Happily, heretics no longer meet at the stake, and Allan Fraser will also escape the flames as other

farming heretics such as Bobby Boutflour and Kenneth Russell who have questioned the moguls of pedigree breeding and the high priests of genetics. Such men have shown that remarkable milk yields can be obtained from quite undistinguished cattle; or Cooper, Voisin, other heretics who proved that grass is a mine of green gold ready to be turned into profit by those who will husband it instead of listening to expert advice to plough it up. Dr. Frasers book will be welcomed by those who have to make a living in farming, the hard way, and will be severely criticised by genetics and pedigree breeders. He shows how progeny testing and sire performance tests have been practised empirically for centuries long before the advent of the agricultural scientist. He doubts whether in its essentials the breeding of animals has changed so materially since long before Bakewells time, quoting in substantiation - of his opinion the plain common-sense of the scriptural injunction By their fruits ye shall know them. He believes that both the geneticist and the breeder tend to exaggerate the importance of breeding in animal husbandry in relation to environmental factors and has a great deal of evidence to support the rival claims of traditional husbandry combined with modem management practices. In this question he goes fully into the subjects of feeding, hormones, antibiotics, mineral requirements and protective foods. This is not a textbookit is far too entertaining for that classification. It is enlivened with the personal views and anecdotes of the author, whose variety of experience is unique: qualified doctor of medicine and science, shepherding on the Scottish hills, selling sheep in Aberdeen cattle market, research at the Rowett Institute and university lecturer in animal and dairy husbandry. He is one of the few agricultural writers who is never dull, can blend the practical with the scientific, and is not afraid to speak his mind.

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY HERESIES

ALLAN FRASER M.D., D.Sc. Lecturer in Animal and Dairy Husbandry University of Aberdeen

Contents
INTRODUCTION PART ONE Inheritance I BreedingBefore Bakewell 2 Bakewell and his Time 3 Breed Formation and Breed Societies 4 Pedigree 5 Shows 6 A Testing of Tools 7 The Contribution of Genetics 8 Proof by Production 9 Importance of Breeding Exaggerated PART TWO Environment 10 Do Environmental Effects Persist? 11 The Internal Environment 12 The Power of External Environment 13 FeedingThe Chemists Inquiry 14 FeedingAnalysis and Tables 15 FeedingA Biologists Approach PART THREE Husbandry 16 Peasant Husbandry 17 Transition 18 Grazing 19 Mechanisation PART FOUR Purpose 20 The Protective Foods page 4 7 8 11 17 23 27 29 33 37 42 48 49 52 56 60 64 69 74 75 81 86 91 95 96

Introduction
THE title of this book is a clear warning to those seeking an orthodox exposition of Animal Husbandry that they will not find it here. It is in no sense of the term a text-book of science. Rather is it the personal views of one man who, over a period of forty years, has attempted to reconcile orthodox agricultural science with his own observations on the farm, and in several respects has failed in that attempt. Science and practice are still far apart and I am not convinced that it is always practice that is at fault. Certainly the practice of animal husbandry, criticise it though we may, deserves and commands considerable respect. It has, in the past, without any direction by organised science, achieved so very much. Even although in the pages of this book I have ventured to question the accuracy of livestock pedigrees, ridiculed the fads of some breeders and cast doubt on the value of livestock shows, I cannot escape the conclusion that the practice of animal husbandry, admittedly in an empirical way, has over a period of centuries secured remarkable results. The breeds at our service; the basic feeding stuffs at our command; the husbandry systems in which these are profitably joined, were all established and confirmed before the first agricultural scientist had been appointed to advise. The achievements in many cases seem to have been founded upon stockmans instinct and experience rather than upon conscious reasoning. That, perhaps, is why the practical stockmans results are so often more impressive than are his verbal or written explanation of how these results were achieved. I am convinced, for example, that the stockman who, in his practice, seldom comes to a clear mental differentiation between breeding, feeding and husbandry systems is, when pressed to make such a differentiation, inclined to exaggerate the influence of breeding. He does so, despite the fact that throughout the world, the level of feeding and husbandry of the stud flock or herd is always at a higher level than in the flocks or herds to which stud animals are sold. Do these, the effects of the higher levels of feeding and husbandry, persist unto the third and fourth generation? I very much doubt whether the practical stockman has ever given the subject a great deal of thought. If the answer be no, it is certainly difficult to make sense of his practice. Whether or not the so-called acquired characters are inherited, the practical stockman has in any case succeeded in building up a historic, valuable, stable and productive industry by the traditional practices at his command. It is impossible to believe that, having done so successfully, his practice has been contrary to the true laws of biological science, were these but established and proved. In consequence of that statement if it be a true one, as I believe, the scientist might be well advised to go occasionally to the farmyard to learn rather than to teach or, what is far less excusable, to preach. The worlds livestock industry, spread like a gigantic panorama over the surface of the world is surely a wonderful field of study for the biologist were he sufficiently inquiring and humble of mind. Modern science, however, with its concepts derived from that particular system of philosophy called vulgar materialism and founded historically on the industrial revolution, has a different approach. The philosophy of science is that all natural phenomena
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were they fully understood, are reducible to the terms of chemistry and physics; that the only difference between a crystal and a man is one of complexity not of kind; that there is no fundamental distinction between things living and things dead, between body and mind or mind and soul. With the philosophical implications of that approach I am incompetent to deal, not being by training a philosopher. Nevertheless, it must be accepted that unless that materialistic outlook be a true one, then science in its present form must eventually prove an untrustworthy guide to the study of any living thing, be it animal or plant. It would be an untrustworthy guide to agriculture in general and to animal husbandry in particular. Professor Toynbee dealing with a similar situation in regard to human history has written: No practical man, however, would think of conducting a nursery garden on the principles of a factory or a factory on the principles of a nursery garden; and, in the world of ideas, the corresponding misapplication of method ought to be avoided by scholars. We are sufficiently on our guard against the so-called Pathetic Fallacy of imaginatively endowing inanimate objects with life. We now fall victims to the inverse Apathetic Fallacy of treating living creatures as though they were inanimate.1 Yet, while no practical man might subscribe to such a fallacy, the accepted philosophy of scientists implies that they do. Vitalism as propounded by Driesch and Bergson is discredited by the modern biologist. As a result of this mechanistic concept the modern theory of heredity called genetics assumes that the phenomena of heredity are governed entirely by minute fragments of particulate matter called genes, which perform complicated evolutions in the germ cells with an ultimate rearrangement based entirely on the laws of chance. It is rather curious, incidentally, that one of the Russian criticisms of genetics has been that of its excessive materialism! In feeding, commonly regarded perhaps as being altogether too distinct from breeding, mechanistic science tends to regard an animal as a passive machine into which fuel is poured in the form of food, with conversion of energy and matter of the food into animal products by variable efficiency according to product, species and breed. The conception of any animal at any one time as being merely one stage of an historical process tends to be ignored, just as the proven reaction of the animal to its dietary tends to be ignored. It is simpler and easier to regard the animal as an inanimate machine and our feeding stuff tables and rationing systems are based on that conception. In addition to its excessively mechanistic approach to living things, modern science, at least as applied to agriculture, threatens to become dogma. That seems to me to be particularly true of the science called genetics. The geneticist appears to be perfectly prepared, even eager, to impose his theories which he would appear to believe infallible, upon the livestock industry of consenting countries by continuous exhortation, if necessary reinforced by legislative action. His theory, so closely in danger of becoming a creed, which denies the inheritance of acquired characters and all direct influence of environment upon hereditary qualities, is the accepted science of heredity in Western countries. It has never, to my knowledge. been so accepted in Soviet Russia. Without a doubt that non-acceptance is associated with the system
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of philosophy termed dialectical materialism dominant in Communist countries. What Western geneticists are unwilling to accede to is that it is equally true to say that the ready acceptance of genetic theories in Western countries is also conditioned by the system of philosophy fashionable there. Questions of philosophy being generally considered as being somewhat irrelevant to a discussion of animal husbandry, it is perhaps more fitting to point out here that even within the content of their own concepts, the theories of Western geneticists have been subjected to close, analytical and penetrating criticism by Russian biologists. This criticism has been very generally ignored in other countries and the concepts of Russian biologists themselves relegated to the lumberroom of irrational superstition. To my mind, such action amounts to unjustifiable complacency. The advanced state of Russian physical science and the capacity of Russian physical scientists is now freely admitted by all. It would be a very strange thing indeed were a Russian scientist, by directing his attention to matters biological rather than physical, to become a vapouring idiot merely by that one deflection. If, however, certain of my conclusions, particularly as regards the greater importance of environment compared with heredity, appear to be in sympathy with Russian views, that is purely accidental. My views on animal husbandry are derived from my own appreciation of the subject, both in the study and in the field and I do not hesitate to admit that I think I have learnt rather more in the field. I feel, therefore, that the traditional knowledge based on practical experience which forms the solid basis of our animal husbandry, through the criticism of certain scientists a trifle too wise in their own conceit, is being ignored or even somewhat unfairly derided, and that the newer knowledge based on science is being applied too uncritically and with too great a haste. I have tried to show that while many of our traditional practices require revision. the teaching of agricultural science also deserves a critical and timely review. In discussing husbandry systems, I have paid my deepest regard to the older methods practised by our forefathers who, lacking any of the modern aids and with the simplest equipment of housing and of tools, sometimes produced results which we might envy to this day. It is one of my several links with Voisin that I share wholeheartedly his respect and admiration for the wisdom inherent in the simplicity of much peasant farming. Nevertheless, I am equally certain that the future of animal husbandry lies neither in simplicity nor in peasant farming. Mechanisation is advancing rapidly in soil cultivation and crop husbandry. Animal husbandry must follow the same way, thereby raising many new problems of nutrition and veterinary control. Whether or not desirable, such development is clearly inevitable. Mechanised mass production of food is a necessary accompaniment to the mass production of mechanised mankind. Finally, I have suggested in my last chapter that the primary purpose of animal husbandry is the provision of protective foods to balance human diets. Eventually the healthful nutrition of humanity at large must come to take precedence over all other matters, economic or otherwise, concerning food. It may be questioned whether food, any more than water, is, morally
6

speaking, a legitimate commodity for barter and profit. Certainly it is quite wrong that the health value of any food should ever be sacrified merely to suit a commercial convenience.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. TOYNBEE, A. J. A Study of History, 1, 8, Oxford (1948).

PART ONE Inheritance

ONE BreedingBefore Bakewell

ROBERT Bakewell of Dishley Grange, Leicestershire, lived between 1726 and 1795. Most of the breeding work for which he is justly and universally famous was done after he succeeded his father in the management of the farm, by which time he had turned forty. It can be said, therefore, that what might be termed the pre-Bakewell period of livestock breeding extended from the beginning of farm animal domestication until the near end of the eighteenth century. Since the domestication of livestock is both pre-Christian and prehistoric, that, of course, is a very long time. It would be absurd to imagine that everything concerning matters of breeding remained static until Bakewell, in the guise of some sort of farmyard Messiah, brought the bright light of planned breeding to illuminate ignorance, superstition and promiscuous mating. Pre-Bakewell animal breeding has been neatly but possibly quite erroneously described as: The chance mating of nobodys son with everybodys daughter. Was it ever really so? If one had the leisure and space to examine and comment on all the many references to the subject in ancient literature, Biblical or classical, it would be possible to exhibit a much more carefully designed picture. Animal husbandry, like every other human art or occupation, has had its ups and downs, its periods of progression and of retrogression, its dark ages, its renaissances, its reformations and its counterreformations. Even in the direct tradition of English animal husbandry which Bakewell inherited, the degree of chaos existing on the English village farm may well have been exaggerated. Without a doubt the degree of inefficiency of the English village open, semi-commercial champion farming was deliberately over-stressed by those seeking legislative powers for enclosure, just as the improvers as deliberately built up a picture of wasted land and opportunity against the Highland crofting communities whom they wished to evict in the interests of sheep. It is, indeed, a remarkable phenomenon that the British people who in all administrative matters reproduce committees and sub-committees as swiftly and regularly as successive generations of Drosophila, should continue to lay such apparent stress on the necessity in the interests of
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efficiency of one man having the undivided control of a given acreage of British soil. If a committee called a Cabinet can control a country why, in all reason, should a similar if humbler organisation be presumed to be so pitiably incapable of managing a farm? It flattered the capitalistic philosophy of the later, Hanoverian, eighteenth century Englishman to imagine that it was so; the Scot, Adam Smith, provided the essential academic ammunition for the political ordnance; and practically every agricultural economist since his period has signified a pious approval. Yet if we lay the conventional teaching of political economy aside for the moment, there is really ample evidence that in several countries and at various times, animal breeding reached a high degree of technical efficiency before ever Bakewell flouted scriptural injunction by giving free play to incest in the safe privacy of his farm. The researches of scholars for example, have shown very clearly the relatively high level of farming in general and sheep husbandry in particular attained on the monastic farmlands of medieval Britain. Concerning England, the evidence is too plain for contradiction in the recent book by Trow-Smith1. An equally scholarly publication points the same moral for Scotland.2 That animal husbandry, like many other activities, suffered from the suppression of religious orders at the Reformation is indubitable and that the rack-renting practices of individual lay proprietors brought regression rather than reform is very possible. The point I wish to make here, however, and to make it forcibly, is that in historical Britain, neither in Roman times before the Saxon conquest nor in medieval Britain previous to the Reformation do I think it at all probable that the practice of animal breeding, or the lack of it, could be in any way fairly summed up in the over-simplification of the adage: The chance mating of nobodys son with everybodys daughter. Frankly, I doubt very much whether in its essentials the breeding of farm animals has changed so materially since long before Bakewells time. I imagine that the tools in the hands of the breeder to-day which according to Lush3 are SELECTION (based both on the individual animal and on its get), INBREEDING, and OUT-CROSSING, were those held in the hands of the breeder since breeding began. It is difficult to believe that people who made such a fuss about the importance of their own ancestry were without any plan in the mating of the animals they controlled. The value in human reproduction attached to inbreeding can be deduced from the enormous prestige and privileges accorded to princes and princesses of the blood. Even when palpably degenerate they were still respected as being well-born. On the other hand, that the revitalising influence of the occasional out-cross was as clearly recognised is evident in Shakespearean drama, where the bastard is seldom lacking in looks, energy and manly resource. Concerning SELECTION in livestock there must always have been, at least in the male, a certain element of deliberate choice. The operation of castration is prehistoric in origin. Selection, in some form, must have rescued the village bull from becoming a village ox. I have speculated frequently on how the choice was made. By some form of committee, presumably, just as nowadays the selection for important administrative posts is made, because, the choosing of a village bull must have been quite as important
9

to the village. I should hazard the guess that castration was postponed to a rather late age so that the village worthies could distinguish more clearly as to what was what. The basis for selection must remain speculative and obscure but undoubtedly, nevertheless, the choice would have fallen on a bull with both testicles descended, masculine in appearance, and nowise imperfect in his private parts. A bull active, freely-moving and firmly set on straight legs, well grown for his age, eager yet controllable, out of a good cow, come of a good family would stand the best chance of avoiding castration. I doubt whether a medieval committee would have paid much attention to horn curvature or colour marking. That improvement in breeding came very much later. I dont think any bull would have failed his test simply because he had only two white socks on his feet instead of four or because the training instruments had failed to govern the growth of his horns to accepted breed standards. In other words, I dont think that selection of the individualor by phenotype as we should now call it was ever more or less sensible than it is to this day. The text By their fruits ye shall know them is both scriptural injunction and plain common sense. There is nothing really new in the idea behind progeny testing although, in recent years, with A.I., statistical and genetical refinements, the technique has been substantially improved. There is not, however, and probably never was an intelligent stockman who failed to await the appearance of the get of a new sire without interest, excitement, impatience and some measure of justifiable trepidation. If, therefore, returning to the village bull, the committee initially responsible for his exclusion from general male castration found in the following year that, despite his individual promise, his get was disappointing. he would suffer his due reward. Had he left deformed calves, dwarf calves, or no calves, he mightaccording to those superstitions fashionable in his daybe judged bewitched, bearing a spell rather than a recessive gene to explain his breeding deficiencies, and some poor old village hag might have shared in the debasement of the village bull but, whatever the theory, the practice must always have been his castration or slaughter. Whether the verdict was based on witchcraft or genetics, the sentence then and now would be precisely the same, and the result as regards livestock improvement or its reverse would be also then and now precisely the same. INBREEDING is a risky game at which to play. Undoubtedly, the scriptural injunctions against incest and close matings were based on the observed results of the increased percentage of imperfect progeny so apt to follow in their wake. The medieval village farmers perhaps no more likely then than to-day to follow each religious precept into everyday practicemost certainly observed the same thing for themselves. The practical breeder of livestock is, and always has been. dead scared of close inbreeding not because of the strength of scriptural injunction but because of the frequent weakness of the resulting stock. How Bakewell got away with close inbreeding is discussed in the next chapter, although even there it will be necessary to examine the evidence as to just how far he did get away with it. It follows surely that the prejudice against close inbreeding previous to Bakewells time was not necessarily an expression of religious superstition but might quite as readily, indeed more so, have followed repeated trial resulting in too
10

frequent error. That the OUT-CROSS is no novelty is more easily proved. The documentary evidence collected by Trow-Smith proves conclusively that the importation of the improving sire to mate with local breeds is at least as old as the monastic foundations. Let it be assumed, then, that the essential tools of animal breeding were in all probability and in their main essentials much the same in the remote past as they are to-day but that the skill and energy with which these tools were employed varied considerably from one era to another. It is certainly an error to suppose that everything that is old is necessarily foolish or that modern practice in animal husbandry is in all respects superior to the practice of each and every historical or pre-historical period that went before it. It is indeed rather curious how in matters agricultural the idea of historical progression towards a material millennium is inclined to persist when the idea has been practically abandoned in the study of human history. I dont know of any modern student of human history prepared to argue that mankind, under the social and political conditions of the twentieth century, is in all respects superior to that of the twelfth, or the sixteenth or even the nineteenth centuries. Yet, it would be as rare to find an agriculturalist who, as regards agriculture, was not as firmly tied to the conception of historical improvement as though progress were an axiom and retrogression unknown.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. TROW-SMITH, R. A History of British Livestock Husbandry to 1700, Routledge (1957). 2. BEDFORD-FRANKLIN, T. A History of Scottish Farming. Nelson Series (1952). 3. LUSH, J. Animal Breeding Plans (3rd Ed.), 115, Iowa State University Press (1949).

TWO Bakewell and his Time

ROBERT Bakewell is a name very famous in agricultural history and as there is seldom smoke wanting flame, a high reputation is rarely attained with out some genuine achievement. So that, therefore, even although there is proof that Bakewell once went bankrupt and that he ruined one breed of cattle, nobody can deny that in his time he was a very great farmer. For those who wish to know all that is known about this man and his breeding methods (and there is curiously little known about the man and he left no personal record of his methods)it is only necessary to refer to the valuable work of scholarship by Pawson. Here, I shall offer only a brief summary of my own personal assessment. I have already referred to Bakewell as having been a great farmer and despite his early bankruptcy Im sure that is true. His crop husbandry was no less vigorous and adventurous than his animal husbandry and in his own time his water-meadows, clovers and root-crops were as namely as his stock. To my mind that is a very important fact to bear in mind. To-day, with the modern emphasis on specialisation, we may attempt to separate the two branches of husbandry but in actual fact they must go together. Bakewell could not have bred his Dishley Leicester sheep to earlier maturity and readier aptitude to fatten unless the fertility and crop
11

productivity of Dishley Grange had been raised to a level to support such a livestock policy. It is, however, my present object (accepting but not ignoring the logical fallacy of such specialisation)to devote attention to Bakewells methods of livestock breeding; to their failure as well as to their success, and finally to offer some suggestions to explain the high position his reputation has attained among the more modern authorities on animal breeding. He appears to have adopted much the same breeding policy with all classes of livestock, Shire horses, Longhorn cattle, Leicester sheep and Berkshire pigs. The essential point, in which he seems to have differed genuinely from his predecessors and contemporaries was in the degree to which he carried the closeness of in-breeding. The frequency of references and criticisms of what were termed the incestuous practices employed at Dishley Grange prove this to be true. In adopting this close in-breeding policy he must have had supreme confidence in his own judgement and there can be little doubt that so far as it concerned livestock, it was a particularly acute, well-balanced and methodical judgement. His inbreeding could have done nothing more than fix firmly in the breeding of his stock what was already judged to be best in his stock. His policy so far as we can safely assess it at this date without his own written testimony must have been to select from its fellows what he considered to be the best breeding stallion, bull, ram or boar and having found it or thought that he had found it to perpetuate its superior characteristics by the closest possible system of inbreeding, sire to daughter, son to dam, full brother to full sister. His long-term policy, at least so far as it concerned cattle and sheep, would seem to have been to adapt his stock to fit the most profitable outlet in the contemporary market. Because of the industrialisation of England, the expanding population and rising standard of material living which industrialisation permits, there was an unsatisfied demand for meat. By specialising his animals towards rapid and economical meat production, Bakewell presumably aimed to take advantage of that unsatisfied demand. Specialisation is probably the best word to use. It is generally called improvement, but that seems to me to be a far less appropriate term. Even although cattle produced more and better beef without notable increase in food consumption and were fit for slaughter at an earlier age it could only be termed improvement provided either the original milking capacity of the cattle were maintained or if beef were the sole product that cattle produced. There can be no doubt, however, that Bakewell in his own work with Longhorn cattle, and his disciples working with other breeds of cattle, did sacrifice milking ability. It cannot be denied that Bakewell himself and with much more lasting effect his disciples as wellsucceeded in specialising certain cattle breeds as beef producers but that is something rather different from improving the same breeds because, without any argument, what was gained on the beef roundabouts was lost on the dairy swings. The beef-bred cow may and probably does yield sufficient milk to rear a wellsuckled beef calf(bull calves excepted, certainly in practice, and possibly also in theory)but she is, on the average, useless in the dairy because she responds to a high level of nutrition by growing fully fat on a half-filled pail. It is of course possible, and I deem it probable, that Bakewell and his disciples in the breeding of their
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cattle did aim actually at improvement rather than at specialisation. I dont suppose for a moment that when they bred for beef they either wished for or expected a sacrifice of milk. Breeders of beef cattle at a much later dateBates for example, and Amos Cruickshank deliberately attempted to maintain useful milking qualities in the beef Shorthorn cattle that they bred. Nevertheless, the assumption proved unjustified, the deliberate effort failed. In the modern breeding of cattle only the dual-purpose breeds attempt to make the best of two worldsthat of meat and that of milkand only those who breed such cattle presume both worlds conquered. Critics of dual-purpose cattle breeds would substitute stools for worlds, maintaining that such breeds, insecurely balanced on each are doomed inevitably to fall between both. The critics may very well be right. In no class of livestock does it seem a practical procedure to combine the highest fleshing and milking qualities within the same breed. Aiming towards earlier maturity and greater readiness to fatten, Bakewell used two main tools of the animal breeder, namely SELECTION and IN-BREEDING with judgement, energy and courage. His selection of a sire was based both on the individuals appearance and performance(what we should now call its phenotype)and, also, upon the appearance and performance of its get(what we should now call its genotype). His assessment of the utilitarian value of the different external points of the animals he bred was carried to the carcase stage. He was interested, as was only right and proper, in the actual meat of the meat-producing livestock he was attempting to specialise or improve. His assessment of the value of any particular sires get (what we should now call a progeny test) was assisted and extended by his practice of letting out sires for a seasons service rather than selling them outright. If a sire so let left progeny of superior value, Bakewell could recall him for service on his own farm in the following year. It is a method widely used by many successful breeders, and it is unlikely that Bakewell was its originator. Nevertheless, he did undoubtedly, press the method to obtain the highest possible value from its results. Once Bakewell had selected a sire to head his herd or flock as stock bull or ram, he used him as widely as was then possible. Since A.I. was unavailable in his time he attempted by simpler methods to make the fullest use of an outstanding sire. He employed, and some say invented, the use of teasers to detect ewes in heat so that they could be brought in to the stock ram ready for service, rather than allowing a valuable ram to waste his physical energy by seeking out the ewes in heat for himself. A teaser is simply a ram or ram lamb of small value that is denied effective coitus by some form of mechanical obstruction such as a piece of sacking tied under his belly. He will mark or raddle the ewes that are in heat but cannot put them in lamb. The vasectomised ram infertile but fully potentis the modern and far more efficient successor to the teaser. Nevertheless, by his use of teasers, Bakewell was able to double the number of ewes an outstanding ram could effectively serve. Having selected what he considered to be an outstanding sire both on phenotype and genotype. Bakewell then preserved his value by close in-breeding. Without inbreeding the contribution of a sire to the breeding of a herd or flock is halved in each succeeding
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generation. By in-breeding, and by in-breeding only could his influence be preserved, until the outstanding technical achievement of deep-freeze semen preservation permitted the continued utilisation of an outstanding sire for further breeding long after his bodily decease. In Bakewells day, however, in-breeding was essential. There was no other method. As already emphasised, inbreeding may prove a double-edged tool in animal breeding. Modern genetics provides a superficially plausible interpretation of its potential dangers. To state the principle briefly at this stage, one notable effect of in-breeding is to render patent, weaknesses hidden and covered up in the genotype of the breed. If there be too many weaknesses, inbreeding will fail because there will not be a sufficient number of perfect individuals born wherewith to perpetuate the breed. It will depend, therefore, upon the number of weaknesses present in the genotype as to whether or not close and continued in-breeding is a practicable procedure. If the weaknesses are legion it must fail. If, on the other hand, the weaknesses are few or unimportant, it may succeed. Since the number and importance of such weaknesses cannot be assessed until inbreeding has begun it must, obviously, be largely a matter of chance or luck as to whether an in-breeding programme succeeds or fails. Bakewell was definitely unlucky with his Longhorn cattle, since his in-breeding there failed and the Improved Longhorn he produced, far from being improved, is generally considered to have hastened the extinction of the breed selected for improvement. Of his success or failure with pigs, less is certainly known. Since, of all farm animals, pigs are the least resistant to in-breeding, failure seems much more probable than success. According to Pawson,2 some of Bakewells contemporary critics, who were numerous, stated that his inbred pigs were all rickety or all fools which is very much what modern knowledge of the subject would lead us to expect. Third time lucky, however, and Bakewell assuredly achieved resounding success with his sheep. It was, in fact, his success in sheep breeding that brought Robert Bakewell his contemporary fame and conveyed to his breeding methods the cachet of at least one indubitable success. Working with the old rangy, slow-maturing, heavy-fleeced longwool sheep of his native county, Bakewell, using his methods of refined selection and intensive inbreeding producedand that within a relatively short perioda more compact, more quickly maturing, but lighter-fleeced sheep, that was used not only as a pure breed in its own mutton-producing right, but even more widely as up-grading, mutton improving rams on most of the English breeds of long-wool sheep and also on many breeds of Continental sheep, especially those of France. He began his work with sheep about the year 1760. By 1789 less than thirty years laterhis sheep were world famous. There is no argument but that in the switch from wool towards mutton which occurred in his time, Bakewells Improved Leicester breed was of immense importance. There were, of course, some rather obvious faults in Bakewells Improved Leicester sheep. They lost fleece weight. The fact is admitted. They may also have suffered both in milk yield and in prolificacy, although that is less certain. Even the undoubted propensity of the breed to fatten early and fatten easily was quite
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freely criticised in Bakewells own time. One contemporary critic, a Dr. Parry of Bath,3 wrote somewhat scathingly: For what then is a perfect Leicester sheep fit? On rich land, he is calculated, at an early age, to produce, for eating, that which cannot be eaten, but which is good for the manufacture of soaps and candles. There is considerable evidence that like most pioneers, especially perhaps pioneers in affairs agricultural, Bake-well encountered a good deal of opposition rather prejudiced and somewhat unfair. Some opposition to Bakewells methods in the time in which he lived is what might be expected. His canonisation by our geneticists of to-day is less easily explained. Cooper describes him as: This remarkable man who established a procedure of breeding which the modern science of genetics can explain but not improve upon to any substantial degree. Actually, without wishing to decry the reputation of such an outstanding figure in agricultural history, especially in the history of sheep-breeding, it is difficult to attribute any particular novelty in Bakewells breeding methods except the probable innovation of intense inbreeding. That he was the first breeder of livestock to pay due attention to a sires getor to progeny test in an unquantitative but possibly sufficiently adequate wayI simply do not believe, having never met a breeder so supremely foolish as not to do so. Nor was he the only sheep-breeder to follow his animals to the butchers shop. John Ellman, if tradition be accepted, did the same and, incidentally, with better results, since the Southdown he evolved is much superior as a mutton sheep to the Improved Leicester that Bakewell bred. We return then, once more, to what appears on analysis to be Bakewells main, if not his only, original contribution to animal breedingnamely, in-breeding. That in-breeding is an effective tool sharp-edged and to be used with discretionis demonstrably true and it has been, and is now, being used to good purpose in many branches of animal husbandry. Thus, as discussed in the next chapter, the differentiation of the various species of farm livestock into distinct breeds and the further subdivision of such breeds into easily recognisable families, so typical of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, could not have occurred without the application of the methods of close in-breeding which Bakewell taught. In-breeding is being used also and to an increasing extent as a preliminary to out-breeding. The outstanding success of this technique in maize breeding has suggested similar techniques in animal husbandry. Developments in poultry breedingfor example, the various varieties of hybrid chickhave followed the maize example with apparent success. In other branches of animal husbandry the principle is implicit although followed in a less deliberate way and to a less radical extent. Since it is impossible to maintain any degree of uniformity within a breed except by inbreeding, many but by no means all crosses between two breeds of the same species of livestock may give something of the same hybrid vigour effect. The planned crossing of sheep, termed stratification, may well owe something of its proved utility to such a
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hybrid vigour or heterosis effect. In-breeding, as a method of livestock improvement, per Se, is rather a different proposition altogether. Not so long ago, many geneticists were rather attracted by the notion of continued and close-in-breeding leading to complete homozygosity. Hagedoorn5 was one such geneticist and there were others. Complete homozygosity implies absolute uniformity and apart from the dubiety of its actual achievement, its practical utility might be open to question. Suppose we had a breed of dairy cattle, precisely similar in every respect. It might fit one system of husbandry, the production of one dairy product, and one uniform market, to perfection. Power of adaptation by further selective breeding to system, product or market would, however, be entirely sacrificed and lost. Less speculatively, it must be admitted that, leaving Bakewell aside, more modern experiments designed to assess the actual results of continued close in-breeding have shown progressive deterioration in the size, vitality and productivity of livestock. This is particularly true of cattle where large-scale experiments to test this very point were conducted in the animal breeding research stations of America. According to genetic theory, in-breeding, following apparent degeneration during the period of exposure and weeding-out of undesirable recessive genes should lead eventually to stock possessing a much sounder genotype. In practice, however, it would seem that in farm livestock either there are too many undesirable recessive genes existing in the genotype to permit of effective elimination or that there are other less clearly understood phenomena concerned in the matter which make continuous close in-breeding an undesirable general breeding policy. It may lead to deterioration of livestock rather than to its improvement. To summarise this short analysis of Bakewells contribution to livestock breeding: It can be safely assumed that he himself practised certain methods which he passed on to his pupils. These methods were based on skilful selection both on phenotype and genotype towards a desired objective and selection was followed by unusually close in-breeding to perpetuate the results. The principal and possibly the sole original contribution lay in the closeness of in-breeding. In Bakewells own hands these methods certainly failed with cattle and presumably failed also with pigs. They succeeded with sheep. In Bakewells pupils hands, especially with the Collings brothers, they succeeded with another breed of cattle-the Beef Shorthorn. His methods were adopted or copied by those several breeders who, at the close of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, established the numerous breeds of livestock with which we are familiar to-day. The selection of an outstanding sire because of his own apparent superiority combined with the proved superior quality of his progeny; the most extensive possible use of that sire and close in-breeding with his nearest female relatives whilst he lived; the further and continued use of his nearly-related male descendants after his demise; the recipe has been much the same since the days of Amos Cruickshank and his Champion of England of the Beef Shorthorn cattle breed down to the Kleberg family with their Monkey of the Santa Gertrudis cattle breed in these more
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recent days. We have now arrived at a period when the things that Bakewell did or tried to do can be done much more swiftly and with far greater power. Methods of sire selection may be widened and refined, if not safely superseded, by the sire performance test and progeny test, statistically controlled and aimed deliberately at enhanced efficiency and economy of production. The influence of such an outstanding sire can be spread with startling rapidity and enormous extent by the method of A.I. The teaser of Bakewells day is, in this respect, a mere archer compared to the hydrogen bomb of artificial insemination. Finally, the semen may outlast the sire and by the deep freeze technique, a sires conceptions may continue long after his body has reached the abattoir or grave. The age of the nominated sire is upon us and if, by performance and progeny testing one sire were provedon the basis of data quantitatively assessedto be superior to all others of his breed who would prefer an alternative nomination? The ideal of complete homozygosity is within the breeders grasp should the breeder still wish it. The work that Bakewell began could now be completed should it be advisable so to do. But is it? That is the question. Every practical breeder of my acquaintance while either admittedly or in secrecy he will at times use incestuous or close in-breeding for some special purpose. seems more than a little afraid of what he does. Both breeders fears and experimental results suggest that for some reason or reasons, known, partially known, or perhaps unknown, close in-breeding too long continued leads to failure of vitality in the stock concerned. Why then the modern canonisation of the man whose most notable contribution to livestock breeding was the degree of closeness with which he inbred? I believe the answer is more likely to be found in human psychology than in animal genetics. Cooper wrote that Bakewells procedure of breeding was one which the modern science of genetics can explain but not improve upon to any substantial degree. From a modern geneticist there can be no higher praise! In this sentence one detects the trace of assumed superiority, at times degenerating into plain intellectual snobbery in the attitude of the geneticist towards the practical breeder of livestock. Cooper being both a practical farmer in his own right and a New Zealander to boot is less guilty than many others because intellectual snobbery is a character completely alien to both. Nevertheless, Cooper rates the value of genetical science very highly. May not this Bakewell canonisation be due then to the presumed fact, that while some other breeders both before and since his time baked every bit as good a tart, his recipe corresponded with official prescription?
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Pawson, H. C. Robert Bakewell, Pioneer Livestock Breeder, Crosby Lockwood (1957). 2. Pawson, Ibid., 65. 3. PARRY (DR.). Communications to the Board of Agriculture, 4 (1806). 4. COOPER, M. McG. Beef Production, 11, Nelson Series (1953). 5. HACEDOORN, A. L. Animal Breeding, Crosby Lockwood (1954). 6. COOPER, M. McG. Ibid.

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THREE Breed Formation and Breed Societies

THE practical success of Bakewells methods of breeding as applied to Leicester sheep and of his pupils the Collings when applied to Shorthorn cattle, led to their adoption and imitation by many other livestock breeders. In-breeding made breed formation possible and the adoption of in-breeding as a recognised breeders tool led very quickly to a rapid multiplication of distinctly separate breeds. The period of deliberate breed formation began in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, continued all through the nineteenth century, reaching its peak between 1840-1880 and is still in progress to this day. The formation of recognisable breeds as distinct from the local types and kinds which seem to have preceded them has followed a rather uniform pattern. Initial crossbreeding as the rule rather than the exception(there is evidence that Bakewell himself began proceedings in that way)was followed by selection on both phenotype and genotype, with a tendency in later years to too great emphasis on the first and under-estimation of the crucial importance of the second; finally, in-breeding (usually confined to the less intense type called line-breeding, which aims to avoid frankly incestuous matings)in order to fix and perpetuate the outcome of selection. In some cases, there may have been little or no initial outbreeding. The origin of the Southdown sheep breed is a case in point. John Ellman, in starting the development of the modern Southdown from the slender, speckle-faced Heath sheep native to the Sussex Downs, is reputed to have made his selection entirely from within that breed. In other cases, the initial out-cross is admitted and confirmed. Many of the best-known sheep breeds arose by the selection and in-breeding from the first-cross between two others. Thus, the Suffolk Down is an in-bred cross between the Southdown and the Norfolk Horn; the Oxford Down between the Cotswold and the Hampshire Down; the Corriedale between Lincoln and Merino. There are very many such others. The value of any new breed must depend upon the aims adopted during its selection. If, as was the case with Bakewell and his Leicesters or Ellman and his South-downs, the declared intention of selection was to improve the quality and economy of mutton production, with the butchers assessment of the mutton carcase the final arbitrament of breeding failure or success, the probability of the new breed making a useful contribution to animal production was greatly favoured and increased. If, on the other hand, the main objective in breed formation was rather in the nature of local patriotism to shield the native livestock from presumed defilement; to
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establish something rather different from what ones neighbours bred; or simply without further attempted analysis of motive, to establish a new breed, the probabilities of utilitarian improvements were obviously less. The establishment of breeds preceded that of breed societies. People did not say to each otherLets establish a breed. Rather they said Here we already have a useful and profitable breed. We should protect its purity and our own interests as possessors of this valuable breeding stock and the interests of the purchasers who want genuine animals of this breed. The demands of purchasers seeking protection of their own interests was in fact an important incentive to the foundation of breed societies. That an animal is in fact pure-bred, registered and vouched for by a recognised society sponsoring its breed is frequently a necessary condition of its export to stock-importing countries. One of the most recently constituted sheep breed societies established its flock book in 1946 as an inescapable prelude to the export of its stock. The breeders wished to send a consignment of their sheep to Canada and the Canadian livestock import regulations prohibited the entry of unregistered livestock. Hence the establishment of the North Country Cheviot Sheep Society! One of the very earliest sheep breeders societies was organised and established by Bakewell to protect the purity, reputation and incidentally the profitability of the Improved Leicester breed he had built up himself. Although the society published no flock book its rules were sufficiently stringent and its membership small. Bakewell also formed the first Association connected with the breed in 1790 known as the Dishley Societya monopoly enterprise formed for the benefit of Bakewell and his friends. There were only twelve members of this Dishley Society. With only twelve breeders interested in the one sheep breed, it was probably unnecessary to have any written record of the sheeps breeding. The breed was recent, the numbers both of the sheep and of their breeders limited and the descent of rams, at least, probably common knowledge among the twelve Improved Leicester apostles. When a breed became larger in numbers, older in time, and in the hands of more breeders, some written record of descent became necessary unless pedigree was to become, confessedly and unashamedly, pure legend. A breeder of Shorthorn cattleGeorge Coateswas one of the first to recognise this necessity. After spending ten years collecting the required information(some of it, incidentally, of questionable accuracy)he, in the year 1822, published the first Shorthorn herd book, which recorded the pedigrees of the Shorthorn cattle of his day. Although the publication of subsequent volumes of the herd book was taken over by the Shorthorn Society of Great Britain in 1872, it is still known as Coates Herd Book. Breeders of other breeds of livestock followed suit so that, today, the keeping of records of ancestry in the appropriate herd or flock book has become one of the most arduous and important functions of a breed society or association. Written record of ancestry constitutes pedigree so that each and every member of a duly constituted breed society publishing its appropriate, herd or flock book was able to claim that his stock was pedigreed. The actual value of pedigree is discussed in some detail in the following
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chapter. While it may be argued that the importance of pedigree has been exaggerated there can be no doubt that, in addition to its importance to the export trade, it undoubtedly raised the value of the breeders stock in public estimation. The term pedigreed is a justifiable label to tag on to stock owned by a member of a breed society publishing a herd or flock book. The justification for using the term pure-bred in relation to pedigreed stock is more debatable. It suggests a degree of genetic uniformity or homozygosity which does not, in fact, exist in any breed. Indeed, apart altogether from genetic considerations, the actual and obvious variation within any one breed is far greater than is generally admitted, particularly by the breeders concerned. The impression of uniformity conveyed by parades at livestock shows is largely fictitious, since the animals exhibited are a selection from, not a sample of the breed concerned. The exhibits are uniform simply because they all display the accepted conformation and markings of the breed. If they lack any of these they are left at home and those that are left at home vastly outnumber those that are shown. Hagedoorn3 gave a very neat illustration to prove this point. He wrote: When the double-laced Barnevelder was at the height of its glory as a show bird in Holland I once asked our most successful fancier how he succeeded in getting so many perfect hens together, all of one type and true to the desired feather-markings. His answer was very simple. He told me that the most economic way of getting together a good collection of show birds was to visit a great number of farms around Barneveld with a basket on a bicycle, with an eye to buying perfectly marked birds I Not only could we see an enormous contrast between the striking uniformity of the group of Barnevelders at a poultry show, and the great variability in the birds of that breed at the farms, but such an inspection makes it evident that should the fashion change it would be as easy to bring a uniform collection of hens of quite a different type to the poultry shows. The point is that the uniformity we admire at the show does not prove anything about the uniformity or variability of the breed, but it is produced by choosing a few similar birds from a multitude. There are over thirty recognised breeds of British sheep. When I visit the Royal Show in England I might well be impressed with the uniformity within each breed and the clearness of separation between one breed and another. But it so happens that I have seen most of these breeds in their native homes, in field or on hill. The wider picture conveys an altogether different impression. If we could so arrange that we had paraded before us all the sheep alive in Britain to-day, I feel that we should become aware of an almost continuous gradation so that, in many cases, we might find it extremely difficult to decide where one breed ended and another began. That, presumably, would have been the impression conveyed by a similar parade before the adoption of Bakewells system of close in-breeding led to the establishment of so many different breeds. While the line of gradation then might well have been more even, without the peaks of greater uniformity where inbreeding has been practised in the consolidation of new breeds, the line, distorted but unbroken, remains to this clay. Let me illustrate my meaning by a simple diagram of the probable pre-Bakewell distribution of variability among sheep compared with that of to20

day. Pre-Bakewell

To-day The result is that while nothing is easier than, say, to distinguish a typical specimen of a Hampshire Down from a Dorset Down or an Oxford Down from a Shropshire Down we could nevertheless find off-types even in the most closely-bred flocks which, at times, might make certain identification a shade less simple. I think that variability within breeds and the tendency to gradation between breeds explains to a large extent the very common insistence by breed societies on what seem to be quite trifling and unimportant external points in conformation or more commonly in coloration. Although usually claimed to have a somewhat mystical and obscure economic significance, they are in fact trade marks. Unfortunately for the breeders themselves it is possible to select marks that give rise to quite unnecessary complications in trade! Some choices have been more fortunate than others. The black coat and polled head of the Aberdeen-Angus cattle breed are excellent trade marks since both are strongly dominant characters. The odd red-coloured calf need not be believed if never seen! The white markings of Hereford cattle is another example of a trade mark very well chosen. In other instances the breeders have blundered. The blue-grey coat of Blue Albion cattle or the dark blue face of the Wensleydale sheep were unfortunate choices. Blue never breeds true so that the breeders in both cases were left in the rather absurd position of a manufacturer having selected a trade-mark which was totally illegible on a substantial proportion of his products. There is, again, the somewhat ludicrous situation of the colourmarkings of saddle-backed pigs. The answer to the riddle When is a saddle-backed pig not a Wessex? might be flippantly answered When it is an Essex! I once met a pig-breeder who told me he had built up an excellent herd of commercial pigs with very little capital by buying at bargain prices gilts with Wessex markings out of pedigreed Essex pig herds and those with ,Essex markings out of pedigreed Wessex herds! Even when trade marks are well chosen so that the majority of the individuals of a breed are superficially similar, it does not mean, at all, that the similarity is anything more than superficial. Lysenko once described such superficial markings as shirts and the description is extraordinarily right and apt. The bodies under shirts of any particular colour may be extremely variable, and, what is more important from the animal production point of view, the bodies covered by one colour of shirt may be very much the same as those covered by another. In other words the real, productive differences between breeds is probably far less than is commonly supposed as the uniformity within a breed is also probably very much less than is generally imagined. These facts should make us extremely cautious in attempting to compare one breed with another for any utilitarian or productive purpose. I recall an expedition of the British Society of Animal Production where we were invited to compare the cross lambs sired by a Dorset Down ram with those sired by a Suffolk ram.
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There was said to be a difference in favour of one group of cross lambs and live-weight gain tables were distributed to the audience to prove the point. It was left to a farmer member of the society to suggest that using other rams of the same breed, the resultif it were a true resultmight well have been reversed. The point is important and too often ignored. At the moment our geneticist hounds are in hot pursuit of two separate hares. One hare is the comparison of different breeds of cattle with regard to their live-weight increase and economy of food utilisation, it may be a comparison between beef breeds such as Aberdeen-Angus, Beef Shorthorn, Hereford and Charollais; or one between dairy breeds such as Dairy Shorthorn and British Friesian. The other hare is called sire performance testing and aims to demonstrate the differences in live-weight increase and economy of food utilisation between bulls of the same breed. If there isas there appears to bea substantial difference between individuals of the same breed in these important economic characters, surely it is illogical to base any conclusions on apparent differences between breeds unless, as is seldom the case, such tests are made on very large numbers of animals. Small wonder, then, that in these breed comparison tests, any particular breed may head the poll in one test and fall right to the bottom in another. Admittedly it is a sufficiently difficult task for any breeder to secure and retain a degree of superficial uniformity within the breed he fancies. Is the struggle worth the effort? It is an axiom of selection that the more points selected for simultaneously, the slower and less certain its results must be. The distribution of the colour markings on the hides of cattle cannot make the slightest contribution to the excellence or otherwise of the underlying beef. The Aberdeen-Angus breed, for example, might lose nothing of its reputation as a producer of the best quality beef if the breed were nowas it was in fact less than a century agoquite variable in its colour markings. Without continued selection for shirt coloration, our cattle breeds might revert to the reds, duns, blacks, whites, parti-coloured natural to the species, but would they be any worse breeds on that account alone? Might they not, on the contrary, become rather better? Some breeders of more recent date consider, presumably, that they might be so. One interesting example is the Beefmaster cattle breed established by the Lasater family of cattle ranchers in Texas. Built up from crosses between the Indian Zebu or Brahman, Beef Shorthorn and Hereford, selection has been based on utilitarian characters only with special emphasis on those considered to be of greatest importance under range conditions. Superficial characters have been largely ignored. The result is that the Beefmaster wears shirts of many colours, dun, brown, red, or marked or spotted with white but is certainly none the worse a breed on that account alone. An increasing number of livestock breeders, both at home and abroad, are tending to follow the Lasater example. Breeding for production rather than for superficial markings is becoming more popular and some of the pioneers in this line are already earning their financial reward. The task, however, is infinitely more difficult for while such characters as colour markings are almost entirely genetic and not affected to any substantial degree by the environmental conditions under which the animals are kept, this is
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very far from the case with the really important economic characters such as milk yield, egg yield, fleece weight, carcase weight and conformation in which the genetic influence in any case tends to be over-estimated and that of food and husbandry too largely ignored. Nevertheless, a more utilitarian and objective approach to livestock breeding is overdue. Some patent absurdities have continued too long as I shall discuss in a later chapter of this book which deals with shows. Reform may be desirable but the reform should be permitted to develop and mature among breeders themselves. The only pardonable function of the agricultural scientist is to educate and persuade but never to dictate. Otherwise the contention of the scientist that the breeder of livestock knows very little of science may be too easily and truly countered by the breeders rejoinder that the scientist knows even less about stock. The actual direction of reform if reform be desirable should be left to the younger breeders themselves. Older breeders wellestablished in their business and with the reputation of their own herds or flocks to defend are less likely to co-operate. I once was discussing the advantage of polled cattle with a distinguished breeder of horned Herefords. His last word in the argument was that whatever the pros and cons might be, so far as he, personally, was concerned, horned Herefords would outlast his day. Rather unfortunately the inevitable defensive reaction of the individual breeder is apt to become the general policy of the corporation to which he belongs. The attitude of the older, long-established breed societies is definitely a conservative one; it could hardly be expected to be otherwise since those who have must wish to hold. It is no mere accident, therefore, that the more recently established breed societies, with less to hold and everything to gain are inclined to be more truly progressive. A notable example among sheep is the Clun Forest Sheep Breeders Society, established as lately as 1925, yet by now the most numerous sheep breed in England; among cattle, by far the most numerous, powerful and influential breed society in England is the British Friesian, established in 1909. The breed societies who have fostered and preserved our varied breeds of livestock, specialised and differentiated for one or more economic products or purposes have done great and useful work. The preservation and improvement of these breeds and their exportation to the developing pastoral continents of the Americas and Australasia gave Great Britain the well-earned title of the studfarm of the world. It would be churlish to deny honour where honour is due. If, as may well be possible, much of the merit attributed to superior methods of breeding were in fact due to superior standards of feeding and of husbandry, that fact if it were a fact, while it might modify our views as to the means by which success was achieved would in no measure detract from the solid value of the achievement. CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. LUSH, J. L. Ibid., 30, Iowa State University Press (1949). 2.ANON. Leicester Sheep Breeders AssociationHistory of the Breed. 3. HAGEDOORN. Ibid., 127.

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FOUR Pedigree
PEDIGREE is a record of ancestry. It may be verbal, and one of the functions of the Celtic clan bards was to memorise and recite the ancestry of their chiefs. It may be written; in modern times is always so, and the object of pedigree registration is the accurate recording of ancestry. Apart from any other considerations the value of a pedigree must obviously depend upon the accuracy of the record. Just how accurate is that record? Probably no pedigree has ever been of such importance as that of kings, since the possession of countries and the government of peoples depended upon its unquestionable accuracy. Yet the pedigree even of kings has been called in question. Thus, the Whigs asserted and indeed believed that the Old Pretender was no de jure sovereign of his country but a mere unpedigreed foundling smuggled into the royal bed disguised as a warming pan! Concerning the nobility, similar questions must often have arisen. A titled character in one of Oscar Wildes plays puts the matter neatly: You should study the peerage, Geraldit is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
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So much for human pedigree. How fares its accuracy where livestock are concerned? Possibly not nearly so well as is commonly supposed and much too readily assumed. Mr. J. Kilpatrick, one of the leading breeders of Clydesdale horses, has revealed that the pedigree of the greatest stallion in that breed was faked.2 The true dam of this stallionDunure Footprintwas his own half-sister, both dam and foal being after the stallion Baron of Buchlyvie. To avoid accusations of excessive in-breeding, Dunure Footprint was registered as being the foal of another and unrelated mare. Sir Alick Buchanan Smith, in a review of Kilpatricks book concerning these revelations, wrote: The interest for students of breed construction is that it is now impossible to assess the true coefficient of inbreeding for any Clydesdale horse. How often has such a thing happened in other breeds?2 The answer to the question How often is that it is anybodys guess. To believe that such a thing has never happened before or since is to ask too much of human credulity. Some years ago I spent a delightful evening in the company of an older man intimately acquainted with the inner history of two breeds of cattle. His knowledge was detailed and profound, his information so shattering to my already slender faith in the accuracy of pedigree that I invited him to write down his reminiscences for my information. I quote from what he wrote, merely substituting letters of the alphabet for the names of breeds, herds and fashionable cow families. 1.In pre-tattooing days there were many instances of making animals fit the pedigree. The case of the X calves you refer to happened in a B herd whose owner took grass fields near C where he put his cows and calves. Before taking them back the grieve and cattleman went down to see how they had done and to identify the animals. They found they had come on so much with the change of pasture that they just couldnt make sure which cow was which and got so confused that they finally settled the matter by giving the best calf to the best cow and calling it a D, E, F, or whatever families were fashionable at the time. Even in recent years some breeders are able to supply the females of the family or families that are in demand year after year. 2.The V mix-up happened in a herd when the G family was much in demand. The particular breeder had a lot of very good cattle and was selling a lot of G females. An Irish breeder bought one or two and on checking up found that some of the ones he had purchased were the progeny of cows which were giving birth to two calves in a yearnot twins. He could get no satisfactory explanation from the breeder and finally reported the matter to the V House of Lords. The Lords called on the breeder to appear before them. It was found he had been selling G females for some years and that his herd book was in a dreadful mess. Quite a few of the most prominent breeders including Mr. Xetc. etc. had this particular strain of C in their herds. In view of this the Lords decided that Mr. X should visit the herd and report. He did and said the breeder had been a little careless in keeping his herd book up to date but that matters were not quite so bad as appeared. He suggested he be reprimanded and told not to do it again. Mr. X,
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etc. etc. immediately began to eliminate Gs from their herds and when the culprit was again had up on a similar charge he was expelled from the V Society and the G family became worthless. A local breeder who held on to them had to put his females through the local mart where they were sold for crossing cows. So much for cattle! I have had more personal experience concerning sheep. Some forty-odd years ago I was lambing a pedigreed flock of a certain dark-faced breed. Because of the dark ears the reading of tattoo marks was considered impracticable, and metal ear-clips bearing the registration number of the sheep concerned were used instead. A ewe died and before disposing of the body I removed the ear-clip and that evening presented the farmer with my sad news together with the dip. A pity, he remarked, to lose a good pedigree as well as a good ewe I The clip was returned to me for necessary action! Rather conveniently there were several unregistered ewes of good type and of the same breed on the farm available for just such emergencies. Incidentally the (Scottish) Blackface Sheep Breeders Association have always declined to institute a flock book for their breed despite strong pressure by the National Sheep Breeders Association to do so. Im sure the decision is a sound and honest one. The pedigree of livestock is not good evidence from the legal standpoint since its authenticity is never confirmed by an independent witness; in important instances its inaccuracy can be proved; it should not, there fore, be in any way regarded as reliable data for the scientist to use. Yet, he has on many occasions so used it. I remember, at Cambridge, finding a research worker busily employed in working out coefficients of in-breeding for various breeds. Beside his calculating machine there lay an impressive pile of herd and stud books. I laid my hand upon his breeders bible, saying: I see you are a fundamentalist. Yes, he answered, missing the rather obvious meaning of my remark, I admit this work is fundamental, rather than applied. If, however, there were bards among herds capable of giving a verbal, yet accurate account of the true ancestry of the leading sires in their breed, we might have to listen to some surprising revelations, including the probable comforting reflection that the most bitter competition between breeds is softened by occasional borrowing from the rival breeds stable. It is the unquestionable intention of all breed societies acting as corporate bodies to make the pedigrees they publish as strictly accurate as such things can ever hope to be and conditions of registration and so on have been adjusted periodically to fit the actuality more closely to the ideal. It follows that on the grounds of accuracy alone, and without any further considerations, the more recent part of any animals pedigree is of greater import. Presuming, for the moment, that the recorded pedigree of livestock were one hundred per cent accurate, what real and utilitarian value would such a pedigree have? Obviously, it has some, otherwise breeders would never have troubled to record them nor would breeders continue to pay such particular and careful attention to the pedigree of the stock they buy. To a certain extent it guarantees the purity or relative homozygosity of the breeding animal concerned. This is of particular importance where
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the trade marks of a breed are strongly dominant as, for example, in the Aberdeen-Angus cattle breed where a high grade cross may be indistinguishable superficially from a pure-bred bull. The two, however, will breed differently, hence the value of the pedigree recording the ancestry of the pure-bred bull. Breeding differently does not, necessarily, mean breeding better as the following communication from an old-time breeder quite unintentionally illustrates. This tale of former times(one must assume that nothing of the kind ever happens to-day!) is admittedly hearsay evidence but I have no reason to doubt its reliability. The communication reads: In some instances it happened that a very good cross bull calf was given a pedigree and sold as pure. A farmer in X got one such bull and it was only when his calves arrived that he realised what had happened. There were reds, red and white and splatchy black and whites. Many were horned. I will say this much for the bull. The heifers which were kept for cows proved excellent breeders and did a lot of good to the farmers stock. Nevertheless, when a purchaser buys a pure-bred bull he wishes to be as certain as is possible that he will sire calves of a uniform and expected pattern and an authentic pedigree gives some guarantee that such expectation will be fulfilled. The desire to distinguish clearly between pure-bred and up-graded stock was in fact one of the main reasons of importing countries insisting that the stock they imported should in all cases be pedigreed stock. A purchaser buying a polled bull does not want horned nor particoloured calves from him whether they do a lot of good to his stock or whether they dont, for that is not what he has paid down his money for. Again, for breeders engaged in in-breeding, particularly in that mild and modified form called line-breeding which so many practical breeders approve of, practise and favour; an accurate record of ancestry, in other words a pedigree, is an essential instrument in their carefully planned breeding programmes. Finally, there are in all breeds certain individuals of assumed superiority which by in-breeding have stamped their seal upon all close descendants. A pedigree will trace the closeness or otherwise of descendants to that individual of assumed superiority and is of unarguable value for that purpose. To deny all utility to pedigree would be absurd. To exaggerate its value, while far more common, is equally senseless even assuming that every entry was of unquestioned authenticity. There is a curious illusion that the word pedigree in itself conveys superiority. Perhaps, more frequently among dog-owners than with livestock breeders the word pedigree or pure-bred is used to excuse a multitude of palpable faults. There has, of course, developed a certain snob value in relation to both these words. Even among genuine farming people it adds some personal distinction to own pedigreed stock even although they are always losing money and the knackery is deprived of its due reward. It is just that little bit more distinguished than merely owning a herd of cross-bred, unpedigreed cows, even although they are most profitable and productive cows. In that agricultural twilight where money made in industry or in other speculative occupations pays very dearly for the shadows of a feudal tradition, the snob value of the word pedigree when
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attached to livestock, counts for a great deal more. I have, myself, heard several of the farming industrys more recent industrial recruits announce proudly that All our stock here are pedigreed as though that one word excused the prevalence of runts, piners, screws and miscellaneous monstrosities. Actually, a fine pedigree has never made an indifferent animal one whit better. It would be a pity perhaps were an outstanding animal to lose sale value simply because a pedigree was at fault! It is a much simpler task to change a pedigree than to alter an animal. Some may contend that such things never have happened, never do happen and never will happen. It would be an exaggeration, perhaps, to suggest that a pedigree, like a treaty, may prove to be a mere scrap of paper, but to accept every recorded pedigree, particularly entries of older date as Holy Writ would be equally foolish and, from the scientific angle, is a quite unjustifiable assumption to indulge in.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. OSCAR WILDE. A Woman of No Importance, Act III. 2. KILPATRICK, J. My Seventy Years with Clydesdales, Glasgow (1949). 3. BUCHANAN-SMITH, SIR A. D. Anim. Breed. Abstr., 18, 125 (1950).

Five Shows
LIVESTOCK shows like breed societies date from the end of the eighteenth century. The first one of the modern type was held in Sussex in the year 1798. The early shows were called cattle shows, not because cattle
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were the only or even the main class of stock exhibited but because at that time the word cattle had exactly the same meaning as the word livestock has today. The nineteenth century was the hey-day of such shows and there is every reason to suppose that they were regarded as a genuine instrument of livestock improvement. They were considered then, apparently, to have a definite agricultural significance as well as an unquestionable social value. Opinion is much more critical to-day and I think quite rightly so. Whenever any species of animal is submitted to the discipline of a competitive show, there arises the probabilityone might even aver the near certainty of a divorce between fancy points and utility functions. That divorce is not of the slightest significance when a species of animal is kept entirely for pleasure and largely for show. It is laudable in budgerigars, pardonable in pigeons, excusable in certain breeds of dog. It is, however, positively dangerous when animals having the allimportant function of supplying humanity with food and clothing are concerned. It is all the more dangerous because those people who show cattle, sheep, or pigs in preference to pigeons or budgerigars attempt to salve their consciences by attributing a mystical utility to what are plainly points of breeders fancy. I am convinced that, on the contrary, there is very little correlation between show type and utility standards. Poultry breeders have, of course, accepted the position by instituting separate standards for show and utility classes of the same breed. How long a utility class can maintain utility and still be shown is questionable. In female sheep, I am certain that there is no such correlation. Once upon a time I conducted a small completely unofficial trial to test the matter out. I was in charge of a good flock of some ten score North Country Cheviot ewes breeding half-bred lambs. I knew the breed and the show points of the breed sufficiently well. One particular ewe showed these points to perfection but, since the productivity of every ewe in the flock was carefully recorded, this ewe had proved herself, in shepherds telling phrase, to be a completely useless female dog. In four years breeding she had never borne more than a single lamb and she had never milked sufficiently well to do even a single lamb justice. In complete contrast, the most productive ewe in the flock, that had borne twin lambs in four successive lambings and milked them so well that their live-weight gains equalled the average of the flocks singles was, again in shepherds telling phrase. the plainest looking female dog that ever was seen. I entered them both for the local show. The useless female dog was awarded the championship of her breed; the plain female dog was entirely unplaced. I think that anybody who entered their most productive and best-paying sheep in company with(from the accepted breed society points)their best-looking sheep would have precisely the same experience. It is, of course, difficult for a keen stockman to be entirely honest in this matter even with himself and I confess that in more emotional moods I am apt to be carried away by good looks in a sheep. Nevertheless, it is right to remember that the only sensible object in sheep breeding is to produce as abundantly and economically as possible, meat to eat and wool to wear. I have none of that happy pleasure in the contemplation of cattle
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that I enjoy in the company of sheep so that I am able to view the cattle exhibits at shows much more objectively. There, the parade of bulls of the dairy breeds always strikes me as being the acme of farce. The blinkers, the rings, the poles, the lumbering mass of mechanically restrained ill-temper led slowly around the keen-eyed, solemn-faced, yet unconsciously hypocritical judge! Who, saving a prophet or a seer can possibly determine from their external appearance alone the relative value of a score or so of dairy bulls in producing profitable milking daughters, the only practical excuse for preserving such reservoirs of masculine ill-humour? A parade of test-tubes containing their semen would give as much and possibly rather more information of genuine utility. The setting of our livestock shows is pleasant and often romantic. The social enjoyment is immense. The parade of beautifully appointed animals is superbly attractive. Yet it would be cowardly not to speak what I believe sincerely to be the truth. Hagedoorn wrote that: In the production of economically useful animals, however, such as cattle, swine, egg-laying breeds of poultry, and horses, the show-ring is more of a menace than an aid to breeding. I agree with Hagedoorn.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHy 1. HAGEDOORN. Ibid., 265.

SIX A Testing of Tools

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ANIMAL husbandry is, of course, scientifically considered, simply one branch of applied biology and like all applied sciences it must depend ultimately upon the reliability or otherwise of the methods and hypothesis of the more basic sciences on which it is founded. If the methods or hypothesis of the basic science be called in question then the methods and hypothesis of the derived, applied science must also be in doubt. The difficulty and the problem is one by no means confined to animal husbandry. It is applicable also to a science such as biochemistry which is obviously dependent on the accuracy or otherwise of the techniques borrowed from pure chemistry which it constantly employs. It may in a sense seem an impertinence for anyone specialising in a subject such as animal husbandry to criticise the value or otherwise of the tools, accepted by his fellow workers as being reliable and placed in his hands to use as effectively as possible by those workers in biology who are, or should be, the tool-makers for his trade. It is perhaps an excusable impertinence provided that impertinence be brief. The impertinence is more excusable in considering Darwins theory of the origin of species through natural selection since this was, to a certain extent, a boomerang first thrown from the farm which, with an approved scientific stamp upon it, has returned to the farm. It was by studying the methods of the animal and plant breeder the variation of plants and animals under domestication and the process of man-guided artificial selection that Darwin was led to his theory of natural selection. In the age of faith the obvious indeed the inevitable equivalent to the plant or animal breeder in artificial selection was the divine creator in natural selection. Since there was obvious design in artificial selection it would seem merely logical and not necessarily superstitious to presuppose an element of design in natural selection as well. It so happened, however, that Darwin thought and worked in an age of growing scepticism rather than of persisting faith and was therefore driven to suggest some instrument in natural selection comparable to the human agency in artificial selection that was not design. He therefore postulated his theory of natural selection through survival of the fittest which, although at first opposed, eventually gained almost universal acceptance because of the scepticism of his time. People tend to believe what they want to believe whether the belief be in an improbable miracle or an equally improbable material explanation. For, on the first principles of logical thought, Darwins theory of natural selection is, in fact, highly improbable. According to Darwin the raw material on which natural selection was supposed to act lay in the relatively small degrees of variation between one individual of a species and another. One rabbit ran faster from the fox than his brother rabbit. The slow rabbit was eaten, the fast rabbit lived to have a happy family and all his little rabbits, when they grew to be big bunnies, ran equally fast and said Boo to the fox and that is why modern rabbits run so fast. It reads like a fairy tale and perhaps it is a fairy tale! Actually, it has now been proved as well and firmly as anything can be proved that these small variations between one rabbit and his brother rabbit are, in most cases, not inherited at all so that, were it not for the insistence of the modern mind that selection must be natural and in no sense designed, the Darwinian hypothesis would have fallen to the ground on that account alone.
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In any case, even supposing these differences in rapidity of reaction between individuals of a species were heritable, would it necessarily lead to elimination or survival? Consider the naturally selective action of death on the roads! So far as pedestrians are concerned, any slow misfit in his twenties has a better survival chance than a child born to be a sprinter or a record-breaking runner who has grown to be feeble and old. The selection is by agegroup, not by speed group at all. Then, so far as the motorists themselves are concerned, does anyone really maintain that road accidents are selective in the sense that while the bad drivers are liquidated, the good drivers survive? Why, my maiden aunt shut her eyes deliberately and made a blind dash over cross-roads in case she might see something dangerous coming and survived all road hazards to die in her bed. Yet Mike Hawthorn, that driver of superb skill, met death on the road. I see the same thing in my garden. The nestlings on their first emergence are the easiest possible prey for cats and the slowest adult bird has a better survival chance than the most agile bec jaune. Survival chance is again a question of age rather than of individual ability, whether heritable or not. Darwin elected to give a hypothetical sharp edge of selection to the bludgeon called chance. The geneticist has accepted both but with greater emphasis on the bludgeon. The alliance of breeding experimentation and cytology in the modern science of genetics is a powerful one and to discuss its validity or to criticise it in detail as acutely as the Russian biologists have done, would be too lengthy and controversial a matter for discussion here. Suffice then to say that as a result of breeding experiments closely correlated with cytological observations it is presumed that the ultimate factors of hereditycalled genesare arranged like strung paired beads on the chromosomes of the germ cellsthat during the ripening or maturation of the germ cells the strings of paired beads split longitudinally so that each and every bead is separated from its accustomed partner which may be identical with it or in some way unlike it, and that which goes where is a matter of chance. That when on fertilisation the germ cells of the two sexes meet(and it is assumed to be purely a matter of chance which one particular spermatozoon of many millions meets with and unites with the ovum)each gene in the spermatozoon again finds a partner on the corresponding chromosome of the ovum, which again may be identical or in some way unlike it, and that it is purely a matter of chance whether the meeting is with like or unlike. The element of chance recurs so often that the whole subject of genetics becomes necessarily involved with the mathematics of probabilities and random distribution, being the reason why a knowledge of mathematics is now essential to a study of genetics. Those who are not mathematicians are best to leave the subject alone. Yet there can be certain criticisms offered on first principles of thought without becoming involved in the mathematical intricacies of the modern geneticists country dance, where genes and chromosomes bow, separate, set to partners, link arms, cross over, join up again to settle down in somatic corners, until the breeding bugles herald the beginning of the next dance number. The element of chance occurs again and yet again which can only mean that all the heritable variations on which selection,
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natural or artificial, is presumed to work, are purely fortuitous, without rhyme or reason, without any relationship, save that purely accidental, to environment or to purpose. The mathematical treatment, granted the ultimate premises, may be unshakeable and entirely sound but what is the final deduction if these premises be true? It would mean that the intricate anatomy and physiology of a dairy cow, with all its intimate relationships and co-ordination of parts integrated into a perfectly functioning unity was the outcome of selection, be it natural or artificial, carried on over a vast period of time, but acting upon the raw material of heritable variation thrown out blindly, mindlessly, unpredictably, purely by chance. Is such a process credible? Suppose we went on throwing bricks at random for an infinity of time, would we by selection of those brick piles most closely resembling a human habitation, ever succeed in erecting a house? Or suppose we threw scrap metal together at random when, if ever, should we succeed in constructing a car? I make these criticisms not for the selfish purpose of appearing to think differently from others but because I feel that in this our present day the actual breeder of farm animalsthe animal husbandman himselfis being influenced, persuaded and even mildly coerced into altering his breeding practice to correspond with the teaching of genetic theory. Organisations such as the M.M.B. and P.I.D.A. accept the hypothetical interpretation of heredity termed genetics as proven fact and their policy of livestock improvement is based on the assumption that the fact is proven. The actual breederthe animal husbandman himselfis rarely in a position to probe the genetic hypothesis for himself. Had he the mathematical equipment essential for that task it is highly unlikely that he would be an animal husbandman. He is therefore faced with the alternative of blind acceptance or blind rejection. He has, in fact, returned by devious routes to the age of faith. He is asked to believe, he is expected to believe, if animal breeding ever came completely under State control he would be compelled to believe. The denial of genetic dogma would then become scientific heresy to be punished economically by the withdrawal or withholding of subsidy or grants. We are perilously near to the stage when genetics becomes the accepted dogma in a new age of scientific faith with the geneticist its high priest. Such a picture may seem a gross exaggeration. Unfortunately it is not. At a meeting of the British Society of Animal Production, a society which until recently was a deliberately designed meeting ground for agricultural scientists and progressive farmers, some question on the breeding of dairy cows for milk production arose. A leading geneticist had the answer or believed he had the answer. Strolling nonchalantly to the blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand he wrote down an equation. That, he said, was the answer. I dont think many of his hearers understood the meaning of the equation. Certainly none of the progressive farmers had a clue. Yet there was no further discussion. The matter was settled. The oracle had spoken, the priest had pronounced. The sublime self-assurance of so many geneticists; the obviously powerful influence of geneticists upon agricultural policy; the difficulty of combating arguments stated mathematically without the mathematical armament essential for the fight is leading many perhaps too manybreeders into the entirely false position of
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having to simulate acceptance of principles and practices with which they do not agree. Opposition to the teaching of the geneticist incurs the risk of being termed reactionary, selfinterested, out-dated, behind the times. Russian biology, however, has never accepted the teaching of Western genetics, and while the opposition is certainly based on political principles, some of that criticism has a definite cogency. The whole conception of Mendelian genetics or Morganism as the Russians frequently term it has been attacked on two main grounds: 1. That besides being too rigid and formalised to be readily credible, the genetic hypothesis has become what might be termed an over-elastic theory, that is to say, one so infinitely extensible that it can be adapted to fit any facts; one so accommodating that it can never be refuted; in short, a theory of but limited usefulness in further scientific research and advance. There may be some grounds for this criticism. The original simplicity of Mendelian theory has certainly become a great deal more complicated. To put the matter rather crudelywhen the genes were found not always to segregate they were assumed to be united in linkage and when they didnt link according to prediction they were said to cross-over and there always seemed to be a conveniently placed eye at the microscope to confirm the segregation, the linkage, crossing-over and all the other strange antics the chromosomes were bound to perform to fit in with the facts! Again, when it was found that so much of inheritance was apparently blended, not conforming to Mendelian pattern in any observable way, the geneticists extended their hypothesis to include blended inheritance as well. They assumed that the blending was only apparent but in reality discontinuous and that its inheritance was governed by the action, reaction and interaction of innumerable small genes in themselves having minor effects. Hence the polygenic hypothesis which explains everything satisfactorily(at least to the geneticist!) that was not on the Mendelian hypothesis explainable before. In view of the seemingly limitless extension of an hypothesis to fit the facts there may well be some justification in the contention of Prezent that hypothetical genes could, by suitable mathematical juggling, be made to fit any segregation ratio as observed in actual breeding. That Prezent was a Russian does not detract from the weight of his contention. 2. Numerous Russian biologistsof whom the names of Lysenko and Prezent are best known in this country have further criticised Mendelian genetics on the grounds of its practical inutility. Their attitude is in-separable from the social and philosophical theories current in Soviet Russia where it is believed, apparently, that practical utility is truth, truth practical utility and: that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. It is an attitude not yet subscribed to in non-Communist countries. Yet, from the point of view of its importance to agriculture, the utility valuethe pragmatic testof Mendelism is patently a prime consideration. For, if the subject is without practical agricultural importance, there seems no sound reason why those concerned with husbandry, either plant or animal, should occupy their minds with its study. They might just as well learn Hindustani. What, then, to date, has been the actual contribution of genetics to animal breeding?
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SEVEN The Contribution of Genetics

THE two terms Animal Breeding and Genetics are frequently confused. The confusion is totally unjustified. Farm animals were being bredand successfully bredlong before Johaunsen invented the name gene; long before Mendel had employed a monks ample leisure in crossing garden peas; long before Charles Darwin with his theory of pangenesis and Weisemann with his hypothetical germplasm had guided the barque of theoretical biology into the superficially clear waters of the particular system of philosophy called vulgar materialism. That, I feel, is a point to be kept firmly in mind. The art, tradition, know-howcall it what you willof animal breeding is something very old. It is infinitely older than the modern biological science of heredity based as it is on the presumed selective action of nature upon the heritable variability of living things as enunciated by Darwin, and the material nature of that heritable variability and its behaviour during inheritance as first propounded by Mendel and subsequently formalised by Morgan. The domestication of farm animals, their exploitation for products useful to mankind, their specialisation for one particular product, were all accomplished facts before Darwinism was thought of or Mendelism born. Even before Bakewell and his time which was long before Darwin and Mendels time, the really big advances in sheep breeding had already been made. The Merino breed was the breed producing the worlds finest fleece. English sheep breeds were classified into the two broad divisions of the Longwools and Shortwools as they are classified to this day. Out of all British sheep breeds the Dorset Horn held the monopoly of consistent out-of season lambing. Already there were districts where cattle were most namely for the plough, in others better suited to the dairy. In poultry there were the game-birds and the egg-producing fowls, and those kinds best suited for the pot. Long before the time of Bakewell, of Darwin, or of Mendel, sheep were producing wool and mutton in variety and abundance; cattle were yielding hides, beef, milk, cream, butter and cheese; pigs, bacon, hams, pork and lard; poultry, eggs and capons, all again in infinite variety and in abundance. All these animal products stemmed from the breeding of farm animals and what is more, their successful breeding, before the scientific study of heredity had even begun. In discussing the contribution of genetics to animal husbandry I want to emphasise how very recent is the one, how infinitely older
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is the other and to emphasise even more strongly the plain fact that the breeding of farm animals for husbandry purposes proceeded wonder fully well without the science of genetics and indeed, without the aid or interference of any kind of science, for very many hundreds of years. Mendels original paper describing the results of his experiments on the hybridization of garden peas was published in the journal of an obscure Austrian natural history society in 1866. His paper was ignored and indeed entirely forgotten for thirty-four years. Then, in the year 1900 three botanists, working independentlyDe Vries, Correns and von Tshermakrediscovered the principles of segregation and independent assortment of hereditary characters and Mendels earlier work was piously disinterred from the archives of Brunn. Subsequent developments of the new science of genetics were both rapid and of profound importance. Its union with the science of cytology(the microscopic study of the ultimate units of both plant and animal tissues, called cells)and with the science of biometry (the study of inheritance on the basis of statistics)culminating in that combination of genetics and biometry called population genetics, is, however, far too involved a subject to be dealt with here. Concerning its application or attempted application to animal husbandry, there is, however, a great deal more that requires to be said. About the year 1920 or so, some twenty years after the rediscovery of Mendelism and by which time a vast amount of new knowledge had been brought to its support, there seemed to be enormous promise in the new science if applied to the breeding of farm animals. It was thought and indeed believed that the day of the breeders art, as it then was and still is called, was about to be replaced by definite quantitative scientific method so that the mating of animals could be arranged in advance to give mathematically certain and predictable results. The vague generalisation that like begets like was to be replaced by simple, easily followed equations of the type: AxB AB x AB A+B+B Some of the earliest experiments on cattle appeared to confirm this expectation. Coat colour and the polled v. horned condition were two of the earliest characters subjected to Mendelian analyses. They seemed to fit in perfectly with the simple ratios of Mendelian expectation. In coat colour, for example, black was proved dominant to red and the difference between the breeding of the black bull that always left black calves (the homozygote) compared with that of the black bull that left the occasional red calf (the heterozygote) was sufficiently and satisfactorily explained. This was a tremendous advance on the knowledge available to MCombie, one of the founders of the Aberdeen-Angus breed who, faced with the recurrent problem in his herd of a red calf born to two jet-black
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parents, is said to have arranged a black background to his mating pen with the idea, based on the then current belief in the importance of maternal impressions, of persuading his cows to a better behaviour! In Shorthorn cattle the hereditary behaviour of the three classical colours of red, white and roan were also satisfactorily accounted for on the simplest of Mendelian explanations roan being the heterozygous intermediary between red and whitewith the necessary corollary that while both red and white would breed true, roan being a heterozygous condition, could never do so. The inheritance of horns when polled were bred with horned cattle was also in keeping with Mendelian ratios, on the assumption that the polled condition was dominant over the horned. Unfortunately, these early and successful applications of simple Mendelism to cattle breeding, led to further attempted application where the problem even if Mendelian was certainly less simple. It seems rather absurd, nowadays(and no modern geneticist could countenance such an idea)that the pattern of inheritance as regards the milk yield of dairy cows could conceivably be interpreted and followed with equal ease. Yet, at one time it was suggested and by some believed that this enormously complicated problem could be adequately accounted for by the action and interaction of no more than three major genes. This exaggeration and sometimes flagrant over-stretching of the applicability of the earlier monofactorial Mendelian ratios to the breeding of farm animals led to a certain disappointment and disillusionment concerning the initial high promise of the Mendelian contribution to animal breeding. Breeding was not going to prove such a very much simpler matter, after all! An element of further disillusionment arose from the fact that even where inheritance had at first seemed to correspond perfectly with the simple Mendelian ratios and laws, there were occasional exceptions not so readily explained. On the Mendelian interpretation of coat colour in Shorthorn cattle, for example, red mated with white should theoretically always yield roan. It is perfectly well known, however, that such theoretical certainty is by no means invariably substantiated in practical fast. Thus, to give a recorded example, Whitehall Sultan, a white Shorthorn bull, sired fifteen red calves out of fifty-nine matings to red cows and one of his sons, also white, Maxwaton Sultan, again produced thirteen red calves out of fifty-four matings to red cows. To suggest, as certain geneticists have suggested that these off the record Mendelian red calves were still genotypically roans although phenotypically reds is merely a rather obvious example of the classical fallacy in logic of begging the question. Again, the inheritance of horns was one of the first reported instances of Mendelian inheritance in farm animals and, indeed, the one factor hypothesis satisfactorily explains most of the known facts concerning the inheritance of the polled v. horned condition in cattle. Yet, undoubtedly sex, also, has an influence and scurs (rudimentary horns)are both more frequent and when present, larger in males. Indeed, personal observation has made me wonder on occasions even with such relatively simple matters as coat colour and horns in cattle whether it was the inseminator or the geneticist who committed a blunder! I recall particularly one batch of calves
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reputedly sired by Aberdeen-Angus semen out of Friesian cows. Had it not been for the fact that the calves were naturally polled, it would have been hard not to believe that Friesian semen had been used instead. In addition to these discrepancies, it very soon became too obvious for further disguise that whatever might be brought forward as evidence of Mendelian inheritance in minor affairs such as coat colour and horns, the really important economic characters of livestock such as milk-yield, egg-yield, fleece weight, meat conformation and so on are so largely governed by the environmental influences of feeding and management that inheritance of any kind may constitute only a relatively small fraction of the observed variability of these characters between one animal and another. It is only one of the many curious results of the present fashionability of genetics in agricultural research that so much weight is given to the mere twenty per cent of the variability in milk yield due to hereditary factors and so relatively little to the remaining eighty per cent which is not! Moreover, even that relatively small part of the variability between one animal and another in the important economic characters that is admitted to be an expression of its inheritance is now regarded by geneticists as the result of very many minor genes working togetherthe polygenic hypothesis. This polygenic mode of inheritance results in what was until recently termed blended inheritance, the type submitted to statistical treatment by Galton, Pearson and their followers in the science of biometry. Since this mode of inheritance whether called polygenic or blended can be studied only in large populations using statistical methods, the results can be applied only in a general way. A statement of probabilities is all that the individual breeder can expect. The element of chance has not been eliminated from breeding by the new science of genetics. Rather the reverse, because random or chance sampling of the gametes at each reduction division and random or chance conjugation of the gametes at fertilisation are two of the primary hypothetical assumptions of Mendelian theory. Yet, during the first flush of Mendelism something more, possibly too much, was hoped for. It then seemed possible that a more definite element of prediction of the results of matings might become available to the animal breeder. So far as superficial characters such as coat coloration are concerned, that hope has been partially but not entirely fulfilled since as already discussed, too many exceptions even to the simplest expectation ratios are liable to occur. With the important economic characters of livestock the case is even less satisfactory. There can be so little reliable prediction of the results of a mating that the whole emphasis of the teaching of the geneticist has been transferred to the quantitative assessment of the results of a mating after that mating has occurred. That is something rather different, and although given the high-sounding title of progeny testing is nothing especially new indeed, with a less erudite title and under less distinguished scientific patronage is probably as old as animal breeding itself. By rather devious routes the geneticist seems therefore to have led the practical breeder back on to the somewhat familiar territory from which he was first induced to venture forth.

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EIGHT Proof by Production

ONE early effect of the impact of genetics on animal breeding was a distrust of the value of phenotype as a satisfactory criterion in the selection of animals from which to breed. The term phenotype means a great deal more than an animals external appearance. It includes individual physiological performance as well as morphological characters. Thus the milk yield of a cow or the egg yield of a hen is every bit as much an expression of her phenotype as is her hide colour or feathering pattern. This devaluation of phenotype was a result implicit in Mendelism which provided a reasoned and convincing explanation of why, for example, the selection of roan-coloured parents was utterly futile if uniformly roan-coloured offspring was the result desired. Nevertheless, it took some little time before the important distinction between what an animal expresses in its own phenotype as distinct from what it passes on to its descendants in its genotype was appreciated as being, in many important forms of animal production quite as applicable to performance as to appearance. When I was working at the Rowett Research Institute in the 1930s poultry were still being selected for breeding on the trapnesting records of individual hens. Birds, both cockerels and pullets, were sold at high prices on the basis of the trap-nest records of the hens from which they were descended. Superficially it seemed a sufficiently sensible thing to do. If eggs from birds which laid three hundred eggs in a year were kept for hatching and
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those from birds laying only one hundred and fifty in a year were discarded it seemed reasonable to suppose that in course of time and with the passing of several generations the average egg yield of poultry would be substantially raised. Actually this superficially sensible method of selection has been proved entirely useless. After ten years intensive selection by this method at the Maine Experimental Station in America, the average egg yield of the flock remained at precisely the same level as when selection began. The reason for this failure is that the egg yield of a hen is an expression of her phenotype and being such is not necessarily heritable at all. In other words it might so happen that a hen that laid three hundred eggs in the year might breed pullets that on the average laid only two hundred. Conversely a hen that laid only one hundred and fifty eggs in the year might breed pullets that on the average laid two hundred and fifty. Precisely the same principle applies to the milk yield of cows. Yet even had the attainment of high egg-yield in poultry and high milk yield in cows been possible by the simple and obvious yet fallacious method of keeping heifer calves for further breeding from the highest yielding cows and eggs for hatching from the best laying hens, the polygamous nature of both species would have raised certain difficulties in actual practice. For, in both species the breeding influence of the male is anything from ten to a hundred times greater than that of the female by methods of natural breeding and may be several thousand times greater if artificial insemination be employed. Clearly, even had selection on phenotype been proved reliable, neither egg-yield nor milk-yield can be directly determined for a cockerel or a bull. Since, in dairy cattle. the only modern justification for the existence of a bull is that he will breed reliable and high-yielding daughters, the obvious method of selecting a dairy bull for extensive breeding is by making a preliminary breeding test while he is young to find out whether or not he is in proven fact, a bull that does leave reliable and high yielding daughters. The slow rate of growth and reproduction in cattle makes such progeny testing of dairy bulls a slow proceeding also and it has happened on occasion that a dairy bull has been slaughtered for his savagery before the superior milking qualities of his daughters had been sufficiently proven to earn him a reprieve. A.I. together with the deep-freeze technique in the preservation of semen has made such progeny testing of bulls technically easier while at the same time emphasising its more urgent importance. The logical necessity of progeny testing of dairy bulls, especially those intended for service by Al. is too clear to allow of any contradiction. As Hagedoorn put it, referring, of course, to dairy bulls in the following quotation: It seems obvious that as the only real object of a bull is to produce daughters, the only really important question to ask when buying a bull or using one is whether he is likely to produce good daughters. The only safe answer to that question is to see how he has bred. That is the questionto see how he has bredand the attempt to answer that question is the reason for the progeny testing of dairy bulls which has given rise to so much discussion, so much deep thinking and at times, somewhat confusing results. One reason for confusion is that it has proved much harder to find a satisfactory answer to the apparently simple question than was at
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first supposed. With earlier attempts such as dam-daughter comparisons and the rather more elaborate bull indices we need not be concerned since these have been discarded in general by the geneticists themselves. Two methods widely employed at the present time are the bull testing station as developed in Denmark and the contemporary comparison method favoured by the English Milk Marketing Board in this country. The basic idea behind the bull testing station is to bring calving heifers sired by different bulls to the testing station where, under standard conditions of housing, feeding and management, the milk yield of the heifers is recorded and the average yield of a fair sample of one bulls daughters(twenty unselected daughters ranking as a fair sample)compared with that of others. In the contemporary comparison method the milk-yield of the heifers sired (by A.I.) by one bull is compared with that of the heifers sired by other bulls in the herds to which the heifers belong. There is no attempt to standardise environmental conditions, the argument (supported by the evidence of actual figures recently published)being that the relative breeding value of the bull should be made evident by comparison with heifers sired by other bulls and kept in the same environment even although the environment must obviously differ materially from farm to farm. I shall not attempt(nor in fact do I deem myself competent) to assess the relative advantages, disadvantages or possible fallacies of either or both methods. I shall, however, discuss one point rather more fully. A few years ago at a cattle breeders conference held at Leeds I heard Mr. Ian Mason give a most interesting analysis and comparison of the results of progeny testing of the same bulls by the two different methods. It struck me as being of great interest and importance that the same bull might rank differently in presumed breeding value according to whether the value of his heifer progeny were assessed in a bull testing station on the one hand or on farms by the contemporary comparison method on the other. Having been invited to open the discussion I suggested that in the light of Mr. Masons analysis, assuming this to be correct, the results obtained by these two distinct methods of comparison could not, being different, were there anything in logic, both be right. On the other hand it was logically possible that they might both be wrong! I shall not dilate further upon what is, in fact, a highly technical and difficult subject for discussion. I think, however, that it is only right, fair and proper to plead that there is a need, indeed a moral obligation on the part of geneticists, to undertake an enormously greater volume of laborious and critical research upon the methods of progeny testing before venturingas they appear only too ready and willing to doto apply the results of such progeny testing to animal husbandry and farming practice. For, unless the methods are reliable, the results can only be misleading and he that must suffer from incomplete knowledge or misinterpretation is not the geneticist who can always alter his hypothesis without any cost but the misled breeder who cannot so easily and cheaply change his methods or renew his stock. It is indeed, only by devising more reliable and sensitive methods of progeny testing that the geneticist can have anything
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useful or novel to contribute to a subject which in principle has really very little to do with science, genetical or otherwise, unless we accept Thomas Henry Huxleys definition of science as being organised common sense. After all, what else is there in the principle of progeny testing but common sense? The principle of progeny testing is implicit in the scriptural injunction By their fruits ye shall know them; it was reached by the Roman agricultural writer Varro, it was practised by the eighteenth century Englishman, Robert Bakewell. It is nothing new, but merely because there is nothing novel in the principle of progeny testing that fact alone does not in anyway detract from its importance. It is, indeed, such a palpable necessity in successful breeding that I very much doubt whether any successful practical breeder of livestock, granted by methods mainly qualitative, has ever entirely neglected it in his practice. While the relative importance of the assessment of genotype rather than selection on phenotype has been rightly stressed by the geneticist in the obviously relevant cases of milk yield in dairy cattle and egg yield in hens, the earlier views on the inadequacy of selection by phenotype in meat-producing animals has been somewhat modified within recent years. The technique called the sire performance test as applied to beef cattle is a notable example of that modification. It was first embarked on in a tentative way in the hope of shortening the time required for the satisfactory progeny testing of a beef bull, which may require three years before the calves sired by him are brought to final beef judgement on the abattoir scales. It was first embarked upon in America under the control of the United States Department of Agriculture. The idea behind the sire performance test is to assess the relative breeding value of beef bulls by measurement of their live-weight increase when bull calves under standard conditions of feeding and management, in short, the general principle of the Danish Bull Testing Station. Some bull calves make greater liveweight increase than do others as might well be expected. A more surprising finding is that the rate of live-weight increase of individual bull calfbeyond any argument an expression of his phenotypeis claimed to be highly heritable. It followsprovided the high degree of correlation between the rate of growth of the bull himself and of the calves he sires be accepted as proved, that beef bulls can be safely selected for breeding at fifteen months of age instead of having to wait a further two years for the results of an actual progeny test. Experiments are now in progress in this country to test the reliability of these American results. They require this repetition. The phraseIt has been shown recently in America has become rather a parrot cry among our agricultural scientists as though the United States were the modern site of divine revelation. Even if proved reliable, this sire performance test as a means of short-circuiting a full-scale progeny test cannot hope to be equally informative since obviously no opportunity for assessment of carcase quality is available. A beef bull might grow at an outstanding pace himself; leave calves that fully inherited this capacity for rapid weight increase and yet, from the point of view of beef production, prove an unsatisfactory bull to use extensively. Live-weight increase, a measurement so well beloved by the research worker in animal husbandry problems is in many ways a somewhat crude measurement. There is always the highly
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important question as to what has increased in weight in addition to what the weight increase has been. Considering the fact that a carcase of beef accounts for little more than half the live-weight of the live animal and that, moreover, anything up to one-seventh of the carcase itself may be the inedible skeleton, too great an emphasis on live-weight increase alone in the breeding of beef cattle might lead eventually to nothing more useful than an overthick hide holding together over-developed intestines within a framework of over-grown bone. The subject of beef cattle seems an appropriate one with which to draw together the substance of this chapter. The two main contributions of present-day geneticists to the breeding of beef cattle are: 1. the progeny test, and 2. . the sire performance test. These at the moment are being offered to the breeder of beef cattle almost in the nature of an obligatory sacrament. Men who have made fortunes in the breeding of these animals are being lectured to as though they were beardless schoolboys by geneticists who, undoubtedly, have much useful and important information and assistance to offer were they but content to serve a great industry rather than attempt to rule it. Actually there is nothing really new in the progeny test nor in the sire performance test as applied to beef cattle nor, rather curiously, is there anything made especially clearer by the contribution of genetical science to either of these concepts. So far as progeny testing is concerned every breeder of beef bulls, since the breeding of beef bulls began, has had them sufficiently well progeny tested by the customers who bought them, not always admittedly in a statistically exact manner but on occasion on a colossal scale. Thus, the bull testing station for the progeny of Amos Cruickshanks Champion of England was the prairies of North America. Indeed, taking the bulls bred by the leading bull breeders of the Aberdeen-Angus, Hereford and Beef Shorthorn cattle breeds, the bull testing station has been the pastures of three continents. To suggest, therefore, that our three great beef breeds have never been subjected to progeny testing is not only the height of impertinence but the pinnacle of folly. Not merely on a vast continental scale, but on a more restricted but also more exact scale, progeny testing has always been an essential tool in the successful breeding of beef bulls. Was there ever a beef bull breeder of experience who, on purchasing a new stock bull failed to employ it, awaiting the first calf drop with an agonised impatience? In the practical assessment of the value of the progeny there may be few measurements taken, indeed, the weighing machine may never be used. Can it, however, reasonably be contended that simply because of that absence, the breeder of beef bull calves is unable to assess their progress and their relative rate of growth? Of course he does so, but is never so foolish as to assume unreservedly that the fastest-growing bull calf is of necessity the best bull calf. There are too many other characters he must take into account some, admittedly of mainly fancy value, others of more genuine utility and just because in his judgement of a bull calf he must regard the animal as a whole he may, in fact, be a much sounder biologist than the geneticist who is so very inclined to
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grossly over-estimate the few characters he can most conveniently measure. Daily study of the progress and development of a group of bull calves, fortified with many years of experience of the progress and development of bull calves of the same breed, may convey far more useful information than periodical weightings, in any case, never repeated sufficiently often to satisfy the elementary requirements of the physical sciences and sometimes on scales that are not even checked over and calibrated before being used. Nor is the sire performance test, whatever its ultimate value may prove to be, anything new in the annals of beef bull breeding. It has, for the better part of a hundred years been the recognised preliminary to the great Perth bull sales. The practice in all beef bull breeding herds(and a practice, incidentally, often severely criticised in the past by agricultural scientists themselves) has been to allow no environmental impediment to stand in the way of the expression of a bull calfs maximum potential for rapid growth. Hence the nurse cows, the lavish feeding of concentrates, the skilled attention to the bull calfs health, nutrition and individual comfort. A bull calf that failed by his rapid growth to respond to such treatment would never smell Perth. The suggestion that the capacity for rapid live-weight increase in the breeding of beef cattle has in any way been neglected or overlooked by the breeders of our beef breed bulls is one too ludicrous and absurd to be countenanced. One unbiased glance at the beef bull calves assembled at the spring bull sales at Perth or at Hereford should suffice to dispel the libel. Proof by production is an essential of any sound system of animal husbandry. Any scientific evidence, genetical or otherwise, that makes such proof simpler or more certain of attainment can only be doubly welcome to the practical stockbreeder of experience and intelligence. To suggest, however, that the skilled stockman has failed to realise the importance of such proof is to ignore his experience and insult his intelligence. The roses now called progeny testing and sire performance testing are old enough roses when called by other names and have gained no fresh odour by the mere changing of their names. Once again, therefore, and by somewhat devious routes not very obviously sign-posted genetical, the geneticist seems to have led the practical breeder back on to the rather familiar territory from which he first started.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHy I. HAGEDOORN, A. L. Ibid., 179.

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NINE Importance of Breeding Exaggerated

THE first suggestion I want to make on this subject (and I realise the suggestion to be a completely heretical one at the present time)is that both the geneticist and the practical breeder tend to exaggerate the importance of breeding in animal husbandry in relation to those other factors termed environmental. Indeed, the tendency to over-estimate the relative importance of breeding is a fairly general one, by no means confined to those professionally concerned with livestock. In all probability the temptation to do so is based originally on racial and social considerations rather than on those more strictly agricultural. The conquering race, the upper social class, quite naturally is inclined to attribute any manifest advantage in stature or physique to superior breeding rather than to the more favourable environment which is the inevitable accompaniment of conquest or of wealth. In communities where there is a clear-cut division between social classes there is an evident differentiation in appearance as well. Thus, in the Scottish clan system, there is abundant contemporary evidence (including the invaluable letters of Captain Burt written about the year 1725)to show that while the stature of the common clansmen was severely stunted, the gentlemen of the clan were particularly well grown. No doubt the gentlemen attributed their superior physique to their gentility! Similarly among Balkan peoples at a much later date. I was told by an old Glasgow banker who happened to have commercial dealings with a troopship carrying refugee Serbian soldiers into the Clyde during the 1914-18 World War that he could hardly believe the officers and the men came from the same race of people, the officers being so much more handsome in appearance, so much taller in stature, so much more impressive in their general physique. Again, Lord Boyd Orr once informed me that there was such an observable difference even in our own House of Commons during the Baldwin Government of the 1930s between the Conservative Party and the Labour Opposition. That difference in stature and physique between the different social classes in Britain is tending to vanish with the increasing impact of socialistic legislation upon succeeding generations. There is patently less difference between the young men of the professional and the working classes than there was between their fathers. The fact is clearly observable in every family and in every street. In a human society distinction between races and between classes decreases, it would seem almost quantitatively, with increasing equality of environmental factors. Is the same true of livestock? The geneticists would probably say no. Superficially, it is perhaps a little surprising to find what relative importance the geneticists continue to attach to the breeding factor in animal husbandry, although that importance would seem to be contradicted by some of their own findings. In milk production, for example, it is known and admitted that only some twenty per centa mere one-fifth of the variability in milk yield between one dairy cow and another is attributable to heredity, to the breeding factor. The remaining eighty per cent four-fifths of the wholeresult from differences in feeding,
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management, health and other environmental factors quite distinct from heredity. I recall debating this very pointthe over-emphasis on genetic factors in milk productionwith the well-known Danish authority, Dr. Eskedal, at a Scott-Danish agricultural conference held in Orkney. Eskedal had described the improvement in the milk yield of Danish cows from an average figure of six hundred and eighty-five gallons in the year 1903-04 to an average of eight hundred and seventy-five gallons for the year 1949-50, an increase of over twenty per cent in the course of the last half century. The increase itself is unquestioned, only the reason for the increase being a subject for debate. Eskedal evidently attributed the increase to an improvement in the milk yield potential of Danish cattle secured by selective breeding towards that particular target, selection being aided by milk recording, fortified by bull testing stations in more recent years. Thus, in the fifty-year period during which the average milk yield had risen from six hundred and eighty-five to eight hundred and seventy-five gallons, the number of milk recording societies in Denmark had increased from two hundred and eighty to one thousand seven hundred and eighty-five. The tacit assumption Eskedal made from these figures was that the increase in milk yield was the result of an extension of milk recording. There is, however, no justification for any such assumption. In this connection it is informative to examine the increased milk yield of Danish cows in rather greater historical detail. The facts are summarised in the table overleaf. I have underlined the figures for 1903-04, for 1919-20, and for 1944-45. It is evident that despite the passage of intervening years and the steady increase in the number of milk recording societies throughout the entire period from 1903 to 1950, that there is very little difference between them. YEAR MILK YIELD (GALLONS)

1903-04 685 1908-09 681 1913-14 718 1919-20 612 1924-25 750 1929-30 803 1934-35 773 1939-40 756 1944-45 695 1949-50 875 To make the matter even clearer, let us compare the recorded milk yield with the number of milk recording societies in the three periods I have underlined: YEAR RECORD SOCIETIES 1903-04 1919-20 1944-45
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MILK YIELD -IN GALLONS 685 612 695 280 635 1785

NO. OF MILK ING

Obviously, there is no real relationship between the notable increase in Danish milk yields from six hundred and eighty-five gallons in 1903-04 to eight hundred and seventy-five gallons in 1950 and the increase in the number of milk recording societies during the same period. One is led to inquire, therefore, whether the notable increase in the average recorded milk yield of Danish cattle over the last fifty years has anything whatever to do with milk recording. Have we any proof that the recorded increase in milk yield, which is a fact, has anything whatever to do with the effect of selective breeding, which is a hypothesis whether based on the principle of milk recording or any other method of selection. Our average milk yields, like those of Denmark, fall in times of war. They fell dramatically in Britain between 1939 and 1941 from five hundred and ninety-five to four hundred and seventy gallons and I think they fell for the same reason as in Denmarka reduction in the importation of concentrates for the feeding of dairy cows, in both countries during two World Wars. Agricultural scientists at times tend to be somewhat inconsistent in their reasoning. When milk yields fall they forget all about selection, attributing the result to what is usually a quite patent reduction in feeding. Yet when milk yields rise they never accept such a rise as being attributable to improved feeding. They bring in such assumptions as improved methods of breeding, of milk recording and so on and to me it seems rather an illogical thing to do. I do not suggest that breeding is of no importance in the improvement of dairy cattle. Any such contention would be obviously absurd. What I do suggest is that the relative importance and the actual effect of selective breeding have been greatly exaggerated. In a sense this is most fortunate where, as in Britain in the not very distant past, and to some extent even to-day, the main basis on which selection was made was fancy. It may, at first sight, prove a little disappointing now that we are attempting to select on a basis of fact. Yet, actually it should be a tremendous encouragement to everyone except to certain geneticists who may be professionally discouraged. For how much simpler our task of raising the milk yield of the worlds cattle will be if we can do so relatively simply by modifications of environment rather than by long-term efforts to modify the distribution of hypothetically immutable genes! Similarly, the lessons of the Cambridge University Farms important experiments conducted by Mansfield and Brooks seem to have been over-looked by the geneticists in their present insistence on the necessity for sire performance and progeny testing in efficient beef production. These Cambridge experiments, which always impressed me as being conducted with an unusual absence of self-advertisement, led Mansfield to make a very important statement of opinion in his address to the British Society of Animal Production in the year 1949. His statement reads: It is the fact that these calves were reared on a high plane that enables them to thrive in this way on such poor fare, rather than the fact that they were beef-bred, though it is their breeding which usually receives all the credit. Brooks made the same point with even greater force in his paper delivered to the Farmers Club two years later in which he
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said: I have formed the opinion that much of the merit of beef breeds is due to nutrition, and the high plane of rearing in early life, and not so much to breeding as some would have us suppose. I have discussed these experiments in fuller detail in my Beef Cattle Husbandry.3 They are of profound interest and certainly give little support to the view that the solution to more economical beef production lies in applied genetics. Nevertheless, the view that the solution lies there, provided that breeding be controlled by the geneticist rather than by the cattle-breeder, is current animal husbandry teaching both in America and here at home. At the moment heavy propaganda is being employed to force the breeders of pedigreed cattle in Britain to follow the approved path flagged out by the geneticists approval. The position in pig-breeding is even more serious since, following the establishment of P.I.D.A. and of pig progeny testing stations, the seal of official approval has been stamped upon the geneticists pretensions. Boar progeny testing, possibly soon to be reinforced by boar performance testing, is being pressed upon the industry as the rather improbable answer to the pig industrys inherent economic difficulties. Progeny testing which, sensibly pursued, is an essential tool of every successful breeder, is being turned into a fetish. The genotype of competing boars is being evaluated on methods of testing which are open to criticism and it is only the present technical difficulties in using AI successfully in pig-breeding that prevents the results of these officially conducted tests being foisted upon the industry as the very last word in scientific improvement. It is only a step from official approval of a small group of officially progeny tested boars to the refusal of licences to all other boars less outstanding in their genotype ordare it be suggestedperhaps rather less lucky in the draw! The practical breeder of livestock, at the moment, is in rather a weak position to withstand these officially supported pretensions of the applied geneticist because although from rather different reasonshe is equally inclined to over-estimate the importance of the breeding factor in animal husbandry. To a large extent, especially in the case of the breeder of pedigreed stock, his living depends upon the continuance of such exaggeration. Were it ever to become current doctrine that the feeding, management and hygiene of farm animals were of much greater economic importance than the breed to which they belonged or to the way they had been bred, then the business of the breeder of pedigreed livestock would suffer severely. It is because the general run of commercial farmers continue to believe that the breeder of pedigreed stock has animals to sell that are better than their own, because of their breeding, that he is induced to pay the enhanced prices which enables the pedigreed breeder to maintain the higher standard of husbandry to which much of the apparent superiority of his animals is indubitably due. It is certainly a circle, whether that circle be classified as vicious or benign. I have discussed this question rather more fully as regards ram breeding in my Sheep Husbandry. It is one which still greatly intrigues me. To make a hypothetical suggestion, suppose I were to exchange places with any one of the owners or managers of any of the world
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famous herds of beef cattle in this country today and that for the next few years I were in full control of that herd, yet carrying on the general breeding policy laid down by the owner or manager before his displacement. I am absolutely certain that following three years of my management the herd would no longer be world famous and that very few of the cattle would be fit for presentation either at show or sale, simply because I havent sufficient knowledge of the specialised technique used in the rearing and bringing out of pedigreed cattle. Yet according to genetic theory the cattle should be every bit as good. The bulls, for the sole purpose for which bulls are maintained, that of breeding other cattle, should, again according to genetic theory, be equally valuable, because a mere change of management could not alter the genetic constitution of the herd. Nevertheless, their actual average sale price might be less than a tenth. Why is it? Are we to assume that all the practical cattle breeders of four continents are paying good money for the results of superior husbandry under the mistaken impression that they are making expensive purchase of superior genes? Such would surely be a contradiction of the political cliche that it is impossible to fool all the people all the time. The alternative hypothesis is that superior husbandry, an almost universal accompaniment of stud breeding does, in fact, improve the breeding value of the animals concerned. That, of course, would be a flat contradiction of the accepted biological principle of the non-inheritance of characters acquired during an animals own life-time. I leave the question there, unanswered, because frankly I can find no satisfactory answer to it. I have always found it difficult to believe in the rigid separation between genotype and phenotype that the geneticist assumes; to agree to the proposition that the germ cells, subjected through the blood-stream to all the influences of nutrition and hormones, bear a charmed life of complete independence, secure from all the slings and arrows of outrageous mismanagement or ill-feeding. Nevertheless, I have no new evidence to prove the contrary. I am entirely positive, however, that the stud-breeder, subconsciously always and consciously not infrequently, seeks to exaggerate the importance of the breeding of the animals he sells and to minimise the influence of the high level of feeding and skilful husbandry such animals enjoy. There is, of course, admittedly an element of showmanship in the whole business. The ram of a hill breed of sheep reputedly hardy is usually proclaimed to have come straight off the heather although every shepherd fully realises that such size, substance, weight and fleece were never produced on a diet of heather alone. Usually the stud rams of hill sheep breeds have enjoyed a much more comfortable if rather less romantic environment. I remember being privileged to inspect a very well-known stud flock of one of our Scottish hill sheep breeds. It struck me, at once that unless the farm had been producing stud rams of a hill breed at attractive prices, it could very well, with rather more intensive cultivation, have carried a flock of more naturally productive sheep. Apart from the special purpose of stud sheep breeding it wasnt
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the type of farm where one would expect to meet with sheep of a bill breed at all. The rams were being prepared for sale. I was shown them in a well-strawed airy shed with the feeding troughs built permanently against the walls. They were certainly magnificent specimens of their particular breed. I cannot vouch for their hardihood or hillworthiness. Yet the curious point is that had those same rams been really bred, reared and fed on heather and hill pasture alone and been presented for sale with the size, condition and fleece which such a dietary permits, their owner could hardly have expected to secure the prices for his rams that he actually obtained. Again, we come up against the same paradox, mere showmanship in commercial practice or a colossal error in scientific theory. Weighing all factors up and admitting to many reservations, basing my opinion mainly on my experience with sheep, the class of livestock I know by far the best I am inclined to favour the alternative of showmanship. I came to the same conclusion when I was trying to puzzle out the problem in specific relation to sheep husbandry. Perhaps I cannot provide a more considered and genuinely honest conclusion to this chapter than by quoting what I wrote there: Indeed, it is not too much to say that a great deal of the average stud-breeders trade depends upon a misconception. A stud ram, stepping in all the glory of the skilful shepherds completed toilette into the animated bustle of the show-ring, looks a much finer animal than anything the potential customer ever sees at home. In size, condition, conformation, and fleece he is infinitely superior. The potential customer, despite the disillusion of a lifetimes effort, is still inclined to imagine all the evident excellencies of the stud ram when exposed for sale are attributable to his breedingthe length of his pedigree, the orthodoxy of his flock book, the mysteriously instinctive capacity of his breeder. In point of fact the stud ram often looks so superbly well because he has been fed superbly well. Actually, superiority of the stud sheep is always due, in part, to the fact that stud sheep are fed at a level that would be quite uneconomic in any commercial flock. If, therefore, the progeny of a stud ram are to rival his appearance they would, in turn, require to be fed at an uneconomic levelthat is to say, uneconomic unless their destiny were to become stud sheep themselves. Nevertheless, the commercial flockmaster continues to hope that in buying these fine-looking stud rams he will reproduce by supposedly good breeding qualities that are, in reality, attributable to superior food. The prevalence and persistence of this superstition are plainly revealed in the repeated failure of more progressive stud breeders when they attempt to sell or exhibit their animals in unforced condition.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. MANSFIELD, W. S. Beef from dairy and dual-purpose calves, Brit. Soc. Anim. Prod., 25 (1949). 2. BROOKES, A. J. Some aspects of rearing cattle for beef, J. Farmers Club, Part 5, 65 (1951). 3. FRASER, A. Beef Cattle Husbandry (2nd Ed.) 179 Crosby Lockwood (1959). 4. FRASER, A. and STAMP, J. T. Sheep Husbandry and Diseases (3rd Ed.) 141, Crosby Lockwood (1957).

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PART TWO Environment

51

TEN Do Environmental Effects Persist?

THAT the sale value of stud, pure-bred or pedigreed stock depends largely upon the skill with which they are fed, fitted and shown can hardly be denied by anybody who has had anything to do with the business. Some of the fitting is mere showmanship, more in keeping with the toilette of mannequins than the breeding of livestock. On the Scottish Borders before the Kelso ram sales, the snip-snipping of shears is a sound as characteristic of the autumn season as is the call of the cuckoo announcing spring. The Border Leicester ram before sale-time has his face washed and powdered, his wool fluffed-up, trimmed and tinted like any debutante at her comingout party. All that is showmanship, plain showmanship. It cannot be considered, even on the wildest wings of breeders fancy, to have any effect whatever on the real breeding value of the animals concerned. Whether the high level of feeding, the optimal nutritional plane to which stud animals are subjected has any more genuine value deserves closer consideration. Accepting feeding as being the most important environmental factor in the individual growth and development of farm animals it is evident that the effects of feeding in both mammals and birds mayapart altogether from questions concerned with heredity persist over a number of generations, perhaps even unto the third and fourth generations.
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Let me illustrate my meaning by a quotation concerning the effects of feeding vitamin E to rats: The rat has a large ability to store vitamin E in its tissues. This is shown by the fact that females born of mothers whose diets contained a liberal supply frequently have enough in their bodies at birth to carry them through a first pregnancy. Rats reared on natural foods rich in the factor and then placed on a deficient diet may produce three or four litters before exhausting their reserves. It follows that, at least on the female side, the effect of the superior feeding and husbandry always afforded to stud animals may be carried over into succeeding generations even when the succeeding generations have been transferred to a commercial environment where it is customary to feed them on a very much lower nutritional plane. That may possibly be one advantage of the intensive level of husbandry in stud flocks and herds although one that would almost certainly be attributed by the uncritical to superior breeding. Consider the hypothetical case of Clydesdale horses transferred to the Shetland Islands and pastured there. Since the size of the foal, as Hammond showed, is determined mainly by the size of the mares body, the foals of the first generation would be of normal Clydesdale size at birth. The frame of the Clydesdale mare, her skeletal mineral reserves particularly would, at least in the first generation, permit a milk yield higher than that supportable by the pasture. The size of successive generations of Clydesdales would decrease inevitably, possibly eventually to that of Shetland ponies, but it would require the passage of several generations to produce that effect. What might be termed the inertia of environmental influence may also occur in poultry. Suppose, for example, that a flock of pure-bred pullets are maintained on an especially high nutritional plane because of the sale-value of their hatching eggs. As a result of that superior level of feeding those same hatching eggs will contain an abundance of all the vitamins and trace mineral elements of recognised importance in poultry nutrition. The chicks, following their three weeks incubation, will hatch out with these nutritional factors contained in their bodies and, just as in the case of rats fed vitamin E, it may take several generations to exhaust the initial store. In a poorer environment and under a lower level of feeding and less perfect dietary, the imported pure-bred poultry may exhibit a superiority of performance over several generations which although almost certainly attributed by the uncritical to their superior breeding might in fact be the result of environmental inertia of initially superior feeding carried down through the female line. In both mammals and birds, the female body is not only a sanctuary for genes but an important store-house of food as well. In most cases, however, the main sale product of the stud flock or herd is the improving sire and neither the male mammal nor the male bird brings any nutritional influence to bear upon his offspring. Or does he? The only contribution that, let us say, a bull makes to the calf he conceives is one microscopical spermatozoon. Accepted theory is that this spermatozoon which carries the genes is in no way affected, neither for better nor for worse, by the level at which the bull is fed. It must follow, if this theory be acceptable, that all the
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extra nutrition lavished, for example, on a beef bull calf, is wasted food, of no more genuine value than the powder dusted on to the cheeks of a Border Leicester ram. Showmanship and nothing more or is it in any way possible, despite accepted theory, that it is something more? The independence of the germ cells is, of course, an essential part of the teaching of modern genetics. The theoretical bull is first reduced to a spermatozoon, then to the genes on the chromosomes that the sperm contains; finally to an equation expressing the manner in which the genes are presumed to behave. To the geneticist the bull is merely the carrier of genes although, somewhat curiously, the modern geneticist has again become rather less uninterested in the bull himself. The views of geneticists are changing and so far as bulls are concerned, changing in a most intriguing way. In his well-known book Animal Breeding, Hagedoorn wrote: When we succeed in building up a bull for the shows, so that his back-line is just perfect and he has fat in all the correct places, but no bulk where he is supposed to be slim, this does not help him in getting any more perfectly formed young stock. In other words, the phenotype of the bull was considered of no importance. Progeny testing was claimed to be essential to secure any satisfactory evaluation of a hulls genotype. The more recent development of the sire performance test has rather altered the picture so that it might now be permissible to rewrite Hagedoorns statement of opinion. When we succeed in building tip a bull for the shows, so that his back-line is just perfect and he has fat in all the correct places, but no bulk where he is supposed to be slim, we have secured evidence that we should be able to do the same with his offspring. The question of Sire Performance Testing of beef bulls has given rise recently to considerable controversy which has tended to mask the extraordinarily interesting theoretical implications of certain of the results already obtained. In practice beef bulls are almost invariably suckled as calves, by their own dams or by nurse cows of higher milk yield. When a calf is suckled, its feed consumption, for very obvious reasons, is difficult to measure so that, in order to satisfy the requirements of experimental control, bull calves to be tested were at first reared by artificial methods from shortly after birth. In several instances the (development of bull calves thus artificially reared was unsatisfactory both to breeders and to Livestock Inspectors. An unusual proportion o[ the bulls being tested were refused licences, in other words, the phenotype of the bulls was below accepted standards. Whether the genotype of the bulls was in any way affected remains an open question. According to accepted genetic theory it shouldnt have been so affected in any way whatever. It would seem that a properly planned investigation to determine whether it was or was not is a research project of the very highest priority. The compromise by which bulls calves are accepted for testing at a much later age, and after having been suckled for several months, cannot in the end be a satisfactory one either to the geneticist or to the breeder. The original contention of the geneticist, that the nutritional
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inequality inevitable if the calves be suckled tends to mask the variation in heritable growth-rate and efficiency of feed utilisation which these tests are designed to measure, remains entirely valid. On the other hand the consensus of opinion among breeders appears to be that unless a beef bull be suckled as a calf it will never develop into a satisfactory beef bull, no matter how well it has been bred nor how carefully it has been tested, thereby laying themselves open to the perfectly logical query: What then does the beef bull breeder profess to sell, the outcome of superior breeding or of better feeding? If current genetical theory be fully accepted the answer could hardly be deemed satisfactory to the beef bull breeder. On the other hand, were such genetical theory considered questionable, the beef bull breeder and the Breed Societies which represent his interests would have a much stronger case to bring forward to judgement or debate.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. MAYNARD, L. A. Animal Nutrition (3rd Ed), 194, New York (1951).

ELEVEN The Internal Environment

BETWEEN the inheritance of an animal and the external environmental influences that direct its development lies a sort of twilight region which Hammond has called The Internal Environment, a region which is one of enormous and increasing importance in animal husbandry. It is a subject which is essentially applied endocrinology and one which to-day is being developed by much intelligent research. The subject is dramatic and certain research workers may be taking full advantage of the spot-lights but, nevertheless, it is one full of promise. It is one which may, eventually, provide means of short-circuiting certain of the slow and uncertain attempts being made to improve animal production by methods of breeding. Differences between breeds where such differences are in fact
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heritable and not merely the persistent effects of a particular system of husbandry are, after all, a matter of endocrine balance. The distinction between a dairy cow which tends to convert its food into milk and a beef cow which tends, on the other hand, to convert its food into beef, is certainly due to a difference in the balance of its endocrine organs. Once our knowledge of endocrinology is sufficiently advanced it should be possible eventually to make any cow milk well without having to progeny test for twenty years to improve the heritable twenty per cent of the actual yield. It should be equally possible to alter the endocrine balance of any animal so that it lays down flesh. Of course, there is nothing at all novel in this effort to control the endocrine balance of farm animals in the interests of economical production. It is something as old as Castration, which must be nearly as old as animal husbandry itself. The general results of castration may well have come originally to the common knowledge of mankind as a sequel to the barbarous practices of human warfare. Certainly the castration of farm animals is pre-historic in origin. Although the operation is so simple, the results are profound. By two scrapes of the knife the stallion becomes a gelding, a bull an ox, a ram a wether, a boar a hog. By a rather more subtle operative technique imposed by the intra-abdominal position of the testes in birds, the cockerel became a capon. It is interesting but not very relevant to speculate upon the development of animal husbandry without the device of male castration. Undoubtedly the farmyard would be something of a zoo! However, castration is so old a husbandry practice that we have come to accept its effects as something quite normal and not at all unnatural. Actually, the castrate of any species is the reverse of natural or normal and it is a salutary mental exercise for those who perhaps tend to cling to the known and well-trodden pathways of traditional farming too long, occasionally to ponder that thought. There is nothing the most adventurous scientist is doing to farm animals to-day nor likely to do in the future, that can possibly have a more revolutionary effect than castration. Castration made planned breeding possible since all the males not required for breeding could be castrated early in life and thereby effectively prevented from procreation. Many geneticists would probably maintain that this was the most important historical effect of castration, a contention which to me(I may be wrong) seems to show a strange confusion of thought on the part of the geneticist. For, unless phenotype, and phenotype at an early age be accepted as a reliable guide to a sires genotype, then it must often have happened that the potentially best breeding bull was castrated as a calf and his herd mate of superior phenotype kept entire merely to flatter and deceive. Certainly castration does permit of some sort of selection but it is difficult to imagine how dairy bull calves, for example, could ever have been effectively selected for the purpose of improving milk production at the customary age for bull calf castration. Tractability and docility were increased. In the case of cattle the improvement was immense. The savage bull became the patient ox, the prime motive power in all agricultural operations over the greater span of the history of farming. Still confining discussion to the effects of castration in cattle, the
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improvement in beef production made possible by castration, was also immense. Apart From simplification of husbandry systems, the changing of the bull into an ox leads to better conformation, with a loss of weight in the neck and shoulders where the beef is of poor quality and a relative weight increase in the hindquarters from whence the best beef comes. The beef itself, moreover, is of finer texture, more tender, and of more palatable flavour. It is also fatter and in days when the work of men was mainly manual and out-ofdoors, that fat was requisite. Since the machine and factory age, the compressed heat energy of fat is no longer a physiological necessity for the majority of mankind and the greater fatness of the castrates carcase is no longer an economic advantage in beef production. That modern complication has been dealt with in a modern way. Those synthetic hormones of the oestrogen class called stilboestrol and hexoestrol when implanted in or fed to castrated male cattle have the useful effect of reducing the proportion of fat in the carcase while increasing the lean. The evidence is conclusive and there is no further doubt on the matter. Both hormones are potent in very small amounts and since they may have other less desirable effects unless most carefully used, their release to the beef producer was possibly premature. Nevertheless, the demonstration that the quality of beef can be so readily altered by factors concerned with the internal environment is of fascinating interest and of the greatest importance. One wonders what length of time would have been required to secure a corresponding result through selective breeding, no matter how scientifically controlled such selection might have been. Now, the distinctive featuresboth physical and psychicalof the entire male, which are termed the secondary sexual characters, are produced by hormones, called androgens, secreted into the blood by the interstitial tissue of the testes or testicles, the male sex organs. Castration terminates this secretion so that all the results of castration of the male are due directly and solely to the absence of a particular hormone in the animals circulating blood. The effects of oestrogen implantation or feeding arc due to the presence of this hormone in minute amount in the animals circulating blood. In the entire male its presence there results in testicular atrophy and one of the earliest utilisations of Estrogens in animal husbandry was to caponise male birds. This method of chemical canonisation is widely employed in the poultry industry of to-day. In the mammalian male castrate it causes alteration in carcass composition already described and for this purpose has been widely used in the beef producing industry of America and rather more cautiously here at home. It has also been employed to a less extent in wethers or wether lambs, the castrated male sheep. Oestrogen hormones have also been used successfully in the induction of artificial lactation. In some of the earliest experiments, carried out at Reading, the inunction of stilboestrol led to the onset of lactation in maiden goats. Hammond and others during the 1939-45 World War explored the possibilities of inducing barren cows and heifers to come into milk by Oestrogen therapy. They had a measure of success since lactations of up to six hundred gallons were secured in this way. More recently, Oestrogens in combination with another hormone called progesterone, the internal secretion of
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the corpus luteum, have been used to secure artificial lactation in barren ewes. The results have been most encouraging, affording hopes of early and successful application to sheep husbandry practice. Barren hill ewes so treated, it would seem, will not only come into effective lactation but will, moreover, adopt an orphan or surplus twin lamb without the slightest hesitation. It has been known for a long time that the reproductive mechanism of the female mammalcalled technically the oestrus cycleis governed by the internal secretion of the endocrine organs or ductless glands. The production of synthetic hormones on a commercial scale has opened up possibilities of applying that knowledge to animal husbandry. The controlling factor the pace-maker or governorof the whole endocrine system is the anterior lobe of the pituitary, a bean-sized organ well protected in a bony box of the skull at the base of the brain. The pituitary has nerve connections with the eyes which explains the fact that the secretory activity of the gland is influenced by changes in the intensity and duration of light. That is the immediate physiological reason for the restriction of the breeding season in so many mammals, both domesticated and wild, to particular seasons of the year. Much of the applied work on this subject has been carried out in connection with sheep. Most breeds of British sheep (the Dorset Horn is the only important exception)have a breeding season restricted to the autumn and winter months. During spring and summer the ewes do not come into oestrus or heat and therefore cannot conceive lambs. Working on the hypothesis that this was connected with changes in the length of day, Hammond, over twenty-five years ago, was attempting to alter the breeding season of ewes by subjecting them to increased darkness during summer and to artificial lighting during winter. It was finally proved at Cambridge by those working with Hammond on this subject that ewes, by suitable light manipulation, can be brought into active breeding condition and can conceive lambs at any season of the year desired. The influence of light being to alter the rate of secretion of hormones by the anterior pituitary gland, the possibility of more direct control of the ewes breeding season by hormone therapy immediately arose. The subject is complicated, because the hormones of the anterior pituitary influence and control the secretion of so many other hormones concerned in the female mammalian breeding cycle, particularly the oestrogens secreted by the ovaries themselves and the progesterone secreted by the corpus luteum. Dr. Ian Gordon has recently performed much valuable research work on this subject, with the general result that he has shown conclusively that the breeding season of ewes can he controlled in this more direct way, although the technique has hardly attained that simplicity in execution and reliability of results which arc desirable before attempting its application to sheep husbandry practice. One particular hormone secreted by the anterior pituitary called the follicle stimulating hormone or F.S.H. for short, directly affects the fecundity of the female mammal, as the number of ova produced at each oestrus cycle is influenced by the level of F.S.H. circulating in the blood. Artificial increase of that level by injection of F.S.H. will lead to increased ovulations. Now, the blood serum of
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pregnant mares is particularly rich in this F.S.H. hormone during a certain period of pregnancy so that pregnant mare serum, or P.M.S. for short, is widely used as a convenient source of F.S.H. Ian Gordon, among others, has explored the possibilities of increasing the lambing rate of ewes by P.M.S. injection at suitable times. Again, a considerable measure of success has been achieved. On occasion the experimental success has outrun the requirements of practice because while in low- land farming, every flockmaster welcomes abundant twins, too many triplets. quadruplets or even quintuplets may merely prove an embarrassment to shepherding. As is common knowledge because of the wide publicity accorded to the investigation, Gordon is now applying similar techniques to cattle with the economic object of replacing single suckling by double suckling calves in beef production. The complication of twinning in cattle which results in free-martins, those sterile and rather masculine heifer calves born twin to bulls is being ignored. since the free-martin, although useless for the dairy, makes perfectly good beef. In birds, as in mammals, there is a connection between light, F.S.H., and ovulation, and in poultry the use of artificial lighting to encourage winter laying preceded scientific knowledge which explains the linkage. Because of the small individual size and the large units in which poultry are kept it seems improbable that direct injection of F.S.H. will ever replace light manipulation as a measure of practical husbandry. That fact gives rise to some very important considerations. There can be little doubt, for example, that Ian Gordon, despite the very considerable success he has achieved in altering both the breeding season and the fecundity of sheep by hormone therapy inclines to the view that it would be rather simpler in practice if sheep could breed continuously and prolifically without the needles aid. In the breeds of sheep already available in Britain, the Dorset Horn has a sufficiently extended breeding season to satisfy all out-of-season lamb production requirements. There arc many foreign sheep breeds with similar breeding behaviour. There is the possibility of evolving new sheep breeds having this character by deliberate selection. As regards fecundity, the Scottish Half-Bred ewe in suitable environment is prolific almost to an embarrassing degree, so much so that some flockmasters avoid flushing the flock to avoid a super-abundance of unmothered lambs. There seems a promise in the near future of using hormone therapy to alter an animal to fit the job if it should so happen that no animal is available to fit the job without hormone therapy. If such an animal is available it is clearly preferable and also more economic both in labour and other items of expenditure to avoid the use of hormones altogether. Nevertheless, the science of endocrinology does provide an additional means of control over animal production, a control, moreover, which is more direct, rapid and predictable than any attempt to attain the same object by methods of breeding. To have any useful application to animal husbandry, it is essential that the use of hormones be both simple in technique and reliable in results. The introduction of hormones into the animals body must, to be useful, combine accuracy of dosage with minimum labour. Introduction through the food makes accurate dosage impossible unless animals are housed individually. Repeated injection involves too much handling and too much labour. Implantation, which
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combines the possibility of accurate dosage with only one handling, would seem to be the method of choice.

TWELVE The Power of External Environment

THE importance of heredity has been so strongly stressed in history, both natural and human, that the greater importance of the environment is too frequently ignored. The results of perpetuating such an error may prove unfortunate both to mankind and to the domestic animals which serve his needs. For it is undeniable that Shakespeare, doubtless endowed with all the desirable groups of genes Elizabethan Englishmen possessed, yet wanting the social environment in which he lived, would have developed into something less human than a Tarzan deprived of Technicolor glamour. Our farm animals, lacking the food and husbandry that man provides, turning feral, would lose their productive utility, becoming once again mere creatures of the chase. In one generation the improvements presumed to be due to selective breeding would have gone with the wind. Yet. advocates have not been wanting to press eugenics, rather than social betterment as the material salvation of mankind. There is, today, an evident preeminence of the geneticist in all official schemes aiming at livestock improvement. Now, there is one and only one justification for the time and labour of what is somewhat loosely termed livestock improvement and that is the more abundant and economical production of the particular animal products which livestock are expected to produce. As is clearly evident from the matters discussed in the earlier chapters of this book, the modern emphasis on Livestock improvement is based upon selective breeding. Whether such selection is mainly phenotypic or more sensibly founded upon evaluation of the genotype by a properly controlled system of progeny testing makes no difference to the argument. The idea underlying all forms of selective breeding is that by planned breeding methods of some form or another it is both possible and advisable to secure more productive farm animals through the raising of the genetic potential upon which production must ultimately depend. Such a hypothesis assumes implicitly that the full potential of our existing farm animals is already expressed. That assumption is, of course, an entirely false one. The genetic potential, already existing, of our livestock for production, is seldom fully expressed. Maximal expression is the exception, not the rule. Only under the specialised economic circumstances of stud breeding is such genetic potential manifested unhampered by economic considerations limiting expenditure on food and on management. Thus, for example, while the average fleece-weight of Australian sheep is some 8 lbs. of raw wool, the fleece-weight of stud Merino sheep in Australia approaches double that figure. While the average fleece-weight of Scottish hill sheep on the hill, is no more than 4-5 lbs., that of hill sheep of the same breed, under the superior environment of stud sheep farming may again easily be doubled. The average milk-yield of the British dairy cow is some six hundred gallons. In the very best dairy herds it may be three times more. It is frequently assumed that it is three times greater because the cows in the very best dairy herds are three times
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better. That assumption is supported by the quite legitimate vested interest of the breeder of pedigreed dairy stock who, just as in the case of the breeder of pedigreed beef cattle, attributes all his herds evident excellencies to their breeding because that is what a breeder professes to sell. The modern geneticist possibly owing to vested interests scarcely less legitimate, supports the breeders pretensions because they serve to magnify the importance of his own speciality. On first principles, however, it seems equally possible that the comparatively low milk yield of the average British cow when compared to the much higher yields in the very best dairies is due rather to lower standards of feeding and management than to anything particularly attributable to her breeding or her lack of breeding. There is, in fact, ample evidence available to support such a view. Boutfiours success at the Royal Agricultural College, in producing astronomical milk yields from unpedigreed Friesian cows is a case in point. It has always been Bout-flours contentionand his earlier work in Wiltshire is plain proof of itthat the milk yield of the average cow depends primarily upon the method by which she is managed and fed. Boutfiour raised the average milk yield of a whole county by advocating a revised method of feeding based, very sensibly, on the strictly finite capacity of a cows gut. By his successful advocacy he secured a substantial increase in milk yields from the same cows. At Cirencester, although his cows were perhaps selected individually on their previous milk yields more thoughtfully than has at times been suggested, he proved quite decisively that by improvement based on feeding and management rather than upon selective breeding, it was possible to secure milk yields quite as high as those obtained in pedigreed herds selling breeding stock largely upon milk records. To my mind, however, the most important evidence on the matter has come out of Denmark where Larsen and Eskedal in a series of tests showed what the best possible systems of feeding and management could do in increasing the milk yields of cows already in the one thousand gallon class. These tests were carried out with Red Danish Milk cattle on the two estates of Stensbygard and Wedellsborg. The results obtained at Wedellsborg were rather better controlled and in addition more conclusive. There, six cows of known milking capacity were put under especially favourable environmental conditions including separate accommodation in well-littered loose-boxes; a high level of feeding and careful regulation of times of feeding; high intake of the best quality concentrates; four times daily milking by skilled hand milkers. The yield of milk and butterfat for two years before the experiment and in the experimental year are shown in the following table; figures expressed as the average per cow:
THE YEARS BEFORE THE EXPERIMENT 1945-46 1946-47 Number of milking days. 328 287 Lbs. milk . 9,630 10,060 Fat % . 3.73 3.69 Lbs. butterfat 358.9 371.3 THE. EXPERIMENTAL YEAR 1947-48 365 23,186 3.93 911.2

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Commenting on these figures, Larsen and Eskedal wrote: The figures show a considerable increase in yield from the years before the experiment to the year of the experiment. In 1945-46 and 1946-47 the yield is of the standard expected from averagely good recorded cows. Three hundred and fifty-nine lbs. of butterfat in 1945-46 and three hundred and seventy-one lbs. of butterfat in 1946-47 are not particularly impressive yields. On the other hand, it is most impressive to find that the same cows have given nine hundred and eleven lbs. of butterfat in the experimental year. The yield of butterfat has increased by one hundred and forty-six per cent from 1946-47 to 1947-48, i.e. the cows gave nearly 2 1/2 times as much milk in the year of experiment as in the previous year. The enormous importance of care and feeding for milk production has seldom been demonstrated so clearly before. It is well worth while devoting rather more consideration to these figures which in so many ways appear to contradict much of Eskedals insistence on the importance of the breeding factor in raising the milk yield of Danish cattle. Thus, according to Eskedal, selective breeding on the basis of milk recording and bull testing stations is presumed to have raised the average milk yield of Danish cows from six hundred and eighty-five gallons in the year 1903-04 to eight hundred and seventy-five gallons in the year 1949-50, an increase of one hundred and ninety gallons over a span of forty-seven years. Even accepting the unproved assumption that this increase was attributable to selective breeding, it is not an especially striking one. The results of an improved environment as demonstrated in the Wedellsborg trial are so very much more impressive. There, the milk yield of the cows tested increased from a figure of one thousand and six gallons, already one well above the Danish national average, to two thousand three hundred and eighteen gallons, an increase of one thousand two hundred and twelve gallons in one year! It is intriguing to speculate how many centuries of selection for groups of desirable genes would be required to attain a comparable result. Even at its very highest valuation, livestock improvement by selective breeding for productive as opposed to superficial characters is such a slow one that it is possible, indeed probable, that the most desirable aims at the commencement of selection may have become out-dated while selection has barely begun. One illustration of such a paradox is the present position of the British pig industry. For almost half a century the British pig-breeder has been officially encouraged to select towards a type with its coat fitted to suit the Wiltshire bacon curers cut. It may have seemed more sensible to some that the cure might be adapted to suit the pig rather than the pig be malformed in the interests of a cure. However, the British pig producer for many years has been wellnigh forced into attempts to satisfy the requirements of the Wiltshire bacon-curing industry, with the big stick of Danish competition suspended threateningly over his intermittently rebellious head. To-day, that big stick seems finally to have fallen and the British pig-feeder is about to be led up the alternative avenue labelled pork. Meanwhile, the newly-established pig progeny testing stations are still awarding diplomas to boars, based on an examination designed to satisfy the Wiltshire cure. Quite
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conceivably, prompted by the dictates of political expediency and international trading, P.I.D.A. may revise the examination system by awarding boars full marks for conceiving pork! It might be suggested that there are other more direct and less dilatory methods of suiting a pig to the most profitable market. The pig, as are all our farm animals, is a plastic, individually adaptable creature. By manipulation of environment, any average pig can be fitted into any ordinary market although perhaps not so exactly fitted as the Wiltshire bacon curers might desire. Actually, a pig can be adapted by the manipulation of environment to fit a variety of markets without awaiting the verdict of progeny testing and similar long results of genetic time. McMeckans classical experiments at Cambridge showed how it could be done. To quote John Hammond: The body form and composition of the pig is capable of large transformations under the influence of environment. For example, by alterations in the shape of the growth curve by the control of nutrition McMeekan found he could, by high nutrition up to 200 lb., make a pork type; by low nutrition, or high followed by low nutrition, produce a bacon type; while by low nutrition up to 16 weeks followed by high nutrition a lard type was produced 2 The experiments by McMeekan on pigs, by Brookes and Mansfield on beef cattle, by Larsen and Eskedal on dairy cows, taken together, demonstrate the enormous yet curiously neglected power of environmental influences in altering the type and productivity of farm animals. The bee-hive provides even more irrefutable evidence of the power of environment. The difference in productivity between the queen bee laying many thousands of eggs and the worker bee that lays none is determined entirely by feeding and housing, having nothing to do with genetics at all. These environmental effects may be considered as being sufficiently dramatic and powerful in one generation without necessarily challenging the teaching of modern biology that such fundamental alterations in structure and function are non-heritable and without effect upon succeeding generations.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. LARSEN, L. H. and ESKEDAT~ H. W. Feeding of High-Yielding Dairy Cows Reprint of 260 Report from the Nat. Res. Instit. An. Hus., Copenhagen (1952). 2. HAMMOND, J. Farm Animals, 235, Butterworth (1952).

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THIRTEEN FeedingThe Chemists Inquiry

OF the several factors which, taken together, constitute the external environment in which farm animals live and reproduce, nutrition is undeniably that of the greatest physiological and economic importance. It is, in consequence, an obvious task of science to assist the farmer to a more precise understanding of the principles on which the feeding of his livestock should be based. It is salutary to remember that the practical farmer in the course of countless centuries of observation and by trial and error had already acquired a vast store of traditional knowledge concerning the feeding of livestock before nutritional science, in any form, had attempted to come to his assistance. That traditional knowledge, moreover, remains the fundamental basis on which the practical feeding of farm animals is carried on to-day. Fortunately so, perhaps, because the so-called scientific principles of feeding farm livestock are themselves admittedly in need of a radical and scientific revision. Based as they still are mainly upon the rather out-dated chemistry and physiology of the nineteenth century they are taught, if not always practised to-day, chiefly because nobody so far has succeeded entirely in devising anything more satisfactory to put in their place. Nevertheless, these principles, not in any case particularly scientific, deserve critical examination if only in the hope of cutting away dead wood so that a new and more vigorous growth may take its place. It may prove useful,
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therefore, to conduct such a critical examination, commencing with a discussion of the methods of chemical analysis upon which the whole system is founded. Let us first consider the method of routine foodstuffs analysis performed by the agricultural chemist. The separation of the various constituents in a foodstuff will divide it into six useful groups which we have called moisture, mineral matter or ash, crude protein with its sub-division into true protein and non-protein nitrogenous substances, ether extract, crude fibre, and a residue, which is not determined by analysis but by difference between the sums of the other groups and 100 per cent, that we call nitrogen-free extractives or soluble carbohydrates.1 Suppose we examine in rather more detail the six useful groups detailed above. I shall quote from Professor Watsons excellent summary in making our examination. 1. Moisture. If any foodstuff is heated to one hundred degrees C., it loses weight, and this loss is due almost entirely to the evaporation of water or, as it is sometimes called, moisture. 2. Dry matter. After boiling, the residue is spoken of as the dry matter. 3. Mineral matter or ash. If the dry matter is heated strongly most of it burns away and leaves behind the ash or mineral matter. This determination cannot, in itself, provide much information useful to animal nutrition since . the main fraction is silica or sand, which curiously enough is not an essential to growth either in plants or animals. Actually, in addition to sand, the mineral matter or ash as determined in a routine agricultural analysis. contains many other elements but of these only some fifteen are essential to the proper growth of the plant and, of these, thirteen are necessary for the animal. Of these thirteen elements several called trace elements, for example, cobalt, require special spectrographic methods for their quantitative determination. In fact, apart from calcium and phosphorus, it is rare to find any further classification of that heterogenous collection of substances, some essential to survival, others completely inert, which the agricultural chemist groups together in the analytical group termed ash or mineral matter and have, in fact, only the one point in common in remaining as an incombustible residue after organic matter is subjected to strong heating. 4. Organic matter. The fraction which burns away in the determination of the ash is called the organic matter. It contains all the carbon compounds in the food and may be divided into two main groupsthose which contain nitrogen and those without it. This organic matter contains the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the non-nitrogenous organic matter. In addition, nitrogenous organic matter contains the element nitrogen and the distinction between the two groups of organic substancesnonnitrogenous and nitrogenousis of admitted utility in animal feeding. In addition to carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, with or without nitrogen, the organic matter also incorporates appreciable amounts of sulphur and phosphorus which, however, are left behind in the ash. The method of analysis does not, therefore, make a clear distinction between the organic and inorganic
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constituents of a food. 5. Nitrogenous organic matterproteins, albuminozds. The compounds in the plant which contain nitrogen range from the simplest formsammonia or nitratesto the most complex, the protein, and there is a wide range of intermediate products.1 The determination of nitrogen in a foodstuff is simple and accurate and when the agricultural chemist gives a figure for the percentage of nitrogen contained within a foodstuff he is providing the farmer with reliable and useful information which no farmer could have obtained without the chemists aid. Possibly, from the point of view of routine analysis it might have been just as well to have left the matter there. Because, when the agricultural chemist attempted to expand the results of the relatively simple and accurate determination of nitrogen into other terms he entered into much more debatable territory. It were better, for example, had the rather appropriately named term of crude protein never been coined. Crude protein is the figure obtained by multiplying the nitrogen present by the arbitrary factor 6.25. This factor is based on the finding that certain proteins contain about sixteen per cent of nitrogen. The figure obtained for crude protein assumes, therefore, that all the nitrogen in the foodstuff under analysis is present in the form of protein, which, in fact, it is not. This, in itself, must render the estimations of crude protein, from which even the word crude is frequently omitted, almost valueless. Watson1 admitted this when he wrote: The total nitrogen in a food multiplied by the conversion factor is called the crude protein which is really a well-deserved term. Ammonia, for example, is the simplest nitrogen compound which is likely to be present in the plant and it contains over 82 per cent of nitrogen, and when this is multiplied by the usual factor it gives a value of about 515 per cent, or in other words, it has been overestimated five times. All the other intermediate compound will be incorrectly measured, though to a diminishing extent until the true proteins are reached. Even here there are differences, and it has been suggested that a series of factors should be used varying with the nature of the food. Similar criticism has been voiced more strongly by Voisin.2 It has already been stated, and is again repeated, that there has too often been a tendency to confuse nitrogen and protein and to attribute the same biological (nutritive) value to all proteins. This was a serious error in the case of ordinary foodstuffs: it had disastrous consequences where grazing is concerned. The implication of these criticisms as they concern practical agriculture was summarised by Synge: It is sheer presumption to recommend changes in farm practice on the basis of a few Kjeldahl figures. It is, of course, by the Kjeldahl method of nitrogen estimation, that the figures for the calculation of crude protein are obtained. 6. Carbohydrates. By far the greater part of the organic matter in most foodstuffs is made up of the carbohydrates. It is of interest to consider how the agricultural chemist deals with thisthe largestfraction of his analysis. It is customary to make a broad separation into what is called the nitrogen-free extract or soluble carbohydrates on the one hand, the insoluble carbohydrates, called crude fibre upon the other. This division depends upon an empirical method. That part of the carbohydrate fraction which is
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dissolved by treatment with a solution of sulphuric acid of known strength, under strictly defined conditions, followed by similar treatment with a caustic soda solution, is called the soluble carbohydrate fraction. Another name is nitrogen-free extractives, and this is rather better since it is less definite than the first. Crude fibre is, roughly speaking, the less soluble forms of carbohydrate plant tissue contains. Hay and straw contain a high proportion of such carbohydrates of the cellulose type. It was assumed, apparently, that such insoluble carbohydrates were of small nutritional value, being thought to be indigestible, despite the practical experience gained by successive generations of farmers that hay and, to a less extent straw, are of unquestionable value in the feeding of farm animals, particularly of horses and of cattle. It is, of course, now common knowledge that such carbohydrates of the cellulose type are broken down to simpler, readily soluble compounds in the rumen of cattle and sheep and in the caecum of the horse. Nevertheless, the assumption that carbohydrates of the cellulose type, being insoluble in acid and alkalie of the prescribed concentrations are, in consequence, indigestible, is the basis of the routine analysis of carbohydrates in food. It was said above that the carbohydrates were classified on a simple basis into those which were soluble and those which were insoluble in an acid followed by an alkaline digestion under strictly controlled conditions. These were supposed to be representative of the digestion process in the animal, but in fact they are not comparable. Actually, the nutritional value of crude fibre varies widely according to the species of animal to which it is fed. Admittedly of small account in the feeding of pigs or poultry, it is now known to be essential to the proper functioning and full health of ruminant animals such as cattle and sheep. Therefore, Watsons statement that the higher the percentage of crude fibre in a plant, the less easy is it for the animal to digest, and consequently the less its value, can only be classed as a half-truth. 8. Ether extract, fat or oil. This determination accounts for all the substances in a foodstuff which are soluble in petroleum ether. These substances vary in composition from the true fats with an extremely high energy content to waxes and pigments which have very little. The actual nutritional value of the ether extract will vary widely, therefore, according to the foodstuff subjected to this analytic procedure. Thus, the calorific value of the ether extract of root crops is little more than half that of the ether extract obtained from oil seeds or oil cake. This brief summary of the six groups of the agricultural chemists routine analysis suggests that it is an unsound foundation on which to base any theoretical assessment of the nutritional value of feeding-stuffs for farm animals let alone one sufficiently reliable to be used as guidance in the practical feeding of livestock. It is, nevertheless, the framework on which foodstuff analysis and the compilation of feeding stuff tables depends.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Watson, S. J. Feeding of Livestock, Nelsons Agric. Series, 12 (1949). 2. Volsin, A. Grass Productivity, 119, Crosby Lockwood, London (1959). 3. SYNGE, R. L. M. The Utilisation of Herbage Protein by Animals, Brit. J.

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Nutrition 6 (1) 100-104 (1952).

FOURTEEN Foodstuff Analysis and Feeding Stuff Tables

IN Great Britain the Fertilisers and Feeding Stuff Act (1926) makes it compulsory for every person who sells as food for cattle (including pigs) most of the feeding stuffs in common use to give the purchaser a written statement showing the percentage content of certain nutrients such as protein, fat, fibre and phosphoric acid. But an analysis showing the total amount of these constituents is of little use in determining the feeding value of the food, and in fact may be highly misleading. Only when the nature of the feeding
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stuff is known might a total analysis give an indication of its value to an experienced person. An inexperienced feeder might be totally misled, for, to take only one example, a food could be adulterated with ground leather, which, on account of its nitrogen content, would show the food rich in protein when the real content of digestible protein might be negligible. This quotation from H. R. Davidsons classical book on pigs, puts into words what everyone who has had any practical experience of the animal feeding stuff trade must often have thought. These written compliances with the law give no real guarantee of the nutritive value of the product sold. In this connection, it is of some interest to compare the figures for the routine chemical analysis of a feeding stuff of known nutritional value such as red clover hay with that of another, such as bracken, which has none.2
FEEDINGANALYSIS AND TABLES
DRY MATTER Clover Hay Bracken (dried) 83.3 93.4 CRUDE PROTEIN 12.0 13.8 OIL 2.4 3.0 CH2O 35.5 46.9 CRUDE ASH FIBRE 26.2 24.4 7.2 5.3

Since bracken has the higher percentage in dry matter content, crude protein, oil, and soluble carbohydrate with a slightly lower percentage of crude fibre it might be assumed that bracken had a higher nutritive value than red clover hay. If such an assumption be absurd as we know from common experience that it is absurd, what useful information can these figures of routine chemical analysis possibly convey? Yet in the Ministry of Agricultures Bulletin No. 48, they occupy the first column of no less than twenty-two pages of closely printed tables! The second column of the same tables is definitely more informative since it is entitled digestible nutrients. Digestibility is measured by subtracting the figures obtained by a routine chemical analysis of an animals dung from those of the food upon which the animal has been fed. This procedure involves feeding the food to the animal before making any deduction as to its nutritive value. The procedure being more tedious and costly, there are rather fewer figures in these tables than there are for the average composition per cent of the same feeds as shown by chemical analysis. There can, however, be no disagreement with the statement that The digestible composition is naturally a much more reliable criterion of feeding value than the crude composition obtained by chemical analysis2the only argument being as to whether any others have any reliability at all. The third column of the composition and nutritive value of feeding stuffs published in the Ministrys Bulletin No. 48, gives figures for four calculations based on the figures for digestible nutrients as shown in the adjacent column. These calculations are of the nutritive ratio; the factor V; starch equivalent and total digestible nutrients, the two latter being estimated as per hundred lb. of the feeding-stuff concerned. Each of these terms require a short definition and critical review. (a) Nutritive ratioThis is the ratio of the digestible protein, expressed as unity, to the sum of digestible carbohydrates and fat,
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the latter being multiplied by 2.25. It is a term seldom used at the present time. (b) The letter V signifies a correction factor which is known as the percentage availability of the feeding stuff. The correction factor is necessary because the full values of the digestible nutrients do not become available for production on account of the energy that is wasted in the work associated with the mastication and digestion of the feeding stuff. The magnitude of the correction naturally increases as the foods under consideration become more fibrous and less digestible.2 This V factor was introduced by Kellner in working out his starch equivalent system. Having calculated the starch equivalent (S.E.) of pure nutrients (protein, carbohydrate, fat, fibre, etc.) he then proceeded to check these values using ordinary feeding stuffs. He found reasonably close correspondence between calculations and results when concentrates were fed, but wide discrepancies as regards roughages. Thus wheat straw yielded only 1/5th of its calculated bullock fat producing capacity, hay some 2/3rds. Actually, when dealing with coarse fodders, Keilner substituted another convention to replace this V correction factor. Instead he subtracted the percentage of crude fibre, multiplied by a factor 0.58, from the S.E. value. Bringing theoretical calculations into line with experimentally ascertained facts by the use of arbitrary correction factors can easily be overdone. Given a sufficient range of such correction factors any theory can be brought into some degree of apparent agreement with any facts. Keilners starch equivalent conception is only slightly less obscure. It may be defined as being: The number of lbs. of starch that would be required to produce the same amount of fat as 100 lbs. of the feed. Using the technique of the combined nitrogen and carbon balance(which does not require detailed description here)Kellner estimated (by calculation and not by carcase analysis)that 4 lbs. of pure starch when fed to a fattening bullock resulted in the deposition of 1 lb. of fat in the bullocks body. That is the real basis of Keliners starch equivalent system, which aims to reduce the energy-producing or rather the fat-forming value of all feeding stuffs to values comparable with that of starch. S.E. is essentially a comparative assessment of the energy value of foods. As such it can be translated into caloric or heat-producing value which is more direct and more easily understood, 1 lb. of S.E. 1,071 k. cal. It is said that Kellner used the term starch equivalent rather than calories as being one more easily understood by farmers. That assumption, always a dubious one, is certainly untrue to-day. To quote Dr. Leitch, lately Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Animal Nutrition: I cannot believe that the present-clay farmer who has the price of gas quoted to him in pence per therm, who has become used to the c.c. or litre as a measure of cylinder capacity and who is in no danger of believing that a horse-power is related to either a racehorse or a Clydesdale, would have any difficulty in understanding requirements and feed values in terms of calories, the calorie having its one and only true meaning.3 Dr. Leitch was perfectly correct in what she said. The term S.E. is perhaps rather more obscure in its meaning to the farmer than it is
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to anybody else. It is one unused by the physiologist. It has not been accepted in the U.S.A. It is unused in this country in the rationing of pigs. It is not really applicable(as Mollgaard discovered)to the rationing of dairy cows since milk production has a higher energy utilisation efficiency than has the fattening of meat animals. It is a term and conception much better abandoned in the interests both of simplicity and clear thinking. To give Dr. Leitch the last word on the matter it seems as if the starch and fattening ox system had outlived its usefulness, and indeed, as Blaxter says, the basic assumptions are not altogether sound. The term total digestible nutrients (T.D.N.) is a relatively simple one might almost call it a rule-of-thumb methodof attempting to compare the relative energy value of different feeding stuffs when fed to the animal. T.D.N. is the sum of the % digestible crude protein % digestible carbohydrate % digestible fibre + % digestible oil x 2.25. The factor 2.25 for the multiplication of the percentage of digestible oil is used to allow for the greater energy content of fat as compared with protein and carbohydrate. The energy value of the protein is based on crude protein, allowing all non-protein nitrogenous compounds full value. Apart from the obvious criticism that the T.D.N. system rests finally on the questionable validity of the routine agricultural chemists analysis as discussed in an earlier chapter (Chap. 13) the convention of attributing the full energy value of true fat to all the ether extract, and the energy value of true protein to all nitrogenous compounds. is clearly inaccurate. Nevertheless, largely because of its straightforward and unpretentious character, the system would seem to have certain very definite advantages. These advantages may be summarised as follows: (a) Its relative simplicity. This is important, remembering that both feeding stuff standards and tables if they are to have any practical value at all should be designed for use by the feedingstuff manufacturer in the compounding of rations and by the practical farmer who prefers to compound his own. (b) Although, admittedly, it fails to take account of all losses of food energy in its passage through the animal, it does take account of what is by the largest, the loss in the dung. (c) T.D.N. figures are based on the results of actual digestibility trials which are relatively simple and inexpensive to perform. In consequence, in the determination of T.D.N. figures there have been far more actual feeding trials and fewer calculations than in certain more superficially exact methods. (d) T.D.N. figures take account of energy required for both maintenance and production, whereas most other methods attempt to measure production as distinct from maintenance. This is probably an advantage rather than otherwise because while the distinction between the nutritional requirements for maintenance and production is a useful convention for the nutritional investigator, it is one highly unlikely to occur in the animal body itself. (e) T.D.N. is the system adopted in the U.S., where by far the largest proportion of modern feeding trials have been conducted. While this does not necessitate its adoption in this country, such adoption would seem more sensible than the retention of the S.E. system based on a rather small number of feeding experiments
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conducted in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Additional to the S.E. and T.D.N. conventions for the measurement of food energy, there are several others which would require too much space for detailed description here. The net energy system designed by Armbsy, Mollgaards protein-equivalent system, Hanssons food-unit system. Morrisons estimated netenergy values are a selection of those better known. There are others and it is, indeed, a curious feature of this branch of nutritional science that almost every worker in it has tended to devise some new system of his own yet that each, in turn, has made additions to terminology rather than to knowledge. It is of some interest to consider the multiplicity of systems, British, American, and Danish; the involved conceptions and clumsy terminology of this older branch of nutritional studies compared with the newer study of the vitamins where the units of measurement are international, agreed, and stated in precise terms which anyone can readily understand. It is not surprising, therefore, that the last section of Maynards (1951) chapter on feeding standards is entitledFood energya field for further study. Additional to the various attempts that have been made to state the available energy of food and the requirement of energy in precise terms for the maintenance and production of farm animals, similar devices have been adopted in connection with the nitrogenous constituents of food which are included in the allembracing term crude protein widely adopted in agricultural science. To understand fully the sharp distinction made between protein and other constituents of food, one would have to probe too far back into the history of nutritional physiology. Sufficient perhaps to say that during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, protein was considered of over-riding importance in the nutrition of both animals and man; that it was considered to be the substance holding the secret of life itself; and that there was as much exaggeration of the relative importance of the protein content of a mixed dietary as there is in the case of the vitamins today. Accepting this nutritional teaching of their generation and of their time, the earlier agricultural chemists would doubtless have preferred to classify foods according to their content of what came later to be called true protein. That, however, was a task beyond their technical resources. Nitrogen analysis was, however, a practical proposition, and it is on the figures obtained in nitrogen analysis that the estimation of crude protein is based. There then developed the controversy as to whether only the true protein of a food was of nutritional import or whether the non-protein nitrogenous compounds, the N.P.N., had any nutritional value as well. Practical experience of the use of foods such as young grass in which most of the nitrogen is present in the non-protein form showed that it had. Out of this debate arose the convention of the protein equivalent (P.E.) which, together with the starch equivalent (S.E.) is the accepted basis for the rationing of milk cows in relation to their milk production generally adopted in this country to-day. The history of the origin of the term protein equivalent is an interesting one. Professor S. J. Watson has given the details in a passage of commendable frankness.4
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In 1925 a committee was set up by the Ministry of Agriculture for England and Wales to investigate the value of non-protein nitrogen in the feeding of the dairy cow. For many years previous to this it had been evident that non-protein nitrogen could replace protein nitrogen to some extent in the ration. The committee compromised on the question of the value of the non-protein fraction of the nitrogenous compounds by assigning to it half value. The corrected figure, which was half of the digestible nonprotein nitrogenous compounds added to the digestible true protein was called the protein equivalent, and new feeding standards were drawn up to allow for this alteration in value. It seems only fair to inform the dairy farmer of the real foundation on which the official guidance concerning the feeding of his herd is based. He should know and has the right to be told that of the two main conceptions, S.E. and P.E., on which the official, sometimes called scientific, system of rationing dairy cows is based, the one, S.E., is a concept of a German agricultural scientist of the last century who was investigating the energy requirements of fattening cattle, not of milk production, and that the other, RE., is the compromise decision of an officially sponsored committee of the Ministry of Agriculture for England and Wales.

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FIFTEEN FeedingA Biologists Approach

ADMIT that the contents of this chapter are entirely speculative. They are intended to be so. The late Professor J. J. R. Macleod of insulin fame was wont to use an expression Thinking aloud, a practice he indulged in frequently as much, I think, in an attempt to clarify his own mind as to illumine those of others. In this chapter, then, I shall be Thinking aloud. It has been my duty over the last decade to include in my lectures that branch of agricultural science sketched briefly in the two preceding chapters and which is usually termed The scientific principles of feeding farm animals. I have never been at all happy or at ease in doing so because, quite frankly, I have come to consider so much of it a curious jumble of confused thinking flavoured with some pompous and pretentious nonsense. Nevertheless, it would, of course, be quite improper simply because of this individual and heretical view, to omit from the teaching of students reading for a degree in agricultural science, due consideration of such conceptions as starch equivalent and protein equivalent with which they must needs be familiar in their subsequent careers. It does appear to me, however, Thinking aloud, that the whole conception of maintenance and production requirements is based on too rigidly mechanistic a view of the animal body and of the way in which it functions. In many respects it is a culmination of the apathetic fallacy in assuming, as it does, that the animal is an inanimate machine lacking any capacity for reaction and adaptation. Without wishing to be unnecessarily obscure I would suggest that a great deal of confusion of thought arises from the determination of an over-materialistic philosophy to regard an animal as an object rather than a process; to assume it Static when it is in fact dynamic; entirely passive when it is defensively active; dead while it is still alive. It is even a little difficult to decide when an animals individual life begins. It may be false thinking to regard it as having an individual life at all. It might just as well be regarded as an episode in a serial, a temporary material embodiment of continuing life. Certainly an individual animals life does not commence with its birth although from so many practical considerations it is convenient to regard it as doing so. The doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church which allows no moral distinction between abortion and child murder is entirely logical. Birth is a critical phase in the development of an individual life(if such can really be said to exist! )but is certainly not its beginning. Is conception then, as distinct from birth, the logical date from which to reckon the beginning of a new life? Surely, merely because of the small material size of the gametes which unite at
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conjugation, it is not necessarily correct to do so! Actually, it could be quite as easily argued that the spermatozoon is simply a microscopic phase of a complete male, rather than one particular fragment of such a male; and the unfertilised ovum merely a microscopic phase of a complete female, rather than one particular fragment of such a female. Once again, as in the instance of birth, conception is possibly more truly regarded as one critical phase in development than as the creation of something that is entirely new. The crisis might perhaps be better likened to the reunion of two branches of a stream separated temporarily by the island of sex than to the issuing of a new river from an entirely independent source. It follows that if the two channels of the stream be too far separated that they cannot unite, as in the mating of two separate species which so frequently results in complete sterility or the conception of infertile hybrids. It may be that those genetic characters borne upon the chromosomes of the uniting gametes, and to which such basic importance is attributed by the science of genetics, are little more than the easily observed bubbles on the streams surface, distracting attention from the more essential union of the waters of the underlying stream. If there be anything in the substance of these outspoken thoughts, then the individual animal can be regarded as merely one material manifestation of an historical process, a history that long precedes either the conception or the birth of a particular animal. That part of its history which precedes conception would be what we term more commonly its inheritance; that part between conception and birth its pre-natal environment; that between birth and maturity its post-natal environment. It would be wrong to draw any too sharp a line of demarcation between one historical phase and any other-Customary distinctions between one generation and that succeeding it, between heredity and environment, between pre-natal and post-natal development could only be regarded as mere artefacts of thought. What has thiswhat some might call mere verbiage got to do with the feeding of farm animals on any principles whether scientific or otherwise? I believe that it has a great deal to do with it. For if there be any cogency in the reasoning then the species and the individual manifestation of the species are both in continual process of change and to regard an animal as something fixed and unchangeable static rather than dynamic, at any one stage of its historical development is a prime error of thought. Yet, that, precisely, is what the scientific system of rationing farm animals attempts and indeed claims to do. The first assumption that system makes is that the nutritional maintenance requirements of an animal are proportional to its body-weight. Even in term of strictly material science that assumption is not entirely correct since it is known that such requirements are in fact proportional to surface area rather than to weight. Moreover the whole conception of maintenance as distinct from production can only be regarded as a descriptive convenience, another artefact of thought, since the physiological processes that occur in the animal body cannot possibly be imagined to make any such distinction. Nor is it even strictly correct to assume that such maintenance requirements are exclusively proportional either to body weight or to body surface since it is known that they depend, also, both upon
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the nutritional plane upon which the animal is being fed and on the nutritional plane upon which the animal has previously been fed. When the nutritional plane is or has been low then it is known that the maintenance requirements are less. In fact, the animal behaves far more like a prudent housekeeper who is careful and thrifty in expenditure either because she is poor or has been habituated to thrift by previous poverty, than like a machine such as a motor-car which performs so many miles to the gallon of fuel poured into its tank. The second assumption made by the scientific system of rationing farm animals is that maintenance necessarily takes precedence over production in the sense that an animal must maintain its body weight before becoming productive, an assumption that cannot be correct because it is contrary to so many known and patent husbandry observations. The ewe hogg may continue to mature and develop its skeletal frame while losing heavily in weight. The dairy cow, in the early stages of lactation, produces milk at the expense of her frame and beyond the resources of her diet. Certain ewes will continue to give milk on sparse pasture to the stage of emaciation and danger to health, the sookit doon yowe so familiar to Scots shepherds. The assumption implicit in the scientific system of rationing that an animal cannot produce until its maintenance requirements are met is therefore one that is plainly untrue. The continuance of that assumption cannot be without its husbandry dangers. For instance, one of the most recent findings recorded by the English M.M.B. as a result of their contemporary comparison method of progeny testing is that the use of certain bulls has led to increased milk yield of their daughters under all levels of husbandry and feeding. The result, which seems adequately proved, is heralded as a triumph, presumably because of the erroneous conception that production is something necessarily superimposed upon maintenance. If, however, as is common husbandry knowledge, production is compatible with submaintenance, then the ultimate result of using bulls of high milk potential upon cows kept on lower levels of husbandry and feeding may be merely to invite sookit doon cows in English dairies to join the company of sookit doon ewes on Scottish hills. The third assumption made by the scientific system of feeding farm animals is that each unit of production requires the same amount of food to support it, while in fact it does not. Animal production, like so many other phenomena both biological and economic, follows the law of diminishing returns. In milk production, for example, as the yield rises, more matter and energy are requisite to support each additional unit of yield. It must surely be an error, therefore, to prescribe so many units of S.E. and of P.E. for each gallon of milk yielded without regard to the magnitude of the yield. It is fairly clear, therefore, that the scientific system of rationing farm animals is not, and cannot be strictly accurate even within the confined territory of its own somewhat limited conceptions. On first principles it would, indeed, be surprising were such a relatively simple arithmetical approach to an extremely complex subject productive of useful or fruitful results. Over-simplification may not lead to greater clarification, rather the reverse. If, on the contrary, we regard an animal at any one time as being
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in one fleeting stage of continuous and progressive development, then the problem, while being possibly more realistic, is obviously infinitely more complex, and the mathematical treatment required for its study somewhat rather more advanced than simple arithmetic. If that be so and if something of the nature of relativity be involved in the adequate mathematical treatment of the subject, then a truly scientific system of the rationing of farm animals may have to await the appearance of its Einstein. Perhaps Kenneth Blaxter, judging from his more dynamic and individually historical approach to the study of milk yield in dairy cows, may qualify eventually for a modified fulfilment of that role. In the meantime while in search of an Einstein there is a more biological and less crudely mechanistic way of looking at the response of any farm animal at any particular time to the ration on which it is fed. There must be, first of all, the influence of its pre-conceptional history, termed customarily its heredity, and it would be strange were environment to be totally without influence upon that preconceptional history. The problem deserves fresh and unprejudiced examination. freed from the dogmatic denials of genetic theory. The importance of pre-natal historythe life of the animal between the two critical phases of conception and birthis now admitted by all agricultural scientists and in relation to other periods of its history is perhaps apt to be exaggerated rather than the reverse. The period of individual history between the two critical phases of birth and of weaning is of such obvious importance in mammals that it would be surprising to find its influence belittled or ignored. Yet, in fact, that cardinal error is implicit in certain current methods both of sire performance and of progeny testing. Beef bull calves selected for a sire performance test are chosen either at birth or at weaning. Their subsequent performance under standard conditions of feeding and management is assumed to be conditioned by one and only one stage of their individual historythe pre-conceptional stage commonly called heredity. Where the bull calf is selected at birth, the continuing influence of that stage of its life history between conception and birth, which in cattle extends for nine whole months, is ignored. When selected at weaning, two stages in the life history, those between conception and birth and between birth and weaning are similarly ignored. Any differences observed between the reactions of individual bull calves to the standard environmental conditions of the sire performance test are attributed apparently without question, and it might be added without reasonable criticism, -to one and only one stage of its previous life history; to the pre-conceptional history called its heredity. The possible and indeed, probable influences of the two later stages of the bull calfs individual history, those between conception and birth and between birth and weaning are seemingly forgotten. Is it allowable to do so when it is known that a simple error of diet, say a calcium deficiency, in the food of a pregnant mammal may lead to such a degree of interference with the growth capacity of her unborn offspring, that they perish before birth? Again, when pigs are selected from litters, whether or not by random, for the purposes of a boar progeny test, it is assumed, apparently, that the reaction of such pigs to the standard environmental conditions of the pig progeny testing station are again attributable to one half of one stage of its previous life
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history, being that one half of its pre-conceptional history contributed by the boar. In view of the environmental influences between conception and birth and between birth and weaning known to affect the subsequent growth-rate of pigs, such an assumption would seem to have insufficient validity to be accepted as sound science, let alone to be imposed upon the pig industry in the form of accreditation, as being an essential preliminary to sound pig husbandry practice. That stage of an animals life history interposed between weaning and the final phase of production and commonly called the store period, is a somewhat artificial one, being imposed upon the animal by the farmer on considerations related mainly to seasonality, to economy, to housing and to markets. Even although artificial, however, it is certainly of an importance that cannot be safely ignored. In beef production, for example, the nature of the store period has an important effect upon final finishing. Cattle that are to be finished on grass do better if they are out-wintered and sparingly fed. Indoor housing and a higher nutritional plane during winter result in a poorer response when the cattle go out to grass. It is not merely the store period, however, that influences the response of beef cattle to the final finishing stage. As shown in the Cambridge experiments the method of calf-rearing is also of considerable import. Undoubtedly the feeding of the pregnant cow giving birth to that calf has its abiding effect and, of course, the influence of the calfs breeding. although often exaggerated, is nevertheless one admitted by all. It follows, surely, that when any farm animal arrives at its final stage of production, whether that product be milk, meat, eggs or wool, its performance is dependent not only upon the rations fed to it during the final phase but upon its nutritional history not merely from the day it is born but in its dams womb before it was born and even perhaps, more speculatively, upon that of its ancestors of which it is merely the continuing phase, generations before it was even conceived. This view of the historical development of an animal in which its reaction at any stage of its life history is regarded as having been influenced and in part determined by each and every stage which has gone before is not one generally subscribed to in the agricultural science of to-day, which aims to reduce the dynamic process which is the living organism to the status of a machine. These historical considerations, however, although meantime minimised in current theory, are certainly in no way ignored in the best traditional practice. Consider, for example, the preferences of a skilled cattle feeder purchasing store cattle to feed. In the first place he will pay due attention to the breed or cross which he buys. He will, therefore, pay due and sensible regard to the pre-conceptional stage of the store cattles history. He will probably combine in his consideration the two stages spanning the life-history of the cattle between conception and weaning. He will certainly display a preference for the suckled calf. He will be very much concerned with the method by which the cattle have been handled between their weaning and their sale as store cattle. At times, since his object is profit, he may have to modify certain of his preferences in response to price. If, however, his intention be to show his cattle when finally fed, either on hoof or on hook, then no surrender of preferences to price can
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be safely made. A calf of beef breeding either pure bred or cross, suckled by a good cow on sound grazing, never checked at any stage of its life so that its calf flesh be retained, is the calf of his choice. Every stage, not merely one stage of the animals life history is taken into careful account. All are accorded their due value. In so doing he may be a sounder biologist than he, himself, suspects or than agricultural science might allow. Can it, for instance, be entirely without biological significance that the leading breed of beef cattle came out of Speyside and that so many individual champions of our fat stock shows are bred and nurtured in that cattle-kind valley to this very day? It seems, therefore, justifiable to conclude that the response of an animal to its diet is as much a matter of history as of energy and of matter, and that without a full appreciation of the importance of that history, no really useful prediction of that response can be adequately made. On the contrary, with a fuller appreciation of that history, prediction may be possible and, in the case of an experienced and skilful feeder may even be reasonably exact. In discussing the judgement of store cattle, MCombie wrote: A judge of store cattle ought to be able to say at a glance how much the animal will improve, how much additional value you can put on him on good, bad, or indifferent land, and on turnips, in three, six or twelve months. Unless a grazier is able to do this, he is working in the dark, and can never obtain eminence in his profession. I am ignorant of any system of scientific rationing of [arm animals that would enable a grazier to do so. Had then, MCombie really such a prophetic gift? As a result of a life-time experience of the cattle trade, of breeds and crosses, rearing districts and rearing methods, of breeders and of farms, I am prepared to believe that he had. MCornbie, after all, was one of the founders o[ a breed of beef cattle which almost a century later, either on hoof or on hook, appears to be unbeatable at all the main fat stock shows of this country and of America. Can any agricultural scientist, even a geneticist, presume to do better?

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PART THREE Husbandry

SIXTEEN Peasant Husbandry

WITH the detailed economics of peasant family farming as compared with large scale capitalistic farming, collective farming, or factory farming I do not intend to deal. If economic theory be the sole guide, I am perfectly certain they have no defence. The small family farm may well have its social value. It may be a good breeding ground both for animals and men. Yet if the criterion of its efficiency be costs of production in terms of money or of labour, pounds shillings and pence spent, or man-hours required in relation to unit of production obtained, then I am convinced that the small family farm simply cannot hope to compete with the large-scale, fully mechanised, highly capitalised farm. Unless, indeed, the family farmer and his family are contented with a lower standard of
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living, longer hours of labour, and a less monetary reward than wage-earners are able to command on farms of more complex organisation and of larger size. I think the agricultural economists who both hold and state that view are the most genuinely sincere agricultural economists because it must be very difficult to be an agricultural economist and hold any other. The uneconomic nature of small-unit farming is too patent for disguise. The county of Aberdeenshire in which I write is a county containing many such farms. Every market day the main streets of Aberdeen become hopelessly congested with the cars of these small farmers, each come in to sell or to buy a mere handful of bestial. One competent manager with adequate office facilities, a telephone and a car could, with an enormous economy in both man-hours and petrol, arrange the entire business of the vast contingent. Only the other day I passed by one of these small farms where a farm sale or roup as we Scotsmen call it, was in animated operation. The fields adjacent to the small steading were filled with parked cars. There were thick crowds of sightseers and bidders. Had I been an interested economist I could no doubt have made a sufficiently rapid calculation that considering the number of cars and the mileage covered in their assembly, the cost of concentration out-weighed the probable value of the goods on sale. If it be true that the small family farm is becoming out-dated as the small family business is already out-of-date, then legislation on the lines of the Small Farms Act and the Crofters Commission amount to little more than paternally sentimental gestures to put back the farming clock. The competitive failure of the small family farm is confirmed in its banishment to places like the Scottish Western Isles or the North Wales highlands which, under modern conditions, scarcely repay farming. Yet, although economics be wisdom, it may still be folly to be wise. There are some men to-day, there may be more in the future who prefer their souls independence to pay-packet pottage. Such men appear to earn respect if not money, otherwise there would be fewer legislative endeavours to put the clock back. The recommendations of Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Crofting Conditions were framed more with a view to saving the crofter than of preserving his croft. Thus. whilst admitting that crofting . . . is a system which. as now organised, is fighting a losing battle against the social and economic forces of the daythe Report goes on to say that: We have thought it right, however, to record our unanimous conviction, founded on personal knowledge and on the evidence we have received, that in the national interest the maintenance of these communities is desirable, because they embody a free and independent way of life which in a civilisation predominantly urban and industrial in character is worth preserving for its own intrinsic quality. The necessary corollary to this reasoning is curious. even if it be true. It assumes that whereas a free and in dependent way of life is a desirable thing, otherwise it could hardly be deemed to be worth preserving, yet such freedom and independence are unlikely to be attainable under those conditions of urban and industrial life called or miscalled civilisation. It is an interesting if unintentional admission that an economic system rather than man himself has become the captain of mens souls. Concerning animal husbandry, it can hardly be maintained that
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the peasant enjoys much freedom or independence in respect to his livestock and it is, very possibly, because of that sacrifice to his stock that he is frequently such a good stockman. He is, of course, tending his own stock rather than anothers, and, human nature being what it is, that makes a considerable difference. He is perhaps on that account more willing to become the servant of his stock because that is what animal husbandry in more primitive systems implies. Attempts to flout that implication may be the root cause of many of the problems of production and disease control which impede the progress of animal husbandry to-day and if the trends towards progressive mechanisation continue as they seem likely to continue, may well cause even greater obstacles tomorrow. From personal experience of shepherding I am convinced that particularly at certain critical phases of animal production, such as lambing in sheep husbandry or farrowing in pig husbandry, meticulous attention or the lack of it to the most trivial details concerning the welfare of the flock or of the herd, throughout the twenty-four hours of every day and for each of the seven days of every week, is by far the most important factor leading to failure or success. It is possibly because the peasant tending his own stock is more likely and more willing to become the servant or minister to his stock that his husbandry results so often seem to transcend his technical resources. When I was working at the Rowett Institute in the 1930s, I bought and sold sheep in the Aberdeen livestock markets on that Institutes behalf. I was repeatedly impressed then by the quality and condition of the stock, both cattle and sheep, whether fattened or store, that the small family farmers of Aberdeenshire brought into the sales. I knew full well the conditions under which these animals had been reared and feda mud-track called a lane leading up to an inconvenient and rickety steading, so dark, dirty and dilapidated that by no stretch of an architects ingenuity could it be adapted to satisfy the minimal requirements of the Milk and Dairies Order. There. chained by the neck in individual stalls, fed on the simplest home-grown rations of turnips, oats and oat-straw, with perhaps some linseed cake to give the extra bloom at the time of sale, the fattening black polled cattle stood calmly arrayed. There, throughout each day of every week, the farmer, helped by his family, tended the beasts. The result of this individual care, study and attention was that these small farmers in the most simple way appeared to turn out rather better cattle than we at the Rowett Institute were able to do with the aid of modern farm buildings, carefully balanced rations and all the technical resources of the day at our command. Tradition, the results of observation, of trial and error, passed down through succeeding generations was of undoubted importance in that success. Aberdeenshire, in history and by tradition is cattle country rather than sheep country, and the Aberdeenshire family farmer was then, and still is, rather more skilful and successful with cattle than he is with sheep. Stockmanship, although difficult to define, is of great importance. It is the peasants chief technical equipmentsometimes his only technical equipmentbut he uses ii with power. ft is, indeed, of major importance in successful husbandry even to-day, and if it be
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once lost, a great deal of unusually sound science will be required to replace it. Thus, it is well-known among the breeders of pedigree beef cattle that should the head stockman leave a herd, the success of that herd both at show and sale, may leave with him. Again, in experimental work with farm animals, it is always advisable to so arrange, if it be practicable and as a necessary measure of control, that all the animals on any one experiment are under the same stockmans care. The factors which distinguish a first-class stockman from one not quite so good have never, so far as I am aware, been scientifically analysed. They are, of course, largely concerned with energy and character. One stock-man on hearing an unusual noise in the byre will go out at once even on the foulest night to see to its cause. He is the good stockman. Another, possibly with far higher technical qualifications, on hearing the same noise, will open the door, feel the wind-blown rain on his face and return to television. He is the stockman not quite so good. There may well be, however, a difference rather more subtle. I remember once travelling in a bus with Dr. Callow, at that time on the staff of the Low Temperature Research Station, Cambridge, on one of the summer excursions of the British Society of Animal Production. The conversation turned on the widely-held belief that men and women too, who worked exclusively with one class of stock, came to resemble that class of stock in their facial features. He instanced Frank Garner who was billed to lecture to us on beef cattle and, indeed, Garners massive physique and closely curled hair of Shorthorn type seemed to substantiate the belief. Then I remembered what I, myself, was to lecture on and felt, and possibly looked, rather sheepish I It is sometimes said, by those who dislike peasantry, that the peasant, because of his close association with animals, tends to resemble the animal in both looks and in behaviour. The converse may also hold an element of truth in that the animal in close association with man tends to become more human in its reactions. Since fundamentally, animal husbandry amounts to a symbiotic relationship between farm animals and man, it may well be that the closer the relationship, the more successful the result. That suggestion is not merely speculative verbiage. It can be supported by quantitative proof. If one cares to talk about conditioned reflexes rather than of the way of a man with a beast, it sounds very much more learned but amounts to the same thing. It may seem rather fanciful to recall that one of the desirable qualities of a Highland milkmaid was a singing voice of sweet quality wherewith to coax milk from the cows. There is, however, nothing at all fanciful in Petersens quantitative finding concerning milk ejection, that a visit by the vet, who had once used a needle on the cows, led to disturbance of the let-down mechanism and a lowered milkyield from those cows. It is, perhaps, because in primitive peasant husbandry, although an animal is sometimes subjected to the same cruel treatment that more civilised people are apt to reserve for one another, there is never any intrusion of the apathetic fallacy. The animal is always treated and regarded as a living thing, not profoundly different in feeling and behaviour from man himself. It probably never occurs to a peasant to regard his bestial as anything else. Were he informed that there was no fundamental difference between a cow
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and a stone he would merely laugh, and it might not be on the wrong side of his face that he laughed upon. My own training in sheep husbandry was not of the peasant type. It was of the larger-scale, big flock system practised in the Scottish Borders. Both Border shepherds and Border sheep-dogs have a deservedly high reputation and until I went to the Middle East during the War years I was convinced there was none better. There, however, I changed my views, the technique of the Palestinian or Transjordan Arab peasant shepherd being so much more delicate, more gentle and I am certain of it, biologically more sound. The sheep were never driven. They were led, and control of their grazing, without any form of fencing, perfectly arranged. The flock would be safely grazing on the fresh spring pasture of the Palestinian hills. When they had been there some time, the shepherd would play a monotonously wistful air upon his pipe, the bell-wether would walk slowly towards him, its bell tinkling melodiously, and then, very gradually, gently and peacefully, the whole flock would gather together to follow their shepherd to pastures new. The practice struck me as being not merely poetical but strictly rational. The sheep having grazed, suffered no disturbance, alarm or interruption of rumination on being gathered. Full of pasture they slowly walked but never ran. They never over-grazed one area of pasture because the shepherd controlled their grazing. They moved to fresh pasture, willingly at his musical bidding, leaving their excrement and parasites behind. The dogs that accompanied the shepherd, savage wolf-like creatures commanding respect, were there to guard the sheep but not to drive them. That Middle East method of sheep husbandry is infinitely old, much older than history. It involves a closer symbiosis between animal and man, a more intimate biological relationship and is, in those important respects superior to many of the sheep husbandry systems practised today. The intimacy of that relationship is vividly described in a passage from the Gospel of St. John: . . . . . . he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice; and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him; for they know not the voice of strangers. It is such a very different picture from that of the latest occasion on which I saw sheep gathered. The shepherd wanted to shift a flock of in-lamb ewes from one field to another. He went to the field gate and, having opened it, stood there. His dog, perfectly trained to the task he was expected to perform, tore off on the wide circling run which is so attractive to witness at sheep-dog trials but which is, essentially, the first gambit of the wolf in gathering the flock for the pack to devour. The sheep, as is their instinctive reaction to the near presence of a wolf, flocked together, and then with the dog in near pursuit fled towards the gate. They arrived there panting, belching, disturbed, afraid. From every possible point of view, physiological, psychological, and obstetrical, it is obviously preferable to lead sheep rather than to drive them, even although to lead is ancient and it is rather more
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modern to drive. It is one of the many curious implications of a philosophy of materialism that what is poetical is assumed to lack practical value. Yet a sound system of animal husbandry may be both. Such was the shieling system of the Scottish Highlands, equally productive of butter and of song. The summer migration of the village community to the encampments in the high hills was looked forward to as eagerly and planned as carefully and as far ahead as continental bus tours are to-day. To quote the very charming Letters from the Mountains, written between the years 1773 and 1807 by Mrs. Grant of Laggan: It is only on the 2nd(of August). . . . that people return from, the glens. One of the great concerns of life here is settling the time and manner of these removals. Viewing the procession pass, is always very gratifying to my pastoral imagination. I rise early for that purpose. The people look so glad and contented, for they rejoice at going up; but, by the time the cattle have eat all the grass, and the time arrives when they dare no longer fish and shoot, they find their old home a better place, and return with nearly as much alacrity as they went. The shieling system, while poetical, was also practical and in many ways a much sounder method of utilising hill pasture to best advantage than is generally current to-day. The clearing of the lower ground to grow hay for winter forage was essential since cattle was the chief enter-prize: the close grazing of the higher reaches during summer, together with the long rest period of freedom from stocking during the remainder of the year, was sound policy for grass. The results of this older system of husbandry, while ridiculed by eighteenth century capitalistic economists, were not so very shameful after all. They included the support of a quarter million people in the most barren part of Britain. What sort of people it supported was shown in 1745 when a few thousand of them succeeded in shaking the English throne. Burton in describing the feat of that Highland army wrote: They had marched through nearly three hundred of hostile territory, had eluded two armies, and were within a hundred and thirty miles of the metropolis. Many of the poorer in the ranks were stunted in growth as has already been mentioned in an earlier chapter. (P. 79.) What little natural wealth there was in the Highlands was unequally divided. Nevertheless upon a husbandry system that supplied quarter of a million people with the main part of their subsistence diet, was also based the export trade in store cattle on which the whole economy of the region during the eighteenth century came largely to depend. There is curiously little that is certainly known about those cattle. One fact, however, is sure. The Highland hills carried a much larger population of cattle than they carry to-day and more than they could be expected to carry under the hill husbandry systems practised to-day. Yet, without any aid from veterinary medicine or any reliance on concentrates or manures, the surplus cattle from the Highlands were assembled in their thousands each year at the market trysts of Falkirk and of Crieff. That such was possible is a tribute to the Highland peasant farmers and to the system of husbandry they employed. The peasant way of farming; the handing down of the traditional
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results of experience from one generation to another, from father to son; the dependence upon instinct, observation and memory rather than upon reason, figures and print; the close understanding of and the intimate symbiosis with the animals tended, although it is not the husbandry of to-day, still less that of to-morrow, is not necessarily ineffective or irrational husbandry on that account alone. It is remarkable how often quite complex operations were conducted successfully in a very simple way. Methods of egg incubation, ancient compared with modern, is an interesting illustration of the case in point. Artificial incubation of hens eggs was practised by the Chinese and Egyptians for centuries before Christ, and the same methods are still employed by them. Judged by our standards the methods are primitive. The Chinese use earthenware vessels with smaller vessels inside them. These latter are loaded with baskets of eggs as the collectors bring them into the hatchery. Heat is provided by charcoal fires in the bottom of the larger vessel. Each incubator has a capacity of some six hundred eggs. The Egyptians employ a different system. They adopt massproduction methods, using mammoth ovens holding thousands of eggs. The ovens are of permanent construction, being in fact part of the hatchery building. They are heated by fire, the fuel being camel-dung and straw. Neither the Chinese nor the Egyptians use thermometers or capsules. They know instinctively the requirements of the hatching egg, the work having been handed down from father to son for generations. The hatcheries are largely family affairs.3 On the contrary: In the Western world the first attempt to incubate eggs by artificial means met with little success.3 It was not until the year 1883 when Hearson invented the capsule device which made thermostatic control of incubators possible, that modern artificial incubation, now a gigantic industry, first began. The lesson is clear. In animal husbandry as perhaps in some subjects of even graver import, educated, urbanised, mechanised mankind has lost a great deal of the instinctive perception the peasant possessed. When the most formative years of a boys life are spent in compulsory confinement studying figures and print, it is only natural that like a myopic with spectacles mislaid, lie becomes completely lost in regions of thought, action and perceptions where these do not apply. It becomes necessary to supply him with written records and with instruments of precise measurementto restore the spectacles to the victim of myopia before he can hope to see clearly and act effectively again.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Crofting Conditions, H.M.S.O. Cmd. 9091, 9 (1954). 2. BURTON, J. H. History of Scotland, 1689-1748, 1, 482. 3. Robinson, L. Modern Poultry Husbandry, 199, 4th edition, London (1957).

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SEVENTEEN Transition
ANIMAL husbandry in Britain to-day is a stage of transition. The peasant way of farming, while long in decline, is not yet dead. Apart from the poultry industry, mechanisation has barely begun. In fact, taking a birds-eye view of British farming as a whole it is strange to see how the centuries overlap. Around one village the clear vestiges of champion farming persist, with commoners even now claiming and retaining their immemorial rights to the village common. Yet, in the very next village, poultry may be kept so intensively and in such a way that the rating authorities refuse to recognise the enterprise as an agricultural subject of any description. On the majority of farms that relic of subsistence farming, called mixed stocking, persists. The mental picture of an average farm today is still a reflection of Noahs Ark; Mrs. Noah waddling through. mud to scatter light grain for poultry; Mr. Noah searching the skies for a sign of cessation of rain; the odd horse, the cows, the feeding cattle, the sheep. the scavenging sow, the hens, the ducks, the turkeys and the geese the domesticated representative of the Arks animated cargo. It is Biblical, archaic, a picturesque survival. When villages were self-supporting and self-contained a wide variety of stock to satisfy all needs and to serve all purposes was a manifest advantage. As a commercial unit in a competitive economy, the survival seems rather less advantageous. It is difficult to deny the accusation that unspecialised farming of such a description is an interesting and attractive survival of an earlier age, an uneconomic and expensive museum piece preserved by lavish grants from the National Exchequer in the midst of a fully industrialised State. That the earlier age may, in certain respects, have been a better age is no real defence against such accusations. The Tudor cottage may well have been a more pleasant home to live in than is the modern council house, but it would obviously be both absurd and impracticable on such grounds alone to propose housing the fifty and more million people of these over-crowded islands in English cottages of Tudor times. That urgent question of overcrowding is, perhaps, one of the greatest indictments of the present transition stage of British
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farming. With the growing necessity of space for housing, for sport, for recreation, for safety from traffic and for freedom from noise, it must be questionable whether it is in the national interest to monopolise one whole acre of ground to support the rather leisurely live-weight increase of one fattening bullock. It is often averred that the modern housing scheme is wasteful of land. It might be claimed also that the persistence of the Noahs Ark type of animal production is equally so. Even under the Noahs Ark system of mixed stocking it is quite usual to find some branches of animal husbandry much more intensive and fully mechanised than are others, a flock of breeding ewes never housed beside a poultry laying unit kept on deep litter where the birds are never outside. That is a contrast, applicable to animal husbandry in general as well as to the mixed stocking of any one farm in particular. It is of importance to study in rather more detail the evidence of transition in these two contrasting systems of animal production. Sheep husbandry in ancient times and, indeed, until quite recent times at least in England was much more intensive than it has become in the present stage of transition. In the old Highland system of communal peasant farming, sheep, kept mainly for their wool, were cared for by women and confined at night. In medieval England the very names sheeps cote and Cotswolds show that the sheep were not left at night without shelter as, indeed, they could not safely have been so before wild carnivore were exterminated or controlled, unless, as under a more kindly climate, the shepherds watched their flocks by night. The medieval village flock developed into the folded flock of later times. This folding system by which the closely packed flock was confined within moveable hurdles on a succession of forage crops was from the point of view of the sheep themselves possibly the best that was ever devised. The food was fresh, the control of parasitic infestation automatic, the creep between the hurdles allowed lambs the first and cleanest bite; the wicker hurdles provided the essential shelter that sheep, no less than other animals, both deserve and require. The American sheep authority, Coffey, who visited England in the 1920s, when the system was about to enter upon its final decline, wrote that: Anyone who has seen the sheep of England within hurdles cannot question the efficiency of the hurdling method for bringing sheep as nearly as possible to their perfection.1 That decline of the folding system had nothing whatever to do with the welfare of sheep. It was dictated by economy and the habits of people. For the folding system in its best and most intensive form required the dedication of the whole-time service of one shepherd and his boy to the needs of some four hundred ewes. Indeed, the needs of the flock came to dominate the management of the farm and the tyranny of the shepherd the policy of his master. A. G. Street gave a vivid picture of that tyranny in his Farmers Glory. It was, of course, the first upsurge of the British working-class that followed the First World War and led to an entirely new wage scale in agricultural labour that dealt the first blow to the old folding system. The postwar wages of the boy approximated to the pre-war wages of the shepherd and the boy. That First World War, moreover, by throwing the ploughboy into the arms of the recruiting sergeant and the dominant
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companionship of boys from towns, led to a more industrialised psychology among the agricultural workers of rural England. Traditions were broken, long habits overthrown. The countrymans pride in his hardiness and endurance was gravely shaken. Perhaps too many had endured too much in Flanders and France! Certainly, following upon that war, there were fewer young men willing to devote their lives to the welfare of sheep. As J. F. H. Thomas wrote2: I think that one of the major problems is the supply of shepherds who are willing to work with an arable flock; it means much hard manual labour and a maximum exposure to adverse weather. That scarcity of shepherds is an abiding difficulty of sheep husbandry in this country to-day, so much so that the noun shepherd is seldom printed or spoken without the qualifying adjective old being attached to it. Decay of the folding system, together with the extension of the Greater London milk catchment area made possible by motor transport and pasteurisation, drove sheep out of many of the traditional sheep-rearing districts of England. Sheep rearing became concentrated in areas where the folding system had never been practised as in the Scottish Borders, for example, where the management of the flock, more extensive and labour saving in every way, was based on a cropping foundation of turnips and grass. This system, neither so laborious nor so expensive in labour, has continued, although. From the point of view of the sheeps welfare, it was never such a good system. In the days when the Border sheep flock on low ground was merely one facet in the economy of a fully-cultivated farm under regular rotation, the system was presumably biologically sound, since it endured with minor modifications over a century of time. When, however, cropping diminished, rotations were extended and the proportion under grassland increased the system threatened to break down. It would, in fact, so have broken down had it not been for the intervention of the veterinarian, who succeeded in plugging with drugs the holes and cracks that kept appearing in the husbandry system because of its inherently faulty foundation. At one point, when a particular parasite called Nematodirus had taken apparent advantage of the free field resulting from regular flock dosage with the drug phenothiazine, the only solution the veterinarian could offer was to remove the lambs off grassland altogether, a solution rather shattering to blind faith in grassland husbandry to anyone other than a grassland specialist. The whole question of grassland grazing as a husbandry system is more fully discussed in the next chapter (Chap. 18). It is without doubt a very valuable system where husbandry is extensive. When, however, it is forced into more intensive channels; when the concentration of sheep increases and where, of practical necessity, sheep must return repeatedly on to land which they have as repeatedly grazed and soiled before, it may become altogether too reminiscent of the dog and its vomit. At the moment many ingenious investigations are in progress to make sheep husbandry even more intensive. Applied endocrinology has been mobilised in an effort to induce sheep to breed out of their natural season; to induce them to deliver a litter rather than a pair of lambs; to have two crops of lambs in the year instead of one. Because grass is a modern idol and because sheep eat grass,
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the sheep is in some danger of scientific canonisation always provided it can be induced to wear two haloes rather than one. The sheeps disinclination to wear two has led to some bitter complaints. A research worker from the grassland temple at Hurley has described the sheep as being a lazy animal, presumably because it fails to make a fully productive use of the grassland prepared for its edification. It might be suggested, on the contrary, that despite its ability to utilise grass the sheep is not, inherently, a species of animal best suited to intensive production. Attempts to make it so are not without their inevitable risks and difficulties even in New Zealand. Probably the main advantage of sheep husbandry in this country to-day is that it is economical in labour. It should be clearly understood that each attempt to intensify production without mechanisation automatically reduces that advantage. The former advantage of economy in buildings is becoming less to-day, since an ever-decreasing proportion of our population is agreeable to working outside buildings. The wind-swept lambing field on a cold spring night would seem to have lost its appeal except to the aged and eccentric. On the contrary, the nocturnal adventure of sheepworrying would appear to have an increasing attraction for the countrys growing population of undisciplined curs. Under extensive husbandry conditions as in newly-developed countries; in thinly-inhabited countries; in hill countries and in those lands encircling the fringes of deserts, sheep husbandry offers substantial advantages over many other methods of animal production. In Britain, the hill land unused for afforestation and the thinly-soiled marginal lands that lie at the hills feet are perhaps better suited to sheep husbandry than to any other system of farming. In such districts, however, the economic solution to the industrys problems would seem to lie rather in greater extension than in intensification, in large-scale farming to supplant the remnants of peasant husbandry sheltering and almost forgotten in the hills; mechanisation of transport both terrestrial and in the air; economy of labour so that one mans modern wage is carried on the backs of at least one thousand sheep; and labour-saving devices so that a sheep gathering and handling becomes an efficient industrial operation rather than a social function. It would seem then that upon factual analysis the sheep is not really a species of animal best fitted for intensive production and that attempts to force it to become so might be more fruitfully directed towards other objectives. Large-scale, extensive sheep farming associated with forestry in our hill districts will almost certainly survive. On the contrary, the scarcity and expense of shepherds, the stray dog, the parasitic worm, the difficulties of mechanisation, the demand for land may well drive out sheep altogether from more fertile and more crowded areas of this country. If we desire really intensive animal production there are several other species from which to choose, poultry being one such notable example. Poultry are still somewhat of a mixed bag, but the future in a fully industrialised age must belong to the hen, a wonderful gift from the magic East, providing a source both of eggs and meat in prolific abundance. Since the hen is native to warmer climates it has always, in Europe, required night shelter if destined to survive. Such absolute dependence on shelter is clearly demonstrated by the fact that despite unlimited and innumerable opportunities to do
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so it has never become feral in this country. As in other branches of animal husbandry in Britain to-day, poultry husbandry systems vary from that of the primitive peasant with hens roosting on the rafters of human habitations to the fully-mechanised hatchery, egg production or broiler unit so reminiscent of the industrial factory that people reared on the mental picture of Noahs Ark farming, have declined to recognise them as farms. There can be no doubt as to which type of husbandry system the poultry future belongs. Even under the small-scale system of family farm units, poultry husbandry has tended to become ever more intensive and mechanised within recent years. The oldest system, under which the hen-house door in the farmyard was opened each morning to let out a collection of mongrel hens intent on laying what eggs they did lay in outlandish places, is well-nigh extinct. Forty years ago it was the system almost universal on mixed farms of all sizes and descriptions. The hens were scavengers, regarded with contempt, under the care of women and their proceeds the farmers wifes pin-money perquisite. Possibly the famine prices of eggs during the First World War made farmers think again. What had been pin-money threatened to graduate into wifely independence. The hen became a profit earner in her own right beside larger species of livestock. The colonyhouse system arose. These transportable hen mansions stocked with point-of-lay pullets appeared as by sleight-of-hand on every stubble field. It was a nightly task, sometimes imposed upon the shepherd, to induce these pullets to seek the shelter of their colony house rather than to roost in hedges and in trees. The main menace to the straying hen was, in those days, foxes. There would be a more serious and constant menace to-day. Among other factors influencing the development of animal husbandry systems in the present transitional stage is the undoubted deterioration in common honesty and the current disregard of law that disfigures our times. Two World Wars within one generation is one obvious cause. Another, less widely accepted reason but nevertheless one not to be ignored, is the Socialistic legislation that followed the Second World War. When to earn a lot of money fairly came to be regarded as a crime against the State to be punished by penal taxation, it seemed a less serious offence to gain money by methods more obviously dishonest. The plain AngloSaxon word theft was replaced by a multitude of euphemistic synonyms and provided one got away with it, no very serious social condemnation was incurred. Now, it so happens, that the hen is one of the very easiest things in the world to get away with and that, in fact, is a potent reason for the progressive migration of the hen from fields into factory. In many districts of our country to-day, or more properly speaking to-night, an armed patrol would be essential to guarantee the nocturnal security of poultry kept under any extensive system. Otherwise there is too real a risk of the colony house becoming a vacant house. A second strictly social reason for the greater intensification of poultry husbandry is the growing disinclination of modern people to face the dirt and discomfort of outdoor labour in winter weather. Carrying food and water to out-lying hen-houses is a task that in the second half of the twentieth century appears to be coveted mainly by intellectual eccentrics and maladapted adolescents. It simply does not appeal to the average worker.
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It is to the more modern branches of nutritional science that successful intensification of the poultry industry is really due. Even thirty years ago it was commonly regarded as essential to provide out-runs for poultry, culminating in that system most strongly advised in the 1930s under which poultry confined mainly to houses kept scrupulously clean were allowed access to grass plots continually befouled. Worms and coccida, as well as sunshine and pasture were the inevitable harvests. The application of knowledge concerning vitamin D3 to poultry has rendered the out-run superfluous and poultry, both laying and table, are maintained customarily either in battery cages or deep-litter houses. The vitamin D3 that they used to obtain from the sun is now provided in their food. Indeed, a great many of the presumed advantages of extensive systems of husbandry in general were due, not so much to fresh air and exercise as commonly supposed but rather to prevention of nutritional deficiencies more recently recognised. Thus, just as the hen in confinement had to suffer from lack of vitamin D3, the pigling reared indoors was altogether too apt to succumb to anaemia provoked by deficiencies of iron and of copper in its diet. Provided these mineral elements are supplied in some way as supplements to that diet, the pigling can survive very much more successfully in confinement, although it can hardly be claimed that its nutritional problems are even yet completely understood. It would seem that in general, therefore, the trend of animal husbandry, to-day, is one towards progressive intensification. Such a trend, if it is to continue, will favour certain species of farm animal and certain systems of husbandry at the expense of others. The three kinds of farm animal in which intensification of husbandry is already greatest are poultry, pigs and dairy cattle, and further intensification and mechanisation in poultry, pig and dairy husbandry seem practicable and because of considerations discussed in a later chapter may well be inevitable. Beef cattle and sheep, largely because of their relatively slow rate of production seem less naturally suited to intensive husbandry or to mechanisation. Under any rationally planned system of animal husbandry in Britain beef cattle could be regarded only. as an inevitable bye-product of dairying and sheep as best suited to the hills from which they originally came. When the present phase of transition has passed and a stage of more sensibly planned equilibrium attained, then the future face of animal husbandry in Brtain will begin to take shape.
CHAPTER BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. CORFEY, W. C. Productive Sheep Husbandry, Philadelphia (1929). 2. THOMAS, J. F. H. Arable Sheep, Rpt. Proc. Brit. Soc. Anim. Prod. 2nd Meet., 43 (

EIGHTEEN Grazing
ALTHOUGH the two words grass and grazing are so closely associated both in theory and in practice, there is no logical necessity for that close association. Grass can be fed to an animal by means other than grazing. All grazed herbage is not necessarily grass. Nor is the conventional grass field, although green, by any means all grass. It may include one or more of the clovers as well,
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together with weeds, their abundance and variety depending upon methods of husbandry or the lack of them. Other plants besides the grasses and clovers may be grazed, heather being only one example. The essential thing about grazing is that the animal does its own harvesting, regardless of the crop harvested, although it is more usual to reserve the term for the harvesting of such plants as show capacity for regeneration and regrowth after defoliation. Largely because of the productive and nutritional value of the cultivated grasses and clovers as sown down in the modern temporary ley, the grazing system has come to be regarded as the ideal system of cattle and sheep husbandry. In New Zealand the target of all-the-year-round grass grazing has been almost attained, at least in the North Island. In this country efforts to imitate New Zealand in this respect are hampered by climatic conditions, since on low ground in most parts of the country and at high altitudes in all parts, grass does not grow appreciably during four or more months of the calendar year. For convenience of description, grazing husbandry systems may be considered under two main headings, namely, extensive grazing on uncultivated pasture and intensive grazing on sown swards. Considered as husbandry systems, neither is ideal. 1. Extensive grazing in this country is associated mainly with hill sheep farming which, in spite of its romantic attractions cannot be considered as being a biologically sound system, nor a particularly economic system, nor a very humane system. In the greater part of Scotland and in many districts of Northern England the general system of hill sheep farming is to maintain a regular stock of ewes on the hill farm throughout the entire year, to sell the annual harvest of sheep all wether lambs, ewe lambs surplus to stock requirements, cast ewes and wool at autumn sales and usually but not always to send the stock ewe hoggs away for low-ground wintering from some time in October until the end of March. This system, which is in fact one rather of exploitation than of husbandry leads inevitably to deterioration of pasture within a measurable term of years. Our hill grazings will not, unaided, carry the numbers of sheep that they used to do. Apart altogether from the slow yet uncompensated denudation of mineral elements from the soil the system. considered from the pasture stand-point, is plainly wrong. The pasture is under-grazed in mid-summer, overgrazed to the point of extinction of early-growing hill plants, in spring. Martin Jones showed many years ago now that no pasture, however well treated otherwise, can long withstand such mismanagement without loss of productivity. In this respect, as explained in an earlier chapter, our modern system of hill sheep farming is not nearly so sound as the older system called shieling in Scotland, hafod in Wales, which involved transhumance of stock between hill and valley, with full exploitation of hill pasture in high summer and relative rest for its recuperation during the remainder of the year. The dedication of two or three acres of land to the support of one hill ewe is not an easy policy to defend on grounds of national economy. Further resistance in any case seems unavailing since the defences have been permanently breached by the powers conferred on the Forestry Commission for the compulsory acquisition of hill land. Implicit in the granting of such powers is the
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national decision, unlikely to be reversed, that hill sheep farming involves an uneconomic use of land unless no other alternative use can be found for such land. In other words that whereas extensive sheep farming as a pioneer enterprise in under-developed, thinly populated countries, has much to commend it, in an over-crowded fully industrialised country such as ours, it would seem to have no very secure future in its present form except in hill areas unsuited for afforestation, and even there merely as an enterprise accessory to other social activities such as water conservation, sport and recreation. A more secure future and the possibility of increased productivity of both hill flocks and herds would seem to lie rather in a radical alteration of hill husbandry methods than in attempts to bolster up the present system by devices such as the re-seeding of stretches of hill land or the supplementary feeding of hill stock at certain critical seasons of the year. The possibilities of integrating forestry with hill farming to supplant an earlier and rather pointless competition deserve further exploration, and it would be a useful development were the Forestry Commission and the Hill Farm Research Organisation to undertake a combined experimental project on such lines. The guiding principle appears to me to involve cultivation of a certain area of lower or in-bye land to provide winter food for stock, the dedication of the land of intermediate altitude to block afforestation and the reservation of the highest and unplanted land for summer grazing. The principle is perhaps best illustrated by means of a simple diagram. Suppose a hill farm to rise in altitude from say five hundred to two thousand five hundred feet above sea-level. The land from five hundred to one thousand feet might be used for the

wintering of stock, both cattle and sheep; the land from one thousand to one thousand five hundred feet afforested; the land from one thousand five hundred to two two thousand five hundred feet reserved for summer grazing, as in the diagram below. Such a system would revive, in a modern form, many of the best features of the shieling system; it would permit a much higher level of animal production together with a sounder balance as between cattle and sheep. It would further remove the main grounds of complaint against afforestation which are that the expansion of one useful industry, forestry, is only possible at the
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expense of another useful industry, hill farming; and that afforestation in itself, because of the limited altitude at which trees will grow, leaves much of the higher land idle and unused. Such a system, moreover, by providing sufficient food and shelter for hill stock during winter, would remove the stigma of cruelty which might easily become attached to our present system of hill farming were the facts as distinct from the romance of the business more fully understood. Is it really morally right or even fair to expose sheep and sometimes cattle to the climatic rigours of our hills in mid-winter without the proper provision of shelter and of food? Personally, I have always had a great love for hill sheep and for hill farming. but I am not at all certain that I should care to be a hill sheep myself except in fine summer weather. Some years ago I knew of a certain man who left livestock exposed in a bleak and open field without shelter or forage. The field, as it happened, lay in near vicinity to a country town and the condition of the stock in it was both noted and remarked upon. Complaint, prosecution and imprisonment followed. It was judged a flagrant case of cruelty to animals. Possibly it was, although no more so, I fancy, than the unconscious cruelty condoned by custom involved in the suffering of most hill sheep on most hill farms at the end of most hard winters. Pregnant skeletons concealed in wool would often be a quite accurate description of those that survive. 2. Sheep and cattle going out to cultivated grass in one sense may be considered as an army going forth to war because grazing stock are actually at war with the grass. The stocks objective is to eat up as much of the grass as will satisfy their appetites; that of the grass is to grow leafage as quickly as possible to replace what the livestock have destroyed and to form flower-head and seed. The manager, be he practical grazier or grassland expert, tries to keep the contest even so that neither side wins outright and the battle is prolonged to the lifetime of the longest temporary ley or continues indefinitely upon permanent grass. Total victory by either side is pastoral disaster. If too many stock are kept for too long on one area of grass then, eventually, the grass will be annihilated, more swiftly under sheep than under cattle, because sheep are closer and more ruthless in their grazing. If, on the other hand, the grass should win, then it shoots up into flower-head and stem as a prelude to seeding. The nutritive value of the grass declines and the stock suffer. The practical grazier has been driven to certain curious and doubtfully economic expedients in his endeavour to maintain a due balance between grass and stock. Thus, on the famous fatting pastures of the English Midlands, the balance between stock and grass is secured in a rather strange fashion. Cattle, being less destructive in their grazing habits, are preferred to sheep although, quite often it is sheep that pay better. Mature and heavy oxen are preferred to younger and lighter cattle despite the fact that the beef from heavy, mature cattle is no longer in demand. If, owing to the vicissitudes of season, the balance between grass and grazing stock becomes disturbed, some cattle are withdrawn should the grass begin to lose, some sheep are added should the grass threaten victory. These precise adjustments of stock to maintain a nice balance on the finest pasture can only be secured by the
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partial sacrifice of either grass or stock on adjacent pastures reckoned rather less fine. The grazier thus classifies his fields according to quality, adapting his system of management to maintain that classification, so that it must always be a moot point whether the best fields receive preferential treatment because they are the best or whether they are the best because they receive preferential treatment. Certainly the best fields could not retain their high quality unless their regulated stocking were secured by the temporary under or over-stocking of adjacent pastures reckoned hardly so good. While there may well have been an initial inequality in the grazing value of different fields, that inequality must have been exaggerated by priority consideration for some over others through a long term of years. As regards sheep pastures, the Romney Marsh grazier is justly proud of the quality he has maintained, but there again, as on the cattle-fattening pastures of the English Midlands, the second-best pasture tends to be sacrificed in the interests of the best. Moreover, the Romney Marsh grazier, in order to preserve the fine quality of his best pastures has had to maintain a class of sheep, the mature wether, proved an uneconomic proposition under modern conditions in all other districts. It is difficult to believe that the Romney Marsh should prove the sole exception to that general rule. The case, however, in rather wider terms is by no means unique. Since the main reason in growing grass is for stock to graze, it seems rather strange that stock should sometimes be kept merely to eat grass. It is, however, one of the disadvantages of the grazing system that farmers having grown grass to feed stock on which they hope to make a profit should so often incur a loss on stock they have bought in merely to eat grass. Quite frequently in good grass-growing seasons I have been consulted by farmers in the local sheep markets as to what sheep they should buy. They have sometimes confessed that their sole reason for buying sheep at all was that they must acquire some stock with which to keep their grass down and that sheep, being cheaper Tuan cattle, were to be preferred as likely to lose less money! While the graziers art at its best has always aimed at a balance between grass and stock the grassland scientist, being primarily a botanist, has usually tended to favour the grass at the expense of the stock. A green level sward with a nice balance between species became the standard of perfection without very much regard to the productivity of the stock grazing it. Systems of grassland management were suggested which, although doubtless excellent for grass, threatened to deprive stock of access to grass at the seasons of the year when they most required it. Voisin, in his Grass Productivity, has described his rational system of grazing by dairy cows in which due regard is paid both to the biological necessities of the grass and of the cow. His results, based on the solid foundation of milk yields, are doubtless excellent in their way. It might seem simpler to some, however, having paid full regard to the biological necessities of the growth of grass, to cut it and cart it as and when required. In other words, it may well be, that the logical sequel to rational grazing is that alternative system called zero grazing. Apart altogether from the difficulties inherent in attempting to
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balance the numbers and appetite of stock against the productivity of grass there are certain factors which render grazing a far less perfect system of animal husbandry than it is usually assumed to be. It is, for example, and without a doubt, both a wasteful and unhygienic system. The diseases, both of man and animals, transmissible by the contamination of the food of one individual by the excrement of another are legion. Under civilised conditions man, by modern sanitation, has succeeded in breaking that circuit so that the choleras, the typhoid fevers, the dysenterys, the intestinal parasites are now of relatively rare occurrence. That is not so, however, in the grazing animal where it has become the recognised custom to attempt to sweep away by periodical drugging those parasites continually acquired through faulty sanitation. A great deal of the very newest devices such as creep grazing, whether forward or lateral, designed to mitigate the results of insanitary surroundings, might be described very simply as merely giving the young lamb an opportunity of eating off a reasonably clean plate. In view of such justifiable criticisms it is obviously wrong to regard grazing as a perfect husbandry system, or the only system, or the best system by which grass and animal may be made to meet.

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NINETEEN Mechanisation
BECAUSE of economic and social necessities, progressive mechanisation of animal husbandry will at least in fully industrialised, overcrowded countries such as Britainbe forced upon us whether we like it or not. The economic reasons are patent. The small farm, the individual ownership, the slow, wasteful methods of animal production embodied in Noahs Ark farming, picturesque and in so many respects socially desirable as they may seem, are nevertheless outdated, clear anachronisms in an industrialised state of the twentieth century. Capitalisation is too low, production too leisurely, labour too arduous and prolonged to fit into an economic system which, on the industrial side, now presents problems of distribution and marketing rather than of production. If, therefore, animal husbandry is to continue to exist in industrialised and crowded countries, its pace of production must be geared to that of the industrial factory and that can only result from rapid and progressive mechanisation of its techniques. From the social aspect the necessity is no less clear. It would appear to be not only a social injustice but eventually, barring slavery, an eventual impossibility to maintain one section of the population in one way of living, distinct from all others, merely because it happens to be engaged in one particular form of primary production. That impossibility has tended to become evident ever since industry diverged decisively from agriculture in the standard of wages earned and in the number of hours required to earn them. An early result of that divergence was that the economic and, for a time, even the political position of wage-earners in agriculture fell substantially below that of those engaged in industry. The gap has tended to narrow within more recent years but only by progressive mechanisation of agriculture and rather less fortunately, by the employment and therefore the wage payment of substantially fewer people. Mechanisation of crop husbandry is in many areas already progressive and advanced. In most branches of animal production it has barely begun. That fact has led to a further divergence within the agricultural labour force itself, in that workers employed mainly in crop production in general enjoy shorter working hours and a shorter working week than do those engaged in animal husbandry duties. Even although the stockman be rather better paid if, at the same time his hours of work are longer and his week-ends less free, his job, under the
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standards of modern industrialised labour will be reckoned less attractive. It is not my contention that mechanisation is the best system for farm animals any more than it is necessarily the best thing for people. It might be argued that both tend to degenerate under that system. What I am quite certain of, however, is that it will prove impossible, eventually, for mankind to take one road of environmental evolution and for the farm animals with which mankind is symbiotic to take quite another or to remain behind. Mass production of food is a modern necessity. In the poultry industry, mechanisation has already gone a very long way. In egg production, incubation is performed in the mammoth incubators, electrically ventilated. thermostatically controlled, under factory conditions which seem centuries away from the farm-wifes broody hen. The hatched chicks are reared in battery brooders; the point-of-lay pullets transferred to battery cages or deep litter houses. One worker, under these fully mechanised conditions can tend many thousands of birds. On the meat production side of the poultry business the broiler industry has been so fully publicised as to require little description. To date it is the closest approach to a factory system producing animal food for human consumption. The aim is complete mechanisation of the entire procedure from newly-hatched chick to pre-packed product. It is not my purpose here to attempt to describe the technicalities of this, the most modern, development in meat production. The rapidity of its expansion in this country, from five million birds in 1953 to seventy millions in 1959, is an earnest of its recent success. Is it a boom which like so many other booms, is doomed to burst? I do not think so. The novelty is too much in keeping with the times and let it not be overlooked that in Britain its mushroom growth has taken place in a period when all the various products with which table poultry competesbeef. mutton. lamb, porkhave been sheltered by the umbrella of price support. Within a decade, an animal product reckoned to be, in this country at least, a seasonal delicacy has become the cheapest. most genuinely competitive form of animal produce the consumer can buy. The keeping of large numbers of birds under crowded conditions must lead inevitably to new problems of hygiene and of disease control, but there is no reason to suppose that the veterinary profession. properly organised, could not handle these new problems as successfully as the medical profession, confronted with a similar situation in urbanised (In the U.S.A. the size of the industry has expanded from three hundred million birds in 1946 to one thousand five hundred and thirty millions in 19581.) humanity, has been able to do. Possibly more successfully, since the slaughter policy, an effective weapon in the control of animal disease, is inapplicable to its human equivalent. New nutritional problems, often linked with disease, will also arise and may take time to solve. Nevertheless, it would be as impracticable and absurd to offer a return to nature as a solution to these problems as it would be to attempt to deal with human epidemics by an escape to the jungle. It appears to be the disease risk, however, that is tending to hold up intensification, centralisation and mechanisation of several important branches of animal husbandry at the present time. The
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hen-sick or pig-sick building, often erected at considerable cost and as a result of careful planning, is becoming a definite disincentive to further developments along similar lines. What frequently happens is that the intensive system and the buildings where such a system is employed, give excellent results for a start but that, after a time, disease incidence increases progressively and to such an extent as to lead to a change in the system and even to a temporary evacuation of the expensively-constructed buildings. Such a reputed build-up of infection is the commonly accepted reason for the apparent failure of the early weaning of pigs which at first promised advantageous results and is the explanation usually offered for the admitted fact that piglets reared out-of-doors are much less subject to disease. The actual nature of the infection and infective agents, sometimes stated to have accumulated in the very structure of the building itself as though infection were a witchs curse, seems somewhat nebulous or at best a trifle vague. It might be thought that were the problem purely one of infection, a flock of poultry or a herd of pigs confined within a building would tend to become immune to the diseases endemic in that building. Indeed, the apparently tonic effects of a return to pasture could be interpreted rather as suggesting the alternative possibility of the exhaustion of one or more stored nutritional factors than as the accumulation of somewhat ill-defined infective agents. In any infection there are always two aspects to consider, the virulence of the invading parasite and the resistance of the host. There may be, even to-day, an undue insistence on the parasites virulence compared with the hosts resistance, a resistance so largely determined by its nutritional state. In other words, were the nutritional requirements of intensively kept animals more exactly defined, deterioration of health might no longer occur. It is rather in keeping with such a suggestion that in dairy cattle, as contrasted with poultry and pigs, there is rather less evidence of intensification of husbandry leading to increase of disease. In fact, it is a widely accepted practice to deny calves access to pasture because of disease risk, admittedly mainly caused by parasitic bronchitis (Husk or Hoose), rather than to put them out to grass for healths sake as may be done with young pigs. So far as adult dairy cattle are concerned, there is really very little evidence that confinement does them any harm or that access to pasture does them any especial amount of good. My recollection is that when I was working at the Rowett Institute there were rather more disease problems in the dairy herd there when the cows were out at grass in summer than when they were confined to the byres in the winter months. The fact that cows appear to tolerate intensive confinement rather better than pigs might be linked conceivably with the more natural type of foodstuffs on which cows are customarily fed. In this connection, it is useful to recall the words written by Gowland Hopkins in the year 1906: The animal body is adjusted to live either upon plant tissue or other animals, and these contain countless substances other than protein, carbohydrates and fat. Despite the advances in nutritional science made since Hopkins original discovery of the vitamins it would be rash to assume that a full count has even yet been made.
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Since cows are ruminants and grass their cheapest food, it is probable that grass, either fresh or preserved, will remain the basic food of cows even under the most in tensive methods of milk production. There may well be a safeguard in the fact that grass is a plant tissue on which the ruminants body is adjusted to live. As discussed in an earlier chapter (Chap. 18), the feeding of grass is by no means synonymous with grazing. Soilage in earlier terminology, Zero grazing in that of to-day, by which the grass is cut and brought into the byres, has proved a practicable and successful alternative to grazing. Mechanisation, with the employment of more modern machines such as the forage harvester, has added to the advantages and removed many of the economic disadvantages of soilage. On first principles, it would seem to be preferable to grazing, in which grass, even when grown to perfection, is subsequently soiled with excrement and trampled underfoot. The yard and milking parlour combined with zero grazing appear to be the shape of dairying things to come. Dairying, if the full and necessary hygienic precautions are to be enforced, mechanisation fully developed and the cost of production reduced, requires to be developed on much larger scale units than are prevalent today. The small dairy herd, still the rule rather than the exception. with less than a dozen cows in the milking herd, can only survive in the family farmer continues in slavery to his own cows and provided the price of milk is maintained above that reasonable in larger herds organised on factory principles. In this country, mechanisation of beef production has lagged far behind that of the dairy industry, one reason perhaps why even with beef at times approaching salmon prices, beef cattle husbandry is so frequently conducted at a loss. That beef production can be mechanised, at least in its final stages, is exemplified in the beef batteries recently developed in America where the whole procedure of feeding from giant silo to feeding trough is automatically controlled. That saving clause, final stages, may prove of fundamental importance as the mechanisation of animal husbandry systems advances, as it must inevitably advance if the industry is to develop, or even survive, in fully industrialised countries. The risks incurred in treating living creatures as though they were inanimate, the practical application of the apathetic fallacy, cannot be too lightly disregarded. Undoubtedly, if the production of meat, milk, eggs and other animal products is to keep pace with and bear comparison in cost with industrial production, the final what is frequently termed the commercial side of the business must be intensive, fully mechanised and labour saving. The cow in milk, the fattening pig and the fattening bullock, the hen in lay and the broiler chicken must, to be economic, be -managed under conditions as closely similar as possible to the organised procedure of the industrial factory. Since uniformity, vitality and resistance to disease are three of the most important qualities desirable in animals subjected to factory conditions of intensive production cross-breeds may prove, eventually, to be most suitable for that specified purpose. The pure breeding and rearing section of the industry might, perhaps, be better conducted on more conventional and established lines at least until the final results of full mechanisation have been more fully tested and are better understood. Possibly, in animal husbandry as is already the case in
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crop husbandry, the two phases of initial breeding and final production may tend to diverge. The mechanisation of animal husbandry is full of challenge and adventure. To face the challenge and to accept the adventure, with its risks and uncertainties, will require both the best of practice and the highest quality of science, pulling together in harness, not in tandem fashion with the horse called science insisting on the lead, but rather as an equal, harmonious and well-matched pair.

PART FOUR Purpose

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TWENTY The Protective Foods

IN all matters concerning agriculture, the relative importance of private profit to the farmer is rather overrated. Naturally, if a man farms for profit as almost all farmers now do, he will not continue farming indefinitely without monetary reward. Nor could any sane person expect him to do so. That is something rather different, however, from contending that just because he is farming and because he is a farmer, he is therefore entitled to a profit no matter how or in what manner he farms. Nobody, even with the highest possible regard for the cultural value of literature, could possibly argue that every author, just because he was an author and wrote books, was thereby entitled to royalties whether or not his books were read. Nevertheless, it is not at all uncommon to hear farmers argue that they should be paid to produce what their land most easily produces and is most fitted to produce even although that produce be heavy over-fatted cattle and sheep which no urban consumer is prepared to consume. If the farmer prefers to produce what he thinks his land and husbandry system is best fitted to produce, regardless of national requirements or consumers tastes, then he should be left to do so in bankruptcy or in peace. Nobody dare attempt to force him to do otherwise in a State professing a belief in the value of private enterprise. At the same time, it would be grossly unfair to the general community to employ public subsidy to support his private idiosyncrasies. If, on the contrary, perhaps in the face of difficulties dictated by
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climate or of soil, a farmer is producing what the national necessities of public health demands then he may both deserve and require, without question, a reasonable measure of public support to aid him in his task. Now, while consumers tastes may be partly fancy, national nutritional requirements when properly understood are basic facts. Since the real purpose of agriculture is to feed mankind, the nutritional requirements of the nation deserve an absolute priority if the national purse is to be opened in agricultures service. In other words. national agricultural policy should be based first and foremost upon the requirements of human health and optimal nutrition and only secondarily upon matters purely economic such as farmers profits, consumers preferences or international trade. Some medical men concerned with agriculture have seen this necessity clearly and have in certain instances secured positions of responsibility in agricultural research and education which enabled them to influence policy and to guide legislation along such lines. The late Dr. Stenhouse Williams was one such medical man; Lord John Boyd Orr was another. The appointment of Stenhouse Williams to be the first Director of the National Institute for Research in Dairying was an extraordinarily fortunate one both for the national health and the dairy industry of this country. It could so easily have happened that another Director trained in a different discipline might have directed research along genetical lines, or biochemical lines, or dairy cattle husbandry lines. Stenhouse Williams, however, having walked the hospitals of his day and generation, both general hospitals and fever hospitals, could not have failed to realise that unless milk were safe milk, the damage caused by the spread of infection, whether tubercular or otherwise, outweighed milks unquestioned value as an article of food. I saw the same thing myself as a medical student, operation following operation to remove glands infected -with bovine tubercle from the necks of children, leaving behind the inevitable and disfiguring scars. Epidemics of dysentery, diphtheria, scarlet fever traced with certainty to contaminated milk. The clean milk campaign was a worthy crusade. The approaching completion of bovine tubercle eradication from the dairy herds of this country is a memorial to Stenhouse Williams memory. Left to the dairy industry itself it could never have been done. Only the pressure of public opinion aroused by medical concern and propaganda has compelled its completion. The clean milk campaign has shown what public opinion, intelligently aroused, can do in ensuring the safety of the human consumer of animal products. Much more is done in a less fully publicised way. The routine meat inspection carried out by the veterinary profession which goes on every day and in every town is one notable example. There are many others. The protection of the public from diseases attributable to consumption of unsound animal products is organised and in general efficient. The provision of animal produce of the most suitable type and in proper amount to ensure full human health is, on the contrary, possibly given less attention than the problem deserves. The relationship between food and health, between agriculture and medicine, both human and veterinary, is too fundamental to be safely overlooked. It is not necessary to be either a food faddist or food crank to appreciate that fact. The conception that a deficiency
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in diet may cause disease, serious and widespread in its effects upon mankind as that due to infection by parasitic organisms, whether viruses, bacteria, protozoa or metazoa, was not one arrived at without opposition and debate. There is, however, no further argument. The fact is admitted and some of the applications of that admission, such as the public provision of vitamin supplements to prevent scurvy and rickets in children, have already become a matter of habit and custom in the Welfare State. The more expensive provision of milk to schoolchildren and certain other people at the public expense is a result, very largely, of the work of Lord Boyd Orr. It was frequently questioned in the 1930s, whether Sir John Orr, or even plainer Dr. Orr as he was at that time, being Director of what was primarily an agricultural research institute financed mainly through the Department of Agriculture for Scotland and the Agricultural Research Council, should have devoted so much of the time and energy of both himself and of his staff to questions which seemed superficially to be purely the concern of medicine and of human nutrition. Yet Orr was right, indubitably right. It is of interest to trace the line of reasoning which led Orr from a study of mineral deficiency in farm animals on which the reputation of the Rowett Research Institute was first founded through experiments on the diet of schoolchildren to the World Food and Agriculture Organisation which he created. I think I can trace his progress with fair accuracy since I was working under him at the time. The imminence of national starvation of Britain in the year 1917, left a firm, although brief, determination in the minds of our politicians that British agriculture must never again be permitted to sink into economic decay. The foundation or expansion of several agricultural research institutes of which the Rowett was only one, was a pledge of that determination. Despite that political determination, however, agriculture did sink into depression again. For some years after the American slump in 1929, depression was deeper than it had ever been since 1870. The signing of a Trust Deed was the customary sequel to conventional farming. Those men who ranched rather than farmed did somewhat better. The situation for thinking people engaged in agricultural research at that time was a curious one. While the professed objective in research was greater and more efficient food production, it happened frequently in those years of depression that food already in production could not be sold. What, then, was the point in attempting to increase food production? In Aberdeen, at that time, surplus milk in large quantity was being poured down the drains, a policy of defeatism if not of despair. It so happened, however, that neither in war nor in peace was John Orr cognisant of the word defeat. It was one entirely outside his vocabulary. It also so happened that Orr had been trained and had graduated in medicine in the city of Glasgow where, throughout the nineteenth century, the evicted peasantries of Scotland and Ireland had been converted by malnutrition into bandy-legged and dwarfed caricatures of their heather-stepping ancestors. It seemed to Orra man of immense common-sense and fundamental goodwillthat the pouring of milk down the drains of one Scottish city accorded ill with the evident malnutrition
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of the citizens walking the streets of another. It seemed to Orr that it would be an altogether more sensible procedure were the surplus milk that could not be sold in one part of Scotland at any price, poured down throats rather than drains without too much regard to price, in the schools of another. To suggest that anybody should have what they required unless able to pay for it was a rather revolutionary proposal in the 1930s. There was no Welfare State then, only mass unemployment. So Orr first initiated feeding experiments in a variety of schools to prove his point. I doubt whether the experiments really proved anything although Orr said that they did. The results, however, such as they were, statistically significant or insignificant, aided Orr in persuading dairy farmers that it would be really a very good thing to sell the surplus milk at a much reduced price to be engulfed by children rather than by drains. He found difficulty in persuading dairy farmers to do so, the argument being raised against his proposals that milk sold in schools at half-price would merely result in less milk being purchased in homes at full price. Fortunately for the children Orr happened to be something of a hypnotist in negotiation. Often I have gone to him determined to maintain the unanswerable argument that black couldnt be white, only to retire beaten and temporarily convinced that everything in existence was some shade of grey! Orrs pioneer work led to the milk-in-schools schemes, the milk for nursing and expectant mother schemes, and all the other schemes by which milk in or out of surplus season finds an assured market at the public expense. It has always surprised me that farmers organisations have not followed up Orrs lead with greater energy. If a child is to be fully educated, it must first be fully fed and the potential public market in the proper nutrition of our children has never been fully exploited or explored. Even from the most material and selfish angle that seems to me to be a serious error in the policy of our farming organisations. The taxpayer, as an individual, cannot be expected to remain permanently interested in the prosperity of the British farmer. The taxpayer, very naturally, is more interested in his own I On the contrary, the best available and freshest food for the countrys children is a national object that might easily become a national crusade. One abiding result of Christian teaching over twenty centuries is the willing surrender of more selfish interests to the welfare of children. Now, it so happens that were human nutrition rather than farmers balance-sheets or trade agreements the principle directing agricultural policy, that certain products of animal husbandry would come to be regarded as of special importance. The basic food of mankind is bread. One or other of the cerealswheat in the richer countries; rice or maize in those poorerremains the energy giving foundation of the food of man. These cereals, as the modern science of nutrition has most clearly shown, are in general lacking in certain dietary factors essential to the health of man. In more precise detail these are certain amino-acids, minerals and vitamins. Some foodstuffs, especially milk, eggs and green vegetables supply in abundance the essential dietary factors which cereals lack. They, therefore, came to be called the protective foods because, supplied in adequate amount, they protect the human consumer against those deficiencies made manifest in the deficiency diseases
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which a diet based on cereals, unsupplemented by animal produce, may easily provoke. Milk and eggs are already two of our most valuable agricultural products and, at the same time, are two of the animal products most necessary for full health. It may be inadvisable and may eventually prove politically impossible for the taxpayer to support the price of each and every product the individual farmer may prefer to produce on his own farm. For price support for those products judged essential to human welfare and health there is, however, a much stronger public sympathy and sense of obligation always provided the public have full confidence in the health value of the food produced. That confidence could quite easily be shaken. There is a growing suspicion that while modern agriculture produces more food, that the food is not of such high health value as that produced under older and more natural conditions. The Biodynamic School which emphasises a supposed superiority of dung and compost over chemical manures with reference to the health value of the vegetable and animal food produced is one clearly audible protest, but there may be others, less audible. The average consumer cannot be altogether happy concerning the extent to which poisonous substances are being so freely used as weedicides, insecticides and for similar agricultural purposes. To the average citizen the formulae of the majority of these substances can mean little or nothing, but arsenic is arsenic to anyone conversant with detective fiction. In rather more subtle manner, it is being borne in upon the human consumer that certain of the products produced in admittedly larger quantity under modern agronomic methods may lack the flavour of those produced under older systems. I have, myself, met a tomato grower who cultivated totally different varieties for his own table as contrasted with those he grew for consumption by others. I have met also, poultry farmers who, while specialising in mass methods of egg production, maintain a small flock on an outdoor extensive system to meet their household requirements. The jug on the breakfast table of a dairy farmer may contain cream from a breed of cow other than that by which his monthly milk cheque is earned. The preference of children for fresh as compared with pasteurised milk is difficult to deny. These are questions of taste and appetite. They might have no relation to the health value of food but, again they might have. In some cases it might even appear that they do. Eggs, for example, at their freshest and best, are an almost complete food. Under conditions of extensive husbandry they contain all the nutritional factors requisite for the development of a perfect chick during its three weeks incubation. Such an egg, eaten by a child, might therefore be expected to supply in almost perfect variety and balance, the majority of nutritional factors required for the development of a perfect child. That, however, is not in general the kind of egg that our children are getting to eat. In the modern poultry industry there is a clear-cut distinction between the layers mash which is fed to birds supplying eggs for human consumption and the breeders mash fed to birds laying eggs for subsequent hatching. The distinction is made abundantly evident in the following short quotation: Numerous experiments have demonstrated that rations that will keep the stock in good condition and enable a high level of egg
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production to be maintained are not necessarily equally satisfactory for the production of -hatching-eggs. Since feeding exerts a profound influence on the composition of the egg, the importance of a properly balanced ration for breeding-stock will be recognised. The egg must contain all the nutriment necessary for building up the chick. The problem has been investigated at numerous experimental stations, and as a result of research work it is known that the proteins, minerals and vitamins play an important part in hatchingegg production. The deduction is all too clear. The average egg produced by modern mass methods of egg-production, being deficient in certain essential dietary factors, will not keep a chicken alive within its egg shell for three weeks. Is it then any longer a genuinely protective food suitable for the building up of the body of a child designed to see out the allotted span of seventy years? I should say not and would suggest, moreover, that the consuming public, probably totally unaware of this important distinction between the layers mash and the breeders mash is being deceived. Again, in milk production, that dairy breed giving the very poorest quality of milk has become the standard cow of the British dairy industry. It is, in fact, owing very largely to the breeds capacity to produce a vast gallonage of milk low in milk solids that has led to its economic success, since in terms of money, of matter and of energy it is clearly cheaper to produce water than it is to produce milk solids. Professor Kay, who followed Stenhouse Williams as director of the N.I.R.D., repeatedly drew attention to the progressive deterioration in the nutritional value of English milk. While, under modern conditions, the solids-not-fat fraction of milk solids containing the protein and minerals dietary factors must be regarded as being of higher nutritional importance than the butter fat, the two are, however, fairly closely correlated, so that milk low in butter-fat, which is much more easily estimated, is in general also low in solids-not-fats. During the last twenty or so years the Friesian, due to the fact that milk in this country is paid for mainly on gallonage without very much regard as to what each gallon does or does not contain, has become the predominant dairy breed of England. The fact that during the same period of time the average B.F. content of our milk has fallen from 3.75 per cent to 3.55 per cent and S.N.F. from 8.80 per cent to 8.65 per cent can be regarded only as a necessary consequence of that predominance. If, then, certain animal products, termed protective were to receive special consideration and their production, if necessary, afforded financial support on grounds of the public health, it would be necessary to pay rather more attention than is being done at the present time to ensure that such products were, in fact, protective. The greater the intensification and mechanisation of animal husbandry becomes the more essential will it be to bear that fact in mind. 1. RommiNsoN, L. Modern Potiltry Husbandry, 400-1, 4th edition, Londorm (1957).

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Grass Productivity
by ANDRE VOISIN
This book provides the complete answer to improvement in grassland. In itself it is unique for it contains information from research centers and farms in America, Germany, France, New Zealand and Great Britain. More important for the adviser and the practising grassland farmer is the -vast fund of practical information and guidance given by the author from his own experience of 15 years rational grazing on his 60 acre farm. For those in doubt about the profitability of grassland this is required reading, just as it is for those who complain that there is no published know-how. It is all here, clearly described, with facts and figures that can be adjusted to suit the needs of any farm. Such questions as periods of occupation, stay and rest, number and layout of paddocks, fertiliser application, grazing systems are all minutely dealt with. Enthusiastically received by FARMERS WEEKLY It is a fascinating treatment of a subject about which so much has been written. But it is a book with a difference he tells us passionately what to do with grass. I have practised with delight and success a modified rational grazing system based on M. Voisins as I understood it. . . . I am extending our rational grazing practices on our own farms very much indeed and shall try to get as near M. Voisins formula as is practicable. Grass Productivity is one of the most important books written about grass for the direct use of cattle farmers dairy or beeffor a very long time. All agricultural scientists as well as farmers should read and re-read it. (Stephen Williams). FARM AND COUNTRY It would scarcely be exaggerating to suggest that M. Voisins lucid analysis of the situation is the greatest single literary contribution that has been made in this field. He rationalises a wealth of research work to support his theories and generally succeeds in making a great deal more sense out of it. Graziers everywhere cannot fail to benefit from reading this book and should make it their duty to do so. SOIL SCIENCE This highly interesting volume written by a French biochemist and farmer. ... Starting with four laws of rational grazing, the author proceeds with the details, supporting his beliefs with evidence accumulated in various parts of Europe and America as well as on his own farm. The book presents a fresh and unique approach to the subject. 368 pages. Size 9 in. x 6 in. 69 tables. 36 diagrams. 41 photographs.

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Health of animals is linked to the mineral balance of the soil THE QUALITY OF GRASS AND CONSEQUENT HEALTH OF ANIMALS SPELLS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PROFIT AND LOSS IN GRASSLAND FARMING. AMONG THE SUBJECTS DEALT WITH IN THIS BOOK ARE THE FOLLOWING VITAL TO THE FARMER The mineral matter of the soil modifies the composition of the protein in the grass. 2. The vitamin content of plants is a function of the composition of the soil. 3. Animal weight gain is a function of the application of fertilisers to the soil. 4. Wool is defective if the soil on which sheep graze is copper deficient. 5. Sterility in cattle can sometimes be cured by copper sulphate. 6. By applying copper sulphate to the soil farmers can often avoid bone fractures or ataxias in lambs and calves. 7. Animals sometimes suffer from diarrhoea because the soil is too rich in molybdenum. 8. Applications of nitrogenous and potassic fertilisers which are badly balanced and spaced can cause grass tetany. (Their correct use is indicated.) 9. Sheep in gestation should never be allowed to graze marrow stem kale because you run the risk of many still births due to hypertrophied thyroid. 10. Certain new varieties of white clover (often recommended for reseeding grassland) may cause bloat and contain an antithyroid factor.
1.

Soil, Grass and Cancer

JNL OF APPLIED NUTRITION (Dr. W. A. ALBRECHT) M. Voisin presents in provocative form what more and more other observing farmers, agricultural scientists, veterinarians, dieticians, and doctors are accepting as logical. They will read with interest what he says in seeming contradiction to conventional beliefs. They will appreciate the able support -for his projected thinking which he has assembled from the scientific literature and his own trials. M. Voisin moves our thinking away from emphasis on relief of ill-health by artificials, and toward attention to good health through a sound nutrition that starts with fertile soils. THE NEW YORK PHYSICIAN This is not only an important contribution but an exceedingly fascinating and provocative work which undoubtedly (and quite probably justifiably), will arouse rather intense controversy . - . . All in all it is a book, which should influence the thinking of those in
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responsible positions in the agricultural and nutritional professions, and lead to a much broader and more basic approach to our investigation into the relationship of soil, health and disease.

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