I Have A Jersey Cow Who Has Just Had Twin Calves A Heifer And A Bull
Categories:
Live Stock and Dairy
The heifer was born about five minutes before the bull and seems to be
the stronger. My neighbors tell me to fatten both for the butcher, for
they say the heifer will be barren. The mother is a young cow, as this
is her second calf. Kindly inform if this is one of nature's laws or if
there is a possibility of the heifer turning out all right?
The probability is that it will be better to veal the heifer than to
<
r />
raise her, as most heifer calves twinned with a bull are free martins,
or animals of mixed sex and no good for breeding purposes or for
profitable milk production. If the bull is a good animal, he probably
will be all right, as this twinning does not seem to affect a bull calf,
though it does the heifer. It does not always happen that the heifer is
worthless for breeding, but the probability is so great that you had
better have her killed and be done with it.
What Is a "Grade"?
Does the term "grade" mean an animal whose sire is a thoroughbred and
whose dam is a scrub, or just one who is selected from others because of
her good points or those of her mother?
Roughly speaking, a grade animal is one having more or less pure-bred
blood, but not enough, or otherwise too irregular, for registry under
the rules of the association of the breed to which it has affiliation.
It does not refer to selection without use of a pure-blood sire at some
point in the ancestry, but this is not a distinction of much moment, for
it is hard to find animals which have not borrowed something from some
cross with pure blood, though remote. The terms high and low grade are
sometimes used to signify amount of pure blood recognizable by form and
other characters or remembered by owners or their neighbors. Generally
speaking, a grade is anything not entitled to registry, though
ordinarily it refers to the offspring of a pure-bred sire and a cow of
another or of no breed. The offspring of a pure-bred cow and a scrub
bull would also be a grade.