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Post by jamshundred on Aug 13, 2017 2:52:43 GMT
The day I saw the first red polled cow sold for $5000 I felt the first twinge of worry and began warning it was NOT a good thing. for excessive prices in a small market invite speculators, and they came........in droves. It is my opinion of course that they paid exorbitant prices for merchandise that was sold under false pretense of purity or even purebred-ity. They not only came in droves, they left in droves, but the breed was marked by the flood of culls sold for record prices. Part of the problem was the members of leadership invested in the polled and the red polled animals who had access to potential buyers via their positions. The market glutted indeed.
Today all breeders are paying for the lack of leadership in this breed, and it will likely get much worse before it gets better. The market was not glutted with top quality animals at exorbitant prices, but just about any calf that hit the ground. New owners had their pastures grazed by animals not representative of the breed either in form or function. The reputation of the breed has been severely impacted by a lack of direction or leadership and the frenzy for high dollar sales not reflective of quality.
The voices are lifting and multiplying daily of breeders who cannot sell their animals. Prices tumble. History usually repeats itself, and right on the heels of several breeds being severely impacted by this exact same thing, Dexter leadership refused to heed the warnings, and a significant percentage of them were part of the problem and certainly not part of the solution.
i write this because I was thinking about that $5000 red polled cow today and curiosity sent me to the registry. That cow never produced a registered calf. And the breeder did not stick around long either.
Many quality Dexters have been sacrificed to greed and more likely will be as the market seems determined to crash.
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Post by cascade on Aug 13, 2017 6:35:13 GMT
My first red polled bull born in 2004 is still healthy and active and producing superstar calves. His polled grandmother is 18 years old and is pregnant with her 17th calf.
Meanwhile, people here bragging about their "Traditional" bulls, saw those bulls go lame from Chondrodysplasia and die at relatively young ages.
The best animals are still bringing good prices, if there is something special about them.
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Post by jamshundred on Aug 13, 2017 11:28:12 GMT
So what does that have to do with the topic? Especially when it comes to the dwarf cattle of which you have not a shred of actual knowledge or experience.
By the way......since you treasure purity reports so highly, it appears that there is yet another outcrossed bull in that very bloodline. When does the pretense of purebred cease and the truth of GRADE be acknowledged? I should think new buyers who are not being told the truth and have suffered financial loss might have grounds for legal action.
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Post by cascade on Aug 13, 2017 14:14:16 GMT
All Dexters have scores of non-dexters in their backgrounds. No Dexters have complete pedigrees back to herdbook #1.
But that doesn't matter.
What makes a purebred Dexter a purebred Dexter is that it and all its offspring meet the current standard, and they have a five generation pedigree. Nobody is using Saltaire Platinum anymore, he's far back on the pedigree. There are many bulls far back on all Dexter pedigrees that have incomplete pedigrees. Parndon Charlie Pudding has an incomplete pedigree and he's on 99% of all pedigrees.
What makes a purebred traditional Dexter "Traditional" is that it and all its offspring can meet the Traditional 1900 Dexter breed standard.
Most chondrodysplastic Dexters have a lot of offspring that don't meet the traditional standard, so they aren't purebred Traditional.
The Traditional standard describes a purebred breed of truly compact cattle where 100% of them and their offspring have shorter legs and 100% of them and their offspring weigh 900 pounds or less. Most chondrodysplastic dwarf Dexters don't meet that traditional standard because many of their calves don't meet that standard. Pure breeds breed pure.
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Post by lakeportfarms on Aug 13, 2017 16:54:41 GMT
I just received the new Dexter Bulletin. I don't have it in front of me, but a couple of things jumped out at me. The latest financials (which I believe cover FY 2016) shows that the ADCA has a funds balance of nearly $300K now. The other thing that jumped out at me was that Craig Turpin had asked for there to be some elimination/delay in late registration fees for heifers, and it was shot down. Apparently to "encourage timely registration of animals". Obviously there was no discussion of how late fees encourage the registration and sale of Dexters that would be better off in the freezer.
I also think that A2 has not been beneficial to the breed at all. Some very nice quality Dexters go wanting for buyers in favor of less desirable Dexters that happen to be A2/A2. I have spoken to quite a few buyers who are turned off by what they see are out of control costs with testing. They are not happy that their one bull and two heifer herd requires genotyping.
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Post by jamshundred on Aug 13, 2017 18:55:58 GMT
That is a MAN-MADE declaration. Not one from nature. The ORIGINAL breed standard, when the breed was organized, required only color if you want to be technical about it.
The Dexters were described by Professor Low in the 1840's with a description that precisely identifies the characteristics of the DWARF cattle called Dexters.
In the 1949 British Pathe video, the video is described as a "Prize Herd of DWARF cattle". Which they were. One of the finest herds of Dexters ever assembled. In 1949, the premier breeder of all time identified her herd and breed as DWARF, and she was breeding in the first decades of the century that saw the popularity of Dexters explode. I am confident she knew her breed.
In 1986, in the book, The Rare Breeds Hand Book, authored by Derek Wallis, in association with Rare Breeds Survival Trust, the breed is described as a DWARF breed. Page 112, Breed priority 3. Dexter
Before you can hope to have any credibility . . . you need to stop making it up as you go along.
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Post by jamshundred on Aug 15, 2017 0:11:08 GMT
Double posted
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Post by jamshundred on Aug 15, 2017 0:23:37 GMT
The Missouri State Fair is this week and the Dexter show is on Thursday. A Missouri resident I know told me I should check the Dexters for sale on Craigslist in the area that covers the fair. So I did. I went to the Columbia page, and then "farm and garden", and then typed "Dexter" into the search engine. It gives the cattle for sale on that page and nearby. An interesting browse which aroused my curiosity so I checked the state of Virginia as I spoke to a person who was down to $400 for a Dexter heifer and could not sell her. I see people dropping prices.
Breeds who have been crashed by prices not reflective of quality and opportunists and speculators arrive..........rarely recover from the effect of a market saturated with overpriced culls.
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Post by cascade on Aug 15, 2017 15:11:52 GMT
Dexters are a man-made livestock breed, 100% invented by fairly well-off people in the UK.
The base value of any livestock breed is the value of its products.
Goumet beef and dairy and leather has quite a bit of value.
Animals that easily and safely provide those products have even more value.
Good Dexters are selling nicely as breeding stock/dairy stock, the rest are selling nicely as gourmet beef.
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Post by jamshundred on Aug 15, 2017 21:43:28 GMT
Not true....again you creating myth. You need to read more historical articles.
most breeds post Bakewell are man-made, and most that existed before he became "improver in chief" are extinct or very much altered.
keep blowing your smoke.
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Post by cascade on Aug 16, 2017 0:41:11 GMT
All domesticated livestock breeds formed in one of two ways, and both methods required isolation of the animals.
Method 1: people moved foundation livestock to an isolated area, where the animals (and people) evolved together into a new race/livestock breeds suited to the local conditions with livestock subject to selection/culling by the local people.
Method 2: People living in a non-isolated area with many different types of animals, choose to create breeds by artificially separating certain types and artificially controlling breeding to create new breeds.
In early Ireland, Kerry cattle were mostly created via method 1, via a degree of natural isolation in Southwest Ireland. Most Kerry cattle were medium-small cattle, the smallest Kerry were referred to as small Kerry cattle, the word "Dexter" meant small. So "Dexter Kerry Cattle", meant "Small Kerry", just like "Mini-Hereford" means "Small Hereford".
The small-Kerry cattle (Dexters) freely interbred with the medium Kerry cattle and they were all just part of one breed... Kerry Cattle. Then as easier travel and shipping started booming in the 1800's many other breeds of cattle were imported into Ireland, especially including Devon and Short-horn. The word "Dexter" was also applied to shorter animals from those breeds and there was a lot of mixing of breeds.
Up until the late 1800's, Dexters did not exist as a separate breed, instead, the term was just used to describe any shorter cattle of any breed/Crossbred. In the late 1800's, enterprising folks got the idea to create an actual Dexter breed, using method-2 above, and they artificially separated some smaller cattle of most any breed and cross-breeds, into their own separate breeding group, creating the Dexter breed.
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Post by jamshundred on Aug 16, 2017 21:36:28 GMT
This is somewhat accurate, but the only "isolation" of animals when breeds were given identities were created geographically and environmentally. Cows that weathered the circumstances survived. in the early 1700's identities were given to MANY cattle, again, usually based on their geographic location. Youatt did a pretty good job of listing every breed, their characteristics, and depicting many of them towards the mid 1700's. Professor Low characterized the Kerry and the Dexter animals based on region and characteristics as well. So, you are only barely correct in your hypothesis.
Method 1 is accurate as I stated in my first comment. However, the choices were NOT so much about selection for breed traits, because it was all just about eating or selling. Not about breed selection. This DID NOT happen until the mid to late 1800's.
Method 2 - I believe this is your imagination and spin. It is not what I have taken from the historical archives I have read relating to the 1700's and 1800's. It was not until Bakewell began his breeding experiments in the mid 1700's that any though at all was given to improving or establishing breeds, and though much meat was eaten, the focus on cattle was not to make good meat, ( which Bakewell first undertook, but the processing of milk and dairy products.
You just globbed onto ONE comment by one author, which was later quite well disputed by another and you run with it as if it were truth. The first time I ever read that comment, ( was it Wilson?) I thought on it, and went to an Irish dictionary and found nothing to substantiate it. Later I saw it gutted by another historian of the Dexter breed as utter nonsense. Which it is. If you type DEXTER into either a Gaelic or an Irish dictionary, you will get nothing that means, small, tiny, short. The means are entirely different. I HATE it that I have to spend so much time dispensing your myths. Please make an effort to locate a means of having an honest person's stem cells injected.
YOU do NOT know that. No one actually knows which came first the chicken or the egg. Perhaps it was the DWARF breed of Dexters that gave the world Kerry cattle. Actually, there is a researcher who found very, very, very, old bones in a bog that appeared to be quite like Dexters. In truth, ALL cattle breeds were relatively small in the 1700's. I recall reading that bulls regularly weighed less than 400 pounds when butchered. That Dexter cattle were a dwarf breed there is no doubt. They were described as such by Low in the mid 1800's, identified by Lady Loder as a dwarf breed in 1949 and she was breeding Dexters just after the turn of the century only a couple decades from the founding of the breed, and I am confident she KNEW of which she spoke, and then again by the Royal Breed Survivor Trust, the national preservation folks in England. YOU have only YOUR naysay opinion to offer. And it has barely been a decade since your first GRADE Dexter calf was born!
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So what? What does that have to do with the price of eggs in China? This can be said of nearly every breed of cattle. Why do you make this pronouncement as if it were an earth-shattering event? In actuality I think there were a couple of breeds like Devon or Hereford that may have been the same time or later. ( Officially founded, bred and maintained as breeds),
ONCE a breed is established. . . . it is the responsibility of those who give themself leadership authority over the breed to maintain it's integrity and purity. However, anytime a human finds a means to enrich themselves, rarely does honesty or integrity bar the door
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Post by lonecowhand on Aug 16, 2017 22:26:21 GMT
Those "Honest Persons Stem Cells" will curl up and wither! That's funny right there.
Darn, missed the cranky!
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Post by cascade on Aug 17, 2017 5:02:33 GMT
1. Kerry cattle came first, because any cattle in the Kerry area, were by definition, "Kerry Cattle" until travel became easier and other breeds of cattle started to be imported more regularly.
2. All breeds of livestock were subject to selection pressure by local herdsmen for thousands of years. Most of the time, local herdsmen saved their favorite animals for breeding and slaughtered their least favorite, or most problematic animals for meat. It wasn't intensive breeding selection, but it was selection.
3. The word "Dexter" was first used in association with sheep. A man named W. Dexter imported Dishley Sheep (a short legged and thick bodied meat animal from Leicester) into Tipperary County where he became famous for breeding the best of them. Dexter's sheep were famous for their short legs and round bodies, as per a sheep book compiled in 1837 and published 1840. In livestock circles in southwest Ireland in the early to mid 1800's, the term "Dexter" was applied to animals with short legs and thick builds. I'll post the book in a new topic.
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Post by jamshundred on Aug 17, 2017 11:22:04 GMT
It was actually Mr. Bakewell who did the first "improving" of sheep . . . developing small, round sheep where he lived in DISHLEY. He called them New Leicestures, and over time they came to be known as Dishley. In the early times of Youatt and Professor Low who wrote of the stockmen and their work with breeds,and Professor Low who described the Dexters, there is NOT a single mention of Dishley sheep created by a Mr. Dexter. Since it was contemporaneous to the events of the time, the "Dexter means small" in Irish or Gaelic language so that is why Dexter's were called such, appears to me to have been supposition. Since the earliest mention of the breed by name, ( though there are early mentions of tiny black cattle), was Professor Low who had heard they were named for the man who developed them on the farm of an estate owner, seems to be the most contemporaneous of the time, and anything after that is revisionist history. Youatt discusses Mr. Bakewell's sheep in his early book, and even this modern day sheep site refers to Bakewell and Dishley Leicesters. www.borderleicester.com/border-leicesters/about-the-breed.htmlYouatt on Sheep.pdf (557.88 KB)  |
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Post by lonecowhand on Aug 17, 2017 15:40:22 GMT
So...
1. Supposition
2. Conjecture
3. Total B.S., this time changed from the last B.S. definition
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Post by teatpuller11 on Aug 17, 2017 16:58:46 GMT
But in her Dexter history video, the one we all love to hate had a picture of a mini shorthorn cow in with the government herd of Kerries at Muckross, and she says the shorthorn was considered a Dexter because of her size, and was included in the herd as such. And there was a picture of a really ugly traditional (met reg. requirements) black horned Dexter, that was some sort of dwarf grade cow, and everyone called her a Dexter.
Didn't Mr. Dexter act as an estate agent for some Lord, who had multiple estates, one which was on an island at the south end of Kerry, where Dexters were supposed to start? Maybe both stories are true?
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Post by lonecowhand on Aug 17, 2017 23:23:29 GMT
Who's who you love to hate?
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Post by teatpuller11 on Aug 18, 2017 5:26:19 GMT
quoting an old post on the other Dexter Cattle site, Dryad Studio was referring to Carol.
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