Saving American red

[rhonda]

I was reading this discussion and saw the name of the cow that might be Legacy--Rainbow Hills-- which is the line my Elsie comes from--Could she be Legacy?? How do I find out?? Her real name is Early Wild-- I find it interesting as a fairly new owner to see how people feel about this subject. I have a lot to learn!!! I know it has been a thrill to me to finally have these little critters after wanting them for years. When I get home from work and they see my car and come running or when my bull is across the field bothering the neighbors and I call his name he looks at me and COMES to me (something my husbands bigger cattle would never do!)--it is such a nice way to unwind from work!! I do wonder if I made a mistake buying a polled bull--but as a new buyer should I have done more homework before I bought?? In my area they seem to like polled and red?? Maybe there should be more info on this on the registry websites so we newbies will know which way to go--

[tiffin]

Judy, this is a test for me as a newbie also, answering Rhonda's question. I would say Early Wild is legacy but her other three animals are not.
Rhonda, according to JamsHundred website www.jamshundred.com/preservethelegacy.html
"Simply put, a Legacy qualified animal will have NONE of the following animals in its pedigree:
Parndon Bullfinch
Lucifer of Knotting
Cornahir Outlaw 
Saturn of Knotting
Brambledel Redberry Prince 
Saltaire Platinum"

I have to add that in my opinion why the registries do not give out a whole lot of information is that their job is to register Dexters without knowledge of their background otherwise the above animals would never have been entered and Dexters would definitely be on the endangered list of ALBC. Rhonda, I didn't find out any of this until after I bought my Dexters so I'm in the same boat as you and most other Dexter owners. I don't regret it as these little ones are so enjoyable. I could never afford to start over with "legacy" animals.

How did I do, Judy? lol

Adrienne

[marion]

Tiffin, Please remember, this idea of 'legacy' is the idea of one person. There is nothing wrong with wanting to keep these animals as a separate line. That does not make all others flawed.
In particular, regarding Saturn of Knotting, you will not find a finer line of small (without chondro to make them small) neat and yes 'pure' animals with register of merit background for milk. Other bulls on 'The List' have parts in the thousanths.., thousanths,..that make them flawed in the eyes of one person. Never mind that they are excellent bulls that contribute muscle, milk, improved udders and teats, etc. as well as necessary new blood.
New owners reading the 'legacy' material have often been extremely upset when scanning their pedigrees and finding one of the mentioned animals there. Most who have been reading the boards for the last few years will not want a repeat of that "discussion" here, so out of respect for those people and Olga's board, I will not start it all over again here. You can pm me if you want to hear another viewpoint..marion

[wstevenl]

I think it's too bad that people have argued about this stuff in the past. Sad really.
To me it doesn't seem much different than the ranches that keep old blood lines and closed herds of herefords, etc. It's good that people are doing it but not everyone has to.
That being said, I wouldn't want to allow more cross breeding like they do in Australia.

[marion]

Poor old ms fermoy..ok, I'm just going to use her to illustrate a point. What, by pedigree, seems to be an old line dexter, may not be nearly as dexter as thousands of other n.american (or import) dexters (as has been mentioned already on this thread). And for re-establishment of the breed in case of a disaster, it is necessary to have as diverse a population as possible, so 'legacy' cattle, a limited gene pool, are not superior in that regard. Loss of breeding stock could happen not just from "breeding errors" (I assume you mean what potentially could show up, post import bulls) but environmental disasters. So, many breeders in many locations, with various bloodlines, are all helping ensure the continuation of the breed. A recessive condition could also manifest in 'pre-import bull' cattle.
The "inrush of imported blood" might have been popular, but it is also necessary for new blood, genetic diversity. An inbred population, while they may look the same on the surface, may not stand up to a particular situation (eg: higher altitudes) or illness or climate extremes, and because of their limited genetics could all be lost.
Why do you think those new imports would have been popular. Do you think it was only because of 'red' or 'polled'? Any chance it could have been because they threw udders that were not like old leather sacks with next to no attachment and/or gigantic teats. Any chance it was for better milk production and/or improved muscle, to counteract some of those torpedo butts. We hear about one particular import bull that was 49 inches, but there are old-line aniimals here that excede that height.
Gene, let me reiterate, no one is against the 'legacy' idea. It's too bad though, that the worth and pedigree of every import bull has been called into question, in the effort to further the 'legacy' idea..marion

[marion]

Gene, I was not disparaging your cattle or 'old line' cattle. But it is a fact that some of our cows need improvement. It is doing no favour to our Dexters to continue with the kind of teats that get stepped on. Leg and foot angle affects function, eventually. Past posts have got a bit jingoistic about "new and improved". We are not trying to produce Jerseys or Angus. We do not need six gallons on a frail animal, but if someone wants a dual-purpose Dexter then they want to try for two gallons plus, not a yoghurt container of milk if they are lucky, after the calf has it's share.
You do not need to tone down your admiration of old line cattle. That there is a question about ms fermoy is not new information. But, she has now been set up as an example of saving the line. We know that there has been much discussion about farms where animals originated, where this or that breed were living at the same time, or more than one Dexter bull was running, and the pedigree "could" be in error. The same applies to ms fermoy. Without parentage testing, no one will ever know.
IMO, there will not be any new information to clarify fermoy's pedigree. I dont think genetic science can prove her to be purebred dexter. Sorry, I'm sure she is a wonderful cow, but there are a lot of Dexters being raised in isolation; no other breeds on the farm, or on nearby farms, where the Dexter pedigrees would be more certain and especially from AI bulls because you know the exact moment of breeding service that caused the pregnancy.
You're right - there is nothing wrong with Dexters, ANY Dexters..not just the ones of older US strains..marion

[tiffin]

Marion, I PM'd you.

[marion]

Hi Tiffin, I replied to your PM..marion

[tiffin]

I wonder about that too as we have tried GnRH and Lutalyse with no success. We've tried it to jump start the cows after calving. The way things are going the cows will calve later and later each year and soon I will have winter calves which I don't want up here in the north. The dairys do it all the time. But, mine just go into heat when their ready not with shots.

[otf]

Nov 16, 2008 6:55:49 GMT -5 tiffin said:

The way things are going the cows will calve later and later each year and soon I will have winter calves which I don't want up here in the north.

Tiffin, we're in central VA, so we try to calve in September-October, so the bull will be going with the cows in December. This helps avoid calving during June-August (too hot and too many flies). For early spring calves, he's put with the cows in June. I've found that having calves year-round is difficult, not just because of heat or cold; having a reasonable idea when to expect calving is very helpful, especially if you're the one who has to check them late at night, etc.

[Cloverbell]

Whoooeeee that girl is RED! She practically pops right off the page!

OTF we do the same with our bulls for calving - Thanksgiving to Valentines for fall calves, then Memorial Day to Labor Day for spring calves.. easy to remember.

[onthebit]

She is a nice looking cow. She looks quite typically Dexter. If her rear hooves need trimming, then why are you going to hope your gritty ground corrects them? Why not have them trimmed?

[marion]

In my area, the foot-trimming guy will not come for a few animals, and without a proper chute, the vet wont do it either. Given the right conditions, their feet do break off and wear off quite nicely.
I used to run a herd of horses here, and at the previous property was always needing to trim, especially fronts. Once I moved, and they ran on 200 acres of varied terrain, I never needed to trim again..marion

[tiffin]

Gene: Probably dumb question, but what is the difference between wild type and recessive?

[cddexter]

Hi Gene, thanks for confirming Fermoy is E+. I think I posted here earlier that from the research that's been done to date, all U.S. early reds are the E+ type, not little e. Nice to have that confirmed from both Genetic Visions and UCDavis.

Tiffin, it's been several days, and Gene didn't reply to your question, so if it's okay for me to respond, let me.

Up until around 1995/6, it was always thought that there was one basic location that determined coat color, and that there were two options available: BLACK and red. Black was dominant over red, red was recessive. Thus Black x Black always equaled a black animal, Black x red also equaled a black animal because black overrides the red, and red x red always equaled a red one. All the other colors found in cattle, like blonde a'quitaine, jersey, galloway and highland have were considered the result of dilutant genes.

The individual options in each gene are called alleles. Some genes have one option, some have two, some have (up to) 10 or more. Thus because cattle came in two basic colors, it was thought cattle had two alleles (Black or red) to choose from in each of the pair of genes at that location.

A man named Kluglund, researching in Scandinavia, found the DNA location for the coat color gene in cattle. Surprise, surprise!!! There were THREE alleles, not two. The third gene was considered a dominant form, as opposed to being recessive. What's neat is that the gene operates differently depending on which breed of cattle it appears in. The color is CONSISTENT WITHIN A BREED but DIFFERENT BETWEEN BREEDS. Go figure that one.

So...different breeds were checked out for this third allele, and this is how they found out it could be a different color depending on the breed, which is why they called it 'wild', much like a 'wild' card in card games, where one certain card can take on different values. They found that Jerseys and Brown Swiss were homozygous for this newly discovered 'wild' gene, and of course we all know both breeds are a consistent taupish brown. Limos turned out to be black if homo for the gene. Holseins were black with red overtones and an almost pure red 'mane' and 'forelock'. Nobody thought to look at that little fringe breed, Dexters. I learned about the test, and had an inbred family of duns and reds tested, expecting to find the 'wild' gene was our dun color, and recessive red would be our red color. No such thing. Our duns came back testing as Black at this main coat color locus.

Now I wanted to find out if Dexters had the gene, and what color wild would be. I knew it wasn't dun, so I kept looking.

Since we had so little red here at the time, I used some DNA from England, and discovered that some of the English reds were actually the 'wild' allele. That meant that in Dexters, the 'wild' allele was red. Now we had two reds and at the time, were the only breed known to be red (later they found some in Herefords too). Based on the tones of red of the few animals I tested, I thought bright carrot was recessive red and dark irish setter was the 'wild'. However, additional testing has been done, and has proven that both genes can be any shade at all, so visually there is no distinction.

Both Black and Wild (red) are dominant, but Black will override the Wild gene, so I guess you could say it's 'more' dominant, but you can often get red overtones in the coat if the animal is Black/Wild, especially in the summer when the coat fades a bit in the sun.

This meant that our dun came from some other cause. No doubt we had it, but we just didn't know why. And that's another story.

regards, Carol D.