A mysterious business!

Tom Best's excellent article 'Thoughts on breed purity' commented that the increased size of the Aberdeen-Angus breed 'didn't come from the existing gene pool'.

In 1982, I did a Nuffield Scholarship study tour in which I looked at the beef cattle scene in USA and Canada with a strong emphasis on genetics.

At that time, our own native breeds had been almost wiped out by Charolais, Simmental and Limousin cattle from Europe.

Forward-looking Angus and Hereford breeders had for some years prior to my trip been importing cattle from Canada. These were having a significant effect on the frame size of their breed without in any way recapturing the market.

On my summer-long tour, I visited 51 cattle herds, various research establishments and several universities. I was, at that time, a commercial cattle breeder selling suckled calves.

My father and I were early users of Charolais bulls and, disappointed with the standard of Angus bulls available, I had the ulterior motive of finding a 'big' Angus bull.

The drive to get the Angus bigger, both in UK and North America, started in the late 1960s. It accelerated through the 1970s and, by the end of the decade, bulls appeared that weighed a tonne, a Holy Grail then.

I discovered that to increase size, Angus breeders had used various sources. We already knew about Western Canada. I discovered that similar breeding objectives to those in Canada were common in the American prairie states, the old Wild West.

In both areas, the bull market was localised, with prices only moderate and was completely divorced from the Eastern show scene. The main customers were ranchers whose income depended entirely on the number and weight of the calves they sold.

Pedigree breeders had weighed their cattle and had based their selections on productive characteristics and, as a result, strong performance lines had been developed and were gaining popularity.

American show breeders had, at the time of my trip, been going for some years to these sources of larger framed cattle and were paying huge sums for bulls from ranchers who had previously had a modest income.

Without doubt, some show breeders had, at the same time either by accident or more probably design, introduced outside genetics through the back door.

While winning shows may have been a satisfying experience, the money required to finance these high profile herds came from sales of offspring and from massive sales of semen from the champion bulls.

Semen from these bulls was used in a huge way over every kind of cow. Problems caused by recessive genes previously unknown in the Angus breed started showing up.

As soon as it was confirmed that a bull had left animals of non-traditional type it was placed on a register published by the US Angus Association. That bull was immediately blacklisted by breeders and his progeny dropped in value to commercial level.

I attended a sale in Southern Alberta. One of the sellers had progeny from a son of a popular show bull who had subsequently been found to leave horns. The other vendors at the sale had a great trade. His beasts were unsaleable.

Although the introduction of outside genetics was usually deliberate and fraudulent, sometimes the reason was relatively innocent.

At the height of the boom in Western Canadian Angus, a breeder who had only operated in a low key way sold some very big bulls at high prices into top show herds in the United States.

Their offspring had been successful in the show ring and at auction. Soon reports appeared telling that some offspring of these bulls had the recessive conditions mulefoot and white eye, which had only been found previously in the Holstein. When I arrived in Canada, that herd was beyond the pale.

A veteran Angus breeder, Don Matthews, from Highland Stock Farms, near Calgary, told me that in the 1930s many pure-bred Angus breeders were so poor that they couldn't keep up their registrations.

When better times returned in the 1950s, the Canadian Angus Association declared an amnesty and, provided the breeder had kept his breed pure, his cattle could re-enter the herd book, subject to inspection.

Don Matthews had been an inspector. The grandfather of the owner of the aforementioned herd had crossed a Holstein, at that time a relatively beefy breed, into his herd sometime in The Depression.

This was not for any dishonest reason as his bull trade was inconsequential and he had stopped registering. He merely wanted a bit more size and maybe milk.

Twenty five years and hundreds of matings later, the dominance of the polled factor and the black coat of the Angus had made those animals with a dash of foreign blood indistinguishable from the others in the herd.

At that time, the bull market in Western Canada hadn't become the lucrative market it later became so no-one much cared and the cattle re-entered the herd book.

That there was deliberate introduction of outside blood into the Angus breed around 40 years ago is beyond doubt. It came and quickly went and its long-term impact has been negligible.

It should be noted that modern DNA analysis indicates that few cattle breeds are absolutely free of genetic skeletons in their cupboards.

Incidentally, the species with the longest records of pedigree in the animal kingdom is the Thoroughbred horse. Modern pedigrees trace back to three stallions imported from the Middle East in the 18th century - The Darley Arabian, The Godolphin Barb and The Byerley Turk.

These were mated with 74 native British and a few imported mares and their progeny was meticulously recorded. Modern DNA research shows that a variant of the myostatin gene was then, and remains today, partly responsible for the renowned speed of the Thoroughbred.

Results of this recent study indicate that the speed variant of myostatin occurred just once, about 300 years ago and is likely to have come, not from one of the great stallions, but from an unknown mare from one of our native mountain breeds.

Purity of breeding! "God moves in a mysterious way".