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As stated by Kelly Schaff (Schaff Angus Valley, the oldest ongoing registered Angus operation in North Dakota), in his ad in the July 2008 Angus Journal: “Much of the Angus industry is caught up in chasing figures and number values and has forgotten the relevant traits, physical conformation and functionality that the breed was based on. This movement has created a large population of Angus cattle that are no better than the computers and academics used to create them. This has many of the breed’s most loyal commercial cattlemen baffled and even seeking the use of crossbred and exotic bulls. Fashionable figures don’t pay the bills when cattle are marketed across the scales, and grid premiums are not premiums when they are offset by additional days on feed to finish—while yielding significantly less carcass weight. If the promotion of figures is leading us to breed narrow, shallow, hard-doing Angus that look and function like a Waygu, it may be better to switch breeds than to erode the elements of the Angus breed that have made it the greatest beef breed in the world.”

Popular numbers and popular cattle (in the show ring, or certain number values in a targeted trait) have led many people astray in their breeding goals. Some of the seedstock being sold for top prices (often to other seedstock producers) are sending the wrong message to the industry about what is most valuable to the commercial cattleman. Yet the qualities needed in a commercial herd, to be able to market good beef calves (to do well in the feedlot or to grow out and sell directly to consumers) from a cow herd that pays its way and can make a profit, is really the only reason why beef cattle are produced. To trade seedstock back and forth for high dollars is about like trading baseball cards. There’s artificial value, in many instances, that has nothing to do with true functionality, but which can lead the industry into thinking this is what we all should be producing.

In many instances the sought-after traits that win a show or look outstanding on paper won’t be a winner in the calving barn or at preg-checking time, or when calves are weaned and weighed in the fall. Just as in any other aspect of the livestock industry—whether it’s hogs, sheep or horses—the halter class champions or the most expensive bloodlines often fail to be exceptional performers in the real world. If you are selecting heifers or cows as breeding stock, or buying a bull, many of the most important traits are not measured with records or ultrasound or carcass grading. Visual evaluation is just as important as performance records and EPDs or measurements of IMF (intramuscular fat or marbling) or ribeye size.

Bull Selection
No matter what kind of records and performance data a bull may have, some important things can only be judged by looking at him. Conformation and structural soundness help determine whether he’ll be able to breed cows and hold up through a busy breeding season. Even if your bull selection is semen for use in AI, his offspring must be sound. A bull for an AI program must be very thoroughly scrutinized; it’s too easy to use a popular sire and not really know much about his structural strengths or weaknesses. His conformational traits will be very important if you plan to keep heifers from him—or market his offspring (bulls or females) to commercial cattlemen.

One big disadvantage of using AI sires selected on their records or popularity without actually seeing them or using them in a cow herd to breed by natural cover is that you have very little idea about structural soundness (since photos won’t tell you everything you need to evaluate), libido, disposition, etc. You have no idea about the conformation of that bull’s mother, for instance, or her udder structure or disposition—even though her traits are often passed on to her granddaughters through her son.

Fertility and breeding ability are traits that are poorly addressed in records. A bull may have great fertility as evaluated by his breeding soundness exam and semen check, yet he still may not be able to breed cows if he has a functional problem that won’t show up in a standard exam, or has poor libido and won’t do his job, or becomes crippled or lazy due to structural faults that cause him discomfort when breeding or traveling. He may be fertile, yet sire few or no calves.

Cow/Heifer Selection
A cow or heifer should be feminine with graceful, slender head and neck and a long body, for room to carry a calf when she’s pregnant. You also want good depth and width of ribcage and body, to handle a large quantity of forage. She should not be narrow or shallow. She needs good muscling, without being too heavyset. These are things you can’t evaluate from a pedigree, EPDs or performance records.

Calving ease is as much a factor resulting from female conformation as it is from inherited birth size (from both the sire and dam). Choose females with wide pin bones, with a lot of length from hooks to pins, and a lot of width between the hook bones. This gives a wider pelvis, with more room for calving, and creates a tipped-down pelvis rather than level or tipped up. A tipped-up pelvis creates more calving problems, since the calf must come up and over the pelvic brim in an arc. The full-term calf and heavy uterus hangs down in the abdomen, resting on the abdominal floor. As the calf is pushed up and over the brim of the pelvis, his front feet tend to hit the top of the birth canal if the pelvis is tipped up (with a high tail head). If the calf’s feet jam into the top of the pelvis or birth canal each time she strains, this may cause the cow enough discomfort that she will put off calving, and a delay in calving may result in a dead calf.

Dr. Ron Skinner (veterinarian and seedstock producer near Hall, Montana) has raised purebred Angus and Saler cattle for more than 40 years and has some definite opinions on what makes a good cow. “A lot of high marbling cattle, and some of the popular pedigrees just make me shudder when I look at the back end of those cows (or bulls). The Saler cattle, for instance, when they originally came from France, had a rump on them like a Quarter Horse, with a very sloped rear end. They were round rumped, with a low tail head—below the line of their back. People hated the looks of that because it didn’t fit the show ring. But those cows could squirt out a calf with no problems. American breeders started changing them to fit what American purebred breeders wanted to look at, and what would sell,” says Skinner.
“Too many people who are showing cattle, in several breeds, have in their minds that a cow must have a high tail head (tipped up pelvis) as a sign of femininity, but this to me is the sign of future calving problems,” he says.

“My sons had a livestock judging coach (also a good friend) when they were in college traveling around the U.S. showing and judging. He was at our fair one year and picked a high-tailed heifer, and I said I’d be glad to offer my services as a veterinarian to whoever had to calve out that heifer! That judge does a great job selecting steers, but he, and many cattle judges, is not so good at judging heifers. The judges haven’t calved out enough cows to know what makes the best female conformation,” says Skinner.

“This tendency to select for a high tailhead is a perception picked up at Denver and other major cattle shows, and is a perfect example of how people can get off on a tangent,” he says. Most of the fads and popular trends in showing are actually detrimental to the breeds involved.

“A good cow will have width to her pin bones, and low wide pins—and lots of length from hooks to pins, and wide hook bones. Some of the little old Angus cows we used to have, that you couldn’t even see their hook bones, would have calving problems if you bred them to anything that sired a big calf. The hook bones need to set out a ways; you should be able to see them if you want a calving ease cow. This is part of the visual selection that EPDs won’t tell you anything about,” explains Skinner. “Even when you look at calving ease EPDs in the Angus breed, it doesn’t quite fit.”

Frame Size
One of the greatest detrimental repercussions of the numbers game has been the upward creep in frame size, especially in the Angus breed. This has led to less feed efficiency, decreases in fertility (inability to breed back on the forage a commercial ranch produces). Computer numbers and records have led many seedstock producers into thinking bigger is better, and now most of the cattle are too big. Most breeders tend to select replacement heifers on size, and select bulls by the biggest numbers for weaning and yearling weight, but these animals usually mature at larger frame size and are not as efficient or easy keeping, nor as fertile or easy calving as smaller cattle.

As stated by Buddy Westphal, a Charolais breeder at Polson, Montana (who has spent several decades selecting for short gestation, easy calving cattle in his breed), many purebred breeders are not cattlemen. “They don’t spend enough time studying genetics. They just look at numbers. Any hobby breeder can look at EPDs and determine which numbers will produce big cattle, and that’s what they’ve selected for,” says Westphal. They don’t think about efficiency, ease of calving, structural soundness or disposition.

When trying to have feed efficient, productive cattle that are easy born and fast growing, yet not maturing too large to be inefficient and unprofitable for the commercial cattlemen, you must look at things besides records, and also remember that records have to be used properly in order to be a useful tool. The commercial rancher’s profit or loss will depend greatly on where he gets his seedstock. As stated by Dr. Skinner, “Some purebred breeders are merely multiplying registration papers rather than practicing selective breeding for optimizing important traits.”

Disposition
One of the most important traits in any herd is temperament and intelligence. No matter how well an animal stacks up on numbers, or how good he or she is in other important traits, a bad disposition can create a danger to the stockman and will also lead to poor performance in the feedlot. Flighty, bad tempered cattle are much more readily stressed, and stress results in poor performance and dark cutters.

There are wild, belligerent cattle in every breed, and individuals that are more tractable. There are also smart and dumb cattle in every breed. It’s up to the seedstock producer to select for easy-going yet intelligent animals that are not labor intensive to handle. These are things the numbers and records won’t tell you, yet may highly impact your entire cattle operation, and that of your customers. A wild, hard-to-handle individual will generally have offspring that make cattle handling challenging, since disposition is highly heritable.

You want to select intelligent animals, however, and it is important to be able to differentiate between flighty/nervous and idiot-wild. You want smart animals that can figure things out when you’re trying to move them or work them, and cows that are smart enough to be good mothers without trying to kill the person who handles their calves. Some of the very docile cattle are not very intelligent, just as some of the wild ones are not. You need to select cattle carefully and find those that are smart enough to be easily managed (with proper handling) even if they are nervous and flighty. Smart cattle are very trainable if you handle them right.
Dr. Skinner points out that if cattle are smart, one person can take a big group of first calf heifers across country without much trouble and with no extra help. The mamas will keep their babies at their sides and line out and go, remembering where the gates are, and always thinking—rather than getting on the fight or trying to run off. “Smart cattle are much more labor efficient, and this is very important because most ranchers can’t afford much hired help,” says Skinner.

By contrast, a bunch of wild, dumb heifers (or even older cows that should know better) can be very frustrating because everything you try to do with them will be a test of patience. Pairs won’t stay together, a cow may try to run off, or the calf is wild and won’t stay with its mother, the herd won’t stay together or a cow will be snorting and bellowing in your face as you try to move the confused and frightened calf.

It’s very easy to select for temperament because the animals’ attitudes become apparent every time you try to handle them. You can cull a group of heifer calves or young bulls on this trait, very quickly, but a lot of breeders don’t cull heavily enough on disposition, especially if they spent a lot of money on the sire or dam of the animal in question. Going by the numbers can give you a false sense of value. There is no place for a wild, dumb or dangerous animal on any ranch, even if the parents were from high priced, popular bloodlines.

BREEDING IS AN ART AS WELL AS A SCIENCE
Many people who enter the seedstock business when a breed becomes popular are investors or hobby breeders who have a lot of money and get into the cattle business as a sideline. Seedstock producers often buy and sell cattle from one another, since this is usually where the big money is, yet the cattle and bloodlines being highly promoted and sold for high dollars may not be functional and profitable for the commercial cowman. As Kelly Schaff (Shaff Angus Valley) points out, “The whole reason for the existence of registered, purebred cattle is to produce seedstock bulls for the commercial industry. The commercial breeder needs great cattle, not just cattle with great numbers. You can have both in balance, but the essential requirements of great cattle must come first so as not to jeopardize the quality of the breed.”

This purpose is lost when seedstock producers select cattle by the numbers and don’t pay much attention to body type and functionality. Understanding the basic principals of cattle breeding is not easily learned because some facets are intuitive. “Basic cattle breeding principals are hard to quantify, and breeding truly great cattle is much more challenging than selecting animals on a computer,” says Schaff. “When there is strong market potential and high dollar values within a breed, the chasing of the latest fad and the race to breed cattle with the highest figures takes over.”

If the “value” of an animal doesn’t have a direct benefit to the commercial cowman’s bottom line, this is just hype and can lead the breed off track. Then there must be a correction point somewhere along the way, and unfortunately a breed usually has to go too far off the mark before the correction sets in. This happened in the 1940’s and 50’s with the trend to smaller and smaller animals that led to dwarfism. When the pendulum swung again, the “hot” items were exotic continental cattle with bigger frames. In order to compete, British breeds scrambled to create larger cattle. Both times, these extremes sacrificed balanced traits. The only salvation then (to get away from midget cattle and dwarfism) and now (to get back to moderate framed animals in herds that have gotten their cows too big) is utilization of genetics from the stubborn breeders who didn’t go with the popular trends and kept their frame size moderate all along.

If the goal is to breed for maximum numbers or for single traits, anyone can become an expert breeder. You can study the numbers and work it all out on a computer and in 2 or 3 generations have cattle that look very appealing, on paper. If you do the matings on a computer, breeding the highest numbers to the highest numbers, or breeding champions to champions, theoretically you could come up with the best and most valuable cattle, or racehorses, or whatever. But it doesn’t work that way. Very seldom do the best animals result from these matings.

The greatest breeders of cattle, or horses, or any other animals, evaluate many things besides numbers or bloodlines when making breeding decisions. To be a good breeder you also have to study phenotype (body type and physical traits) and some of the other things that can’t be evaluated by computer or measured by numbers. The best breeders have an innate understanding or intuition about which individual matings will nick best, looking at the phenotype and traits of each cow and bull. This is something that you don’t learn in a book; it can’t be taught, and can’t be documented, so it tends to be given very little importance by the breeder who is just looking at numbers.

Understanding of number values and use of EPDs is much easier and can be learned quickly. By contrast, understanding the actual principals of breeding cattle is harder to quantify and thus can’t be promoted as readily by speculators or hobby breeders coming into the seedstock business. Anyone can sit at a computer and mate the cattle by the numbers, without ever looking at the cows. When figures are the criteria that establish the value or concept of good cattle, rather than the cattle themselves, balance is readily lost. The seedstock breeders who try “numbers” genetics eventually find that it doesn’t work for their commercial customers.

Economic functionality for the commercial cattleman depends on body type, not numbers. There are no EPDs for easy fleshing, thick, deep-bodied, well-muscled efficient cattle that gain rapidly and mature early, with high fertility and longevity in the cow herd. Cattle breeding is as much an art as a science, and this is being ignored by many producers in their quest for maximum numbers.

UDDERS
When selecting a replacement heifer, it pays to know what kind of udder her mother had, and also the udder of the mother of her sire. Heifers often inherit their udder traits from their sire’s dam. If you don’t like the udder on the mother of the bull, you won’t like his daughter’s udders either, because they tend to throw back to their paternal grandmother.

It’s always a good idea to keep your own records on udders, since memory doesn’t always serve well, and udder scoring for a breed requirement may not be fully adequate. A cow that raises a nice big calf may have a decent looking udder in later lactation, and you forget how ballooned her teats were at calving time. Or, you tend to keep heifers from a cow you like, even though her udder isn’t perfect. Memory is too subjective. It’s always wise to score each cow’s udder very critically at calving time--regarding teat length, circumference, placement, udder attachment, etc. If you have any cows in your herd with less than optimal udders, you are doing commercial customers a grave disservice selling sons or daughters from those cows, since commercial cowmen are looking to you for seedstock that will improve their own genetics.

THE NEWEST FAD: CHASING AFTER HIGHER IMF
With any trend or push for maximizing a certain trait, breeders select away from balanced traits. Many Angus breeders have been pushing for more marbling, at the expense of other traits, even though Angus cattle are already high in IMF. In the past decade many articles have been emphasizing IMF and cattle with higher marbling have been strongly promoted. This is creating cattle that are often lighter muscled and poor doing—since marbling and muscling are antagonistic traits. If you maximize one trait you generally lose some of the other. This is hurting commercial cattlemen who sell cattle by the pound. Some of the highly promoted bloodlines no longer have the thickness and muscling that the commercial producer wants and needs in his calves. The Angus breed actually had to lower its standards for CAB beef, in the chase for higher IMF.

Angus breeders need to maintain marbling since that’s one of the things that made the breed popular in the first place. But in order to be competitive with other breeds, Angus cattle need to have adequate muscle and yield, with overall performance on several counts. Otherwise they cannot compete with crossbreds in the feedlot or with crossbred, composite or exotic bulls in the cowherd—to produce optimum beef calves. If Angus seedstock producers continue to chase marbling, at the expense of other important qualities, they will be making what was originally a fairly well balanced breed into something more single faceted.