Soapweed's Ranch
Ramblings |
It was February of 1977. Dad was running mostly straight Hereford cattle at
the time, and about a third of his cattle were registered. He usually marketed
about 70-100 head of bulls at his annual October sale. Dad had gone to a couple
bull auctions in January, and purchased five new herd bulls. These Hereford
coming-two-year-olds had been close to our ranch headquarters for a couple weeks,
but we were getting about ready to start calving and Dad wanted to make room
for more cows. This particular beautiful sunny day, Dad decided to drive the
five new bulls east of the house about a mile where there were about 35 or 40
other older bulls. The weather report was for things to go haywire, but there
was adequate protection from the wind where these other bulls were located.
I had just acquired a brand-new Canon FTB camera, so was packing it along as
I fed hay. My feed-outfit was an International 1066 tractor pulling a Lahman
stack-mover equipped with a Hydra-fork. Dad rode by looking pretty sporty on
his paint horse, "J.R.". He was wearing his hat on this beautiful 50 degree day,
so I got out of the tractor and took his picture.
Things went to heck in a hand backet that night, as the predicted "Alberta Clipper" came
along packing snow and high winds. The temperature went from the balmy plus 50
degrees to a miserable minus 50 degree wind chill, in essence a 100 degree drop.
The old bulls didn't allow the five new bulls to share wind-break space, so the
five drifted off to the southeast corner of the meadow where there was no protection.
Back in those days, no one really cared about scrotum size. It has since become
desirable, as it seems to be linked to both fertility and greater maternal qualities
in the female offspring of so-endowed bulls. Two of these bulls had large "desirable" scrotums
and the other three didn't. As it turned out, the two more masculine well-endowed
bulls froze their scrotums and were later pronounced to be ruined. The other
three came through the storm with flying colors, and went on to sire some pretty
good calves. There is no further point to this story.
Kind of along the same topic, though, I think the larger scrotum-more fertility
aspect is worthy of consideration if you are buying a bull with the idea of keeping
future daughters as replacements. If you are buying a bull to use as a terminal
cross (selling all offspring as feeders) don't worry about scrotal circumference.
Copyright © 2005 Steve
Moreland
All Rights Reserved