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Post by cowgirl on Jun 8, 2010 14:43:22 GMT -5
we have had "regular" cattle in the past but decided we wanted to try dexters for our hobby farm, we bought 2 female dexters with calves last spring, one of the calves grew normally and we sold her to a friend of the breeder we got them from, the other calf is still very small. she is a happy healthy little cow, and is now just over one year old.
We have not seen her come into heat, and have no intention to breed her due to her small size, but she has been out with the herd (including a few 2 year old dexter bulls) and im hoping its not possible she has been bred? i cant find anything on when the females are sexually mature?
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Post by Olga on Jun 8, 2010 17:08:22 GMT -5
Dexter females may become sexually mature at as early as 6 months. There is nothing that would guarantee that your little heifer isn't bred already; in fact, she is a lot more likely to be bred than not, which would explain the absence of heats. There are some very good articles on Dexter breed history and genetics at www.dextercattle.org that you could read. Your little heifer is probably a short-leg. Which in itself doesn't mean that she is "unfit" to be bred. It just means that if she is to be bred, it should be to a long-leg bull, and she should preferably be mature (fully developed) before she is bred. Most Dexter breeders don't expose heifers to a bull until they are 15 months + old. I have heard that breeders who have short-leg heifers usually wait longer before breeding them. It may be a good idea to have your heifer preg-checked; if she is bred you may want to ask the vet about aborting the calf. I hope everything turns out OK for you and your little heifer. Good luck. |
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Post by cowgirl on Jun 8, 2010 17:27:57 GMT -5
thx for the reply, in the past we have never kept bulls longer than a few months to breed the females, they go into the freezer pretty fast. This being our first experiance with dexters, they were a lot scrawnier than we thought they would be and had to keep them to get them to a decent size for butcher. Unfortunatly my parents (the cows are not mine) didnt really do any looking into sexual maturity and just had them all together. She is deffinatly a short legged cow, but is also just very small (small everything, not just short). The bulls are long legged. Unfortunatly at this point she is looking quite rotund and im afraid that she is pregnant and quite far along (deffinatly to far for abortion), so hopefully all goes well.
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Post by cowgirl on Jun 9, 2010 0:39:03 GMT -5
these were just scrawny/small when we got them at 14 months old, they were just young and have filled out quite nicely as they have matured, they are around 26 months old now.
These bulls came from nice show quality registered stock, the woman used to show her 'strain' quite regularly all over the country. The last 2 years she had nearly all bull calves born and needless to say was a bit overrun with them, we bought one quite nice one and one decent one for a good price.
however the calves we breed are put in the freezer after growing out, so it does not really matter if they arent the best conformationally. The parent animals are healthy and vigorous.
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