Post by genebo on Jun 30, 2015 3:17:40 GMT
I love the horns on our little Dexters. The form, the beauty ....
In my small herd, I can identify each of them by the shape and color of their horns. One of the first things I fell in love with, after small size and temperament, was the beauty of their horns.
For a long time, I thought that Dexter horns were unique to them, but that is mainly due to the fact that in everyday life, I never saw another horned breed. All the other breeds around here except for some longhorns, are polled. They've all been converted, if they ever did have horns.
My uncle did it with his Herefords, back in the 1950's. He bought an Aberdeen Angus bull and started making polled Whiteface cattle. A rancher nearby used an Angus bull to convert his entire herd of horned Herefords into polled Herefords. It was a popular thing to do back then. The popularity of the practice extended to England and swept up some of the Dexters there.
It was a while after I bought my first Dexters that I found out about what had been done. It wasn't many years ago (maybe 2006?) that the very first polled Dexter showed up in Virginia.
At first, all I read and heard was that it was some sort of a miracle, a mutation, but before long the information surfaced that Dexters lost their horns in nearly the same way my uncle's Herefords lost theirs: by bringing in an Angus cow to the registry and using the Angus genes to do it.
It wasn't gene splicing, where they plucked a polled gene out of an Angus gene and put it into a Dexter. No, it was ordinary breeding, using a Dexter bull and Angus cow to make a Dexter/Angus heifer calf.
I never saw this calf. Don't know anything personal about it. I do know that half of all her genetics were Angus. She didn't just inherit a polled gene. She also inherited one of every other gene pair that her Angus mother had. I know for a fact that she inherited an Ed color gene from her mother, making her black. I know that she inherited one of her mother's genes for udder, and one of her mother's genes for size. She was probably quite tall, compared to a full-blooded Dexter.
Generalities about the Angus breed, such as they throw large calves and have a lot of dystocia (difficult births), and they have small round leg bones with a high percentage of beef-to-bone ratio, and they don't make enough milk to make it worthwhile to milk them, are very likely to be true about the half Dexter calf she bore. You don't get to pick and choose when you breed two dissimilar breeds. You get 1/2 of each genetic package bundled together to make a new mix.
That's the price you pay when to cross-breed to get a specific trait. You get the whole package.
Lots of people would jump in here to point out how different the calf would have been from her mother, and declare that the calf was NOT an Angus. That's true. So is the fact that the calf is just as different from her father. It's not a Dexter, either.
However, the English had elected to permit people to cross-breed for outside traits using these general guidelines:
The outcrossing must be between a full-blooded Dexter bull and a non-Dexter cow.
The offspring must be a female to proceed.
The female offspring must then be bred to a full-blooded Dexter bull, and produce a female offspring.
When this process has been repeated 3 times, the last offspring is eligible to be registered with the English registry as a purebred Dexter.
That is what is called a grading up or upgrading program and it is used in some other breeds, too. The first generation offspring is called a Grade 5. The second generation offspring is called a Grade 4 and so on ...
When you go to the livestock auction and hear the terms Full-blood, purebred and grade cattle, this is what is meant. The term grade cattle is actually applied to all cattle that are not full-blooded or purebred.
A prime example is the Lowline Angus cattle. They were developed in Australia, and are as scarce here as Dexters were when I started. As a result, people are outcrossing the Lowlines with other breeds in order to meet the demand. They have a registry for their Grade Lowlines. They call them "percentage" Lowlines.
The USA and Canada have stood steadfastly against allowing upgrading. The rules are clear on this. However, one of the English bulls managed to get into those registries, using paperwork that showed compliance with the rules. The registration was controversial at the time and remains so today.
Meanwhile, a review of current Dexter registrations in the ADCA is showing that the registration of polled Dexters has overtaken the registration of horned Dexters by a significant margin. Horned Dexters may soon be as scarce as Dexters were as a whole when I started.
When the breed was formed, there were no polled Dexters included. There were none in Ireland. For many years there were none anywhere else, either. The Polled Dexter is a modern creation that first showed up in the US in the 1990's. The first polled calf to be registered here was born in 1994, in Washington state.
The polled movement received a boost when the imported English black polled bull, Saltaire Platinum, produced a red calf out of Wee Gaelic Ms. Fermoy, am American red Dexter, in 1995, proving he carried red.
Saltaire Platinum was shown to be heterozygous polled (one horned and one polled gene) when he produced a horned calf in 1994 . He had previously produced three polled calves.
Platinum now has 62 offspring registered with the ADCA, but that number is growing, even though he is either deceased or 23 years old. Some people still hold semen from him.
Selective breeding allowed some of his descendents to become homozygous polled, upping the number of polled offspring.
The combination of Platinum and Ms. Fermoy eventually resulted iu today's homo polled, red version of the Dexter, and the introduction of the polled test this year at UC Davis has probably increased the number of homo polled calves that will hit the ground next year.
So, were there any polled Dexters in Ireland? Not back then, but they are now. If you don't hurry, you may never be able to see a real Irish Dexter with the black-tipped white horns. They're going fast. Polled Dexters are already the norm in some other countries.
The US and Canada used to be the last bastion of full-blooded Dexter cattle in the world, with our Dexters much sought after for the original Dexter genetics. A pocket of "fall-back" genes. That has largely gone by the way. Someone recently wrote that there are no more full-blooded Dexters in Australia. We're not much better. The ADCA on-line registry only shows only three registrations in 2013 of a Legacy Dexter that can trace it's ancestry to the US herd prior to any of the Modern Imported versions.
Preservationists wail and cry while modernists laugh and grab each other's behinds.
Genebo
Paradise Farm
paradisedexters.com
In my small herd, I can identify each of them by the shape and color of their horns. One of the first things I fell in love with, after small size and temperament, was the beauty of their horns.
For a long time, I thought that Dexter horns were unique to them, but that is mainly due to the fact that in everyday life, I never saw another horned breed. All the other breeds around here except for some longhorns, are polled. They've all been converted, if they ever did have horns.
My uncle did it with his Herefords, back in the 1950's. He bought an Aberdeen Angus bull and started making polled Whiteface cattle. A rancher nearby used an Angus bull to convert his entire herd of horned Herefords into polled Herefords. It was a popular thing to do back then. The popularity of the practice extended to England and swept up some of the Dexters there.
It was a while after I bought my first Dexters that I found out about what had been done. It wasn't many years ago (maybe 2006?) that the very first polled Dexter showed up in Virginia.
At first, all I read and heard was that it was some sort of a miracle, a mutation, but before long the information surfaced that Dexters lost their horns in nearly the same way my uncle's Herefords lost theirs: by bringing in an Angus cow to the registry and using the Angus genes to do it.
It wasn't gene splicing, where they plucked a polled gene out of an Angus gene and put it into a Dexter. No, it was ordinary breeding, using a Dexter bull and Angus cow to make a Dexter/Angus heifer calf.
I never saw this calf. Don't know anything personal about it. I do know that half of all her genetics were Angus. She didn't just inherit a polled gene. She also inherited one of every other gene pair that her Angus mother had. I know for a fact that she inherited an Ed color gene from her mother, making her black. I know that she inherited one of her mother's genes for udder, and one of her mother's genes for size. She was probably quite tall, compared to a full-blooded Dexter.
Generalities about the Angus breed, such as they throw large calves and have a lot of dystocia (difficult births), and they have small round leg bones with a high percentage of beef-to-bone ratio, and they don't make enough milk to make it worthwhile to milk them, are very likely to be true about the half Dexter calf she bore. You don't get to pick and choose when you breed two dissimilar breeds. You get 1/2 of each genetic package bundled together to make a new mix.
That's the price you pay when to cross-breed to get a specific trait. You get the whole package.
Lots of people would jump in here to point out how different the calf would have been from her mother, and declare that the calf was NOT an Angus. That's true. So is the fact that the calf is just as different from her father. It's not a Dexter, either.
However, the English had elected to permit people to cross-breed for outside traits using these general guidelines:
The outcrossing must be between a full-blooded Dexter bull and a non-Dexter cow.
The offspring must be a female to proceed.
The female offspring must then be bred to a full-blooded Dexter bull, and produce a female offspring.
When this process has been repeated 3 times, the last offspring is eligible to be registered with the English registry as a purebred Dexter.
That is what is called a grading up or upgrading program and it is used in some other breeds, too. The first generation offspring is called a Grade 5. The second generation offspring is called a Grade 4 and so on ...
When you go to the livestock auction and hear the terms Full-blood, purebred and grade cattle, this is what is meant. The term grade cattle is actually applied to all cattle that are not full-blooded or purebred.
A prime example is the Lowline Angus cattle. They were developed in Australia, and are as scarce here as Dexters were when I started. As a result, people are outcrossing the Lowlines with other breeds in order to meet the demand. They have a registry for their Grade Lowlines. They call them "percentage" Lowlines.
The USA and Canada have stood steadfastly against allowing upgrading. The rules are clear on this. However, one of the English bulls managed to get into those registries, using paperwork that showed compliance with the rules. The registration was controversial at the time and remains so today.
Meanwhile, a review of current Dexter registrations in the ADCA is showing that the registration of polled Dexters has overtaken the registration of horned Dexters by a significant margin. Horned Dexters may soon be as scarce as Dexters were as a whole when I started.
When the breed was formed, there were no polled Dexters included. There were none in Ireland. For many years there were none anywhere else, either. The Polled Dexter is a modern creation that first showed up in the US in the 1990's. The first polled calf to be registered here was born in 1994, in Washington state.
The polled movement received a boost when the imported English black polled bull, Saltaire Platinum, produced a red calf out of Wee Gaelic Ms. Fermoy, am American red Dexter, in 1995, proving he carried red.
Saltaire Platinum was shown to be heterozygous polled (one horned and one polled gene) when he produced a horned calf in 1994 . He had previously produced three polled calves.
Platinum now has 62 offspring registered with the ADCA, but that number is growing, even though he is either deceased or 23 years old. Some people still hold semen from him.
Selective breeding allowed some of his descendents to become homozygous polled, upping the number of polled offspring.
The combination of Platinum and Ms. Fermoy eventually resulted iu today's homo polled, red version of the Dexter, and the introduction of the polled test this year at UC Davis has probably increased the number of homo polled calves that will hit the ground next year.
So, were there any polled Dexters in Ireland? Not back then, but they are now. If you don't hurry, you may never be able to see a real Irish Dexter with the black-tipped white horns. They're going fast. Polled Dexters are already the norm in some other countries.
The US and Canada used to be the last bastion of full-blooded Dexter cattle in the world, with our Dexters much sought after for the original Dexter genetics. A pocket of "fall-back" genes. That has largely gone by the way. Someone recently wrote that there are no more full-blooded Dexters in Australia. We're not much better. The ADCA on-line registry only shows only three registrations in 2013 of a Legacy Dexter that can trace it's ancestry to the US herd prior to any of the Modern Imported versions.
Preservationists wail and cry while modernists laugh and grab each other's behinds.
Genebo
Paradise Farm
paradisedexters.com
