bull's first daughters were milking well enough for my requirements, had those excellent bodies, legs and udders and the butterfat was in most cases held, though in one or two cases there was a drop in butterfat. But what was clear was that they had not quite the quality of bone which is necessary in a Jersey which is to be an efficient converter of food into milk. Coarse bone always seems to need rather more flesh to cover it than fine bone, and the tendency was with these daughters of old Top Sergente to need rather more in the way of maintenance ration than I had needed for their dams—though they were all better yielders.

   It is a good thing to have big-bodied, large-capacity bellies on strong legs, which are essential prerequsities of the efficient food-converting cow, but it is no use achieving that type of cow with coarse bones, for she will only want to cover them, and also use some of the valuable milk-making ingredients of her food for bone maintenance.

   So I had to find an outcross which would bring quality to the bone without losing the stomach capacity—strong straight legs and shapely udders. It must, as well, be a strain that would increase the butterfat.

   In my now burning enthusiasm for the Jersey cow, I had seen many herds both in the Island and in England. But one herd stood out on its own for consistency of pleasing type and butterfat. That was the Lockyers herd of John G. Bell. I went back to see that herd (after visiting others in the intervals between visits to Lockyers) so often that I came to know quite intimately many of its members, and each time I was impressed with the superiority in quality and uniformity over all other herds. The herd had been most studiously bred for over thirty years and some of the old families, two in particular, which emanated from one bull—Valentino, gave me my first real feeling of certainty regarding perfection in a Jersey. These families were founded with Lockyers Madeline and Lockyers Verbena. What they had in addition to the essential commercial and constitutional qualities which Top Sergente had given me, were a beautiful mahogany red colour, and longevity. The first, a factor which is superficially quite unimportant in the commercial dairy herd, but which influences every breeder, farmer or herdsman who loves his cows, and may even have some bearing on milk colour and fat content; the second, perhaps the most needed factor in our dairy herds to-day. So it was to the old Lockyers family that I went for bulls, and it was from the same herd, with the addition of some components from my imagination and the Top Sergente family, that I developed in my mind's eye the model of a perfect Jersey, the model which must be permanently engraved in the waking and sleeping thoughts of all keen breeders. I suppose this picture will live in my mind until one day hence in my doddering nineties I may see it grazing my pastures!

   This mental picture in the heart and mind of the true breeder, is the only sound basis of genetics. And this is really what I mean when I say the genetics of animal breeding can never be learned from a book. If you haven't the ability to conjure up each time you look at a cow or a bull, the background canvas of the perfect animal against which to measure it, then you may as well decide that you had better remain a cowkeeper or a cowman only, and leave breeding and herdsmanship to those with the heart and mind for it.

   There is much still to be learned about the effect of environment on breeding. Whether characteristics caused by environment can be inherited is still an open question. No book on cattle breeding gives any importance to this subject but my experience leads me to believe that acquired characteristics may be transmissible.

   I was first given to consider this point when I started breeding Channel Island cattle. I soon discovered that there was a distinct island type, peculiar to animals bred on the islands. With Jerseys two characteristics were marked in animals born on the island, and the first few generations of their progeny bred away from the island. These characteristics are fine bone and the tendency to weak hocks and hind legs generally. Jerseys bred in England, with a long ancestry of English breeding have not retained such fine bone though still much finer than other breeds; neither do they have the marked tendency to 'cow hocks' which is evident in imported and early generations from imported Jerseys.

   When I first went over to Jersey I found that fine bone and weak hocks were unquestionably the result of environment. The custom in the island of tying up their animals from the first few weeks of age for the rest of their lives, with little or no exercise other than being led out to tether in the summer, makes weak hocks inevitable, especially in conjunction with the so-called 'scientific starvation' which is practised to ensure fine bone.

   But what struck me as remarkable, was the fact that these characteristics, particularly the weak hocks, are transmitted to their progeny bred in England and reared under perfect conditions of nutrition and exercise. I searched in vain for some mention in books on genetics of this undesirable demonstration of acquired characteristics becoming hereditary. I had previously believed that weak hocks were caused solely by faulty nutrition and lack of exercise, and that it was a factor which could not be transmitted. But there is no doubt that in this instance, at any rate, environmental conditions have changed inheritance to such an extent as to render the characteristic transmittable. In other words, we can by environment improve or harm the future inheritance of our herds. We already know that it is useless to expect breeding to overcome bad management. Because a bull whose dam has given 2,000 gallons of milk is mated to a 2,000-gallon cow it does not follow that the progeny will also give 2,000 gallons of milk at maturity. If environment is unsuitable and management is faulty, they may not give more than 200 gallons. Similarly it is probably possible by improved management and ideal environment to produce over the generations, better-yielding and more profitable cattle, and in so doing influence the inheritance of characteristics acquired by good management and the right environment.

   There have been many examples of cows under identical management and apparently identical feeding showing inexplicable improvement when moved from one farm to another. I recently visited a Jersey herd which had been moved from Southern Ireland to England. Cows which had never averaged more than 600 gallons of milk suddenly, under a regime identical in every respect, even with exactly the same staff, poured out a herd average of 1,100 gallons. A similar capacity has been passed to the first daughters of these cows born and so far recorded in this country.

   Though I have read none of his writings or even seen any published details of his theories, I understand that a Russian scientist, Dr. Lysenko, has founded a whole theory of genetics on the idea that qualities acquired by environment are inherited. My own knowledge of the subject is merely that of a breeder, but I do suggest that further serious investigation of the effect of environment on heredity is desirable. For instance, if the Island of Jersey authorities would admit into Jersey cattle of several generations of English breeding with strong straight legs we could see if in the course of a few generations, under the conditions which have produced weak-hocked Jerseys, they would revert to cow-hocks.

   All farmers know of instances of animals which have been started well by their breeder, being sold as perfect specimens of their breed, only to go back under bad management and appear later at any rate, to be thoroughly poor specimens of the breed and under the same bad environments to breed animals which appear to have inherited the characteristics created by the bad management of the dam.

   Yet without knowledge of these environmental factors it would be impossible to say whether the poor specimen was the result of heredity or the effect of management of the dam before and during pregnancy. The desirable qualities of bone and horn structure in the Scottish Blackface ram can be produced artificially by suckling the young tup on a goat. The buyer believes he has found a ram with outstanding inheritance and pays an exaggerated price only to find that these qualities are not transmitted to their progeny, having been acquired in the ram purely by virtue of the greater milking capacity and richer milk of his goat foster-mother.

   But would it be possible by repeating this system of ram rearing for generations to develop the ability to transmit improved bone and horns? I really don't know, and I don't know anyone who has pursued the subject long enough to find out. There is a good deal of evidence either way and I am certainly not qualified to do more than instance the above illustrations from my very limited and unscientific observations as a practical breeder.


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