IN THIS ISSUE...

• Coalition Power

• Just 5 Questions

• Multibreed Genetic
  Evaluation Means Limousin

• The Behavior Gene

• The World According To
   Hooter McCormick

• Tough Steaks Start
   At home

• TRAILS
• RIDING THE GAP

We don’t want wild cattle that are hard to handle and a challenge to get into the corral, chute or barn, or mean ones that are dangerous when handling their calves. We don’t keep any wild, flighty heifers, and we always select a calm, easy-going bull calf whose sire and dam were also docile, intelligent, and easy to work with. Disposition/temperament and handling ease are heritable.

It’s not always easy to select a good-disposition bull at a bull sale. In a pen of bulls most of them may be mellow and at ease, in a peer group they are familiar with. They may go berserk, however, if taken out of the security of familiar herdmates and put into a totally new situation. You can readily see the ones that are buzzed up and on the fight or scared when they come into the ring, but you can’t always tell if the calmer ones will be easy to handle when you try to put them down the chute, or if they will sire calm calves. You don’t have any clues about the temperament of that bull’s sire and dam or other ancestors. It would be a great help if bull breeders would objectively score their bulls-for-sale on temperament as well as birth weight, weaning weight, EPDs for marbling, etc.

Let’s Give Bulls a Temperament Score
Bull testing and evaluations have become excellent tools to aid in the complex problem of selecting bulls—taking much of the guesswork, chance and risk out of the selection process. Some bull test facilities have added more categories of evaluations, such as pelvic measurements, scrotal circumferences, ultrasound ribeye and backfat measurements, etc. along with the standard weight gain tests and semen checks. There are EPDs now for maternal qualities (how well the females milk) and meat tenderness. In years to come, there will be more innovative improvements in the testing and evaluation process, just as the present use of EPDs is an improvement over some of the earlier ways of measuring various traits such as birthweight, weaning and yearling weights for bull comparisons.

One thing we’d like to see in bull evaluation is an indication of disposition or temperament—a way of scoring bulls on whether they are wild or docile. For most ranchers, handling manageability is a crucial part of the over-all value of any animal, and just as important as milking ability, calving ease or growth rate. It may actually be more crucial than any other trait—for profitability—especially to the feeder and packer who takes a loss on wild cattle that won’t gain and end up being dark cutters.

Disposition may not matter much to the stockman who runs cattle on thousands of acres of range in a mild climate where they can calve unsupervised and he rarely has to handle them (even though gathering and working them at branding, vaccinating or for sale or weaning can prove challenging). But temperament of those wild/flighty animals may make them poor doers in the feedlot.

Those of us who work with smaller, more intensely managed herds prefer docile, easy-handling animals. Manageability makes any type of handling much easier, safer and less stressful for both the cattle and the handlers. Some of us, for instance, calve early (often in cold temperatures of January/February, which means putting cows into barns to calve) so cows can be bred early (and selectively, to our own bulls) before they go to summer range community pastures. Under these conditions, we need cattle with good temperament that are intelligent and easy to handle.

It’s a frustration and disappointment to buy a high priced, high performing bull, only to discover after you bring him home that he’s wild and crazy whenever you try to do anything with him or have to leave him in a corral by himself. It’s even more frustrating to find that most of his daughters inherit his hare-brained or mean temperament. It’s not always possible to accurately evaluate a bull’s mental makeup in a one-point-in-time observation during a sale. The bull may seem very mellow in a group or pen of bulls, but shows his true nature later when he’s being handled or when he’s by himself.

Even a docile bull may have a high-strung or aggressive ancestor that his progeny can throw back to. About 35 years ago my husband and I bought a nice gentle bull that must have had a wild mother or flighty ancestor. About half his calves were easy-going and mellow like him, and the other half were wild as elk (even from docile mothers). If you can find out more about the temperament of a bull’s parents and other forebears, it can help you greatly in making a wise selection. We had our best luck selecting bull calves from our own cows, especially the cows that had many generations of intelligent, docile ancestors.

Temperament is highly heritable; we’ve found this to be true in more than 50 years of working with cattle (my husband and I both grew up on ranches). If you get a bull with skittish tendencies or a mean, aggressive nature, chances are that many of his sons and daughters will inherit that trait and you’ll end up culling some on disposition. How you handle and “train” cattle can make a big difference, making timid/flighty cattle more trusting and easier to work with, but it’s most important to select cattle with basic good intelligence and an easy-going nature to begin with.

You can ruin a good disposition with bad handling; that cow will never trust you again! But by the same token, all the good, careful handling in the world won’t salvage a cow with a naturally mean or wild disposition. Some individuals are not good candidates for human handling and will be a big disappointment—as well as being dangerous to work with.

Some ranchers think a cow has to be aggressive and mean to be a good mother, to roust that newborn calf around, lick the sac off his head and get him right up to nurse (especially if weather is cold), and to protect her calf from predators. But the mellow, easy-handling cows we’ve raised disprove that myth. They are no-nonsense, efficient mothers, yet they are docile enough for us to walk through the herd any time, anywhere, and maybe even pet them. They follow us anywhere when called, because they trust us. They respectfully stand back and let us iodine and tag their newborn calf—yet are instantly on the fight if a dog or a predator gets within sight of their calf. They are smart enough to tell the difference between a human (which they’ve learned to consider the dominant “boss cow” in their social hierarchy) and a predator that might endanger their calf. Scared/mean cows never quite get the picture; they still think of every human as a predator.

With a little conscientious effort on your part, your cow herd can be very easy to work with. But this kind of easy manageability can be lost if you use a bull who sires crazy daughters. If your goal was herd improvement, you wasted your money on that fancy bull. Even if his calves are super gainers or his daughters are good milkers and raise big calves, if you can’t handle his daughters at calving time (or whenever you have to put them through a chute), or they knock you down and tromp on you when you grab a calf to tag or treat, you won’t want them around very long.

Every breed has a few dingbats and belligerent individuals, and some docile ones. Continental cattle (even though many of these breeds were dual purpose, raised for meat and milk, with intensive human handling) tend to be wild and flighty when raised in less intensive conditions; if they don’t see people very often or are handled roughly, they can be explosively unmanageable. Some breeds are not noted for good disposition, and some have bad reputations for flighty or belligerent temperament, but you can always find individuals that are more mellow or more trainable, if you look hard enough and selectively breed for those traits. Temperament should be given a score (to make that search easier!) just like birthweight, milking ability, weaning weight, and so on. This would give the cowman one more way to compare individuals within a breed or in a group of composite animals, and make better choices for his or her purposes and goals.

Temperament may not matter very much to the rancher who doesn’t handle his cattle often, or is using a bull for a terminal cross—not keeping any heifers. But it should matter, because those feeder calves sired by flighty/scared/crazy/suspicious/mean bulls won’t gain as well in the feedlot and many of them will have poorer carcass quality at slaughter. Ranchers who buy bulls may want to have that choice—using some kind of scoring or measure of the genetics of temperament. Even more important, however, is the value of this trait to the industry as a whole, not just to individual ranchers. Regardless of what any stockman thinks, wild cattle (and the resulting lost production due to lesser feed efficiency, dark cutters, and tougher meat for the consumer) hurt us all. It’s time for seedstock producers to address this very important problem.

Why not add some kind of temperament measure (such as rankings derived from chute behavior—what I call the “rattle index”—or from measuring exit speeds) to test results and bull evaluations at bull test facilities, or add it to information in a sale catalog? The seedstock producer, especially, could benefit his customers greatly by giving some kind of ranking or evaluation, since he is in a position to know something about the disposition of the sire, dam and other relatives of the young bulls he is offering for sale. Scoring can easily be done when weanlings are being processed, for instance, and that score can be augmented by the histories on the calf’s sire and dam and other ancestors.

Disposition/temperament is not as easily measured as birth weight or weaning weight, but we all know the difference between a calm, easy-going individual and a hot-headed, flighty one or a mean one. There are a number of ways now to score cattle on handling ease and attitude when they are being worked. The breeder who wants satisfied, repeat customers could do his bull and heifer buyers a great service by adding some kind of temperament evaluation to sale information.

Genetics of Temperament; Personal Reflections
The disposition of a bull, and that of his mother, will have a lasting influence on your herd if you are keeping daughters (or sons) for future breeding. Over the past 40 years my husband and I have come to rank disposition as one of the most important traits we select for in our herd of crossbred/composite cattle. Years ago when we were starting our crossbreeding program, we had mostly Angus cows and bred them to Hereford bulls. We noticed early on that one of our Hereford bulls consistently passed his mellow disposition to his daughters, whether they were out of Hereford or Angus or crossbred cows. We soon started breeding all of our meanest and unmanageable Angus cows (which we had a lot of!) to that bull. Thus we were able to salvage their good traits (most of those mean cows were good producers and raised big calves), keeping daughters from them that were much more tractable.

We ended up with a lot of good crossbred daughters that stayed in our herd a long time because they were much “nicer” than their wicked mothers. We eventually had to cull the meanest Angus mothers because they were incorrigible, but their good crossbred daughters by “Little John” had much better temperament and almost all of them kept producing good calves until they were 14 years old or older. They were much more trainable than their mothers, and easier to work with, and so were their calves.

The temperament of a bull’s mother is an important factor for the bull’s daughters’ dispositions. Heifers tend to inherit traits from their sire’s mother, more often than not. When you select a herdsire, take a very critical look at his dam. The cows you keep from that bull will be a lot like her—in milking ability, udder shape and teat size, conformation and disposition.

The biggest influence in our own composite herd came from our family milk cow, a grand old Holstein. Her half Hereford sons (5 of them, during the early 1970’s—full brothers by a very fertile Hereford bull that we used til he was 10 years old) were bred to our Hereford-Angus cows, producing daughters that were half Hereford, quarter Angus, quarter Holstein. Those 3-way cross range cows were athletic, fertile (always breeding back within a 30 day breeding season in April, in very unpampered conditions), hardy and long-lived, and their calves were outstanding.

That Holstein cow had excellent feet and legs and udder conformation; she lived to be 21 years old and still had a very good udder (we milked her up until the day we butchered her). She was very intelligent, and not a bit high strung. Through her crossbred sons she passed on her good traits—longevity, fertility, good udder, docile and tractable intelligence—to her grand-daughters who became the foundation backbone of our composite program. We later added a little Simmental and some Limousin and a bit more Angus to our mix, but every composite cow on our ranch harks back to those foundation 3/way cross cows that were grand-daughters of that Holstein milk cow. With each addition to our composite we stirred the mix and tried to maximize the most desired traits from each breed while minimizing the traits we didn’t want. With selective breeding we created high producing, long-lived beef cows that are gentle and easy to handle.

We learned very early that a bull’s mother is the most important factor in the equation, in traits he will pass to his own daughters. Over the years we occasionally bought a new bull to add a new bloodline to our herd or to intensify a certain trait. But it was always hard to find a bull that met the criteria we wanted. It was much easier to make good selections among our home raised bull calves because we knew so much more about their ancestry.

For instance, about 20 years ago we bought a nice-looking, fast gaining young bull at a sale, then discovered he was a little flighty. Most of his daughters were hot-headed under pressure, and aggressively mean when they calved. We later asked the breeder what kind of disposition the bull’s mother had, and he confirmed our suspicions. She was a “pretty cow” in his words, but didn’t have a good temperament. We would have been better off selecting a bull after visiting the breeder, with a chance to look at a bull’s sire and dam and other female relatives, instead of being confined to the selection criteria available in the sale catalog. Since then, we’ve mostly bought bull calves (crossbred bulls, that fit our composite mix better than a purebred)—after a visit to the farm and a look at the bull’s mother, while the calf is still on the cow. This not only gives us an idea about the dam’s conformation, udder shape, etc. but also about her temperament.

We’ve had the best luck adding new genetics to our herd by first blending a new bull’s traits with our own best genetics. Almost always the sons of our new bull, out of our own good cows, are better than their sires in what they can produce for us, since they have our best cows as mothers. When we buy a new bull, we breed him to the cows we feel will best compliment his traits and improve them—with disposition/temperament as one of the important criteria. Thus we are usually able to raise bull calves that are better than their sires in all around usefulness—to produce better calves and replacement heifers.

For instance, the previously mentioned bull whose disposition was a disappointment (whose daughters had aggressive temperament) had sons and grandsons that proved to be better sires, for our purposes. After we added our best genetics to the mix, the offspring were more suited to our herd goals. This is what a study of genetics is all about—selecting for traits that will enhance your cow herd and beef production, enabling you to raise better calves, not just in gainability, marbling, feed efficiency, etc. but also in traits that will make them work better for your own herd management. And this should include temperament and ease of handling.

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