Interesting responses . . . thanks guys.
The place the workshop was held on raises Angus cattle, crossbred meat goats and Dorper (meat) sheep.
PC had been at the property a few weeks ago and classified the animals for the owner. We started off with the meat sheep. He had four classifications: white tag = elite animals, supernucleus for breeding stock; a cull group; and two intermediate groups (I cant remember the tag colours for those other groups. Basically, the white tag animals were, as Colin said, fine boned, petite, light muscled, very feminine animals. The animals in the cull group were thick, long bodies, heavily muscled and heavy boned. I really liked some of the 'cull' animals - they were really nice productive carcase animals. He didnt seem to understand that you can get femininity on a well muscled animal :?: He was adamant that his 'white tag' ewes would breed earlier and producer more twins than the other animals. I very much question that. His white tag ewes were lighter boned and muscled and smaller, so I would think that they would be lighter at the same age than the other animals, and so they wont join at an earlier age. Also, it is well known that body weight and condition at joining influences fecundity (twins etc.) so for the same reason, I think the white tags would have less multiples than the thicker animals. The funniest thing was when he said that the cull animals were too heavy and masculine and that they would be barren, and never lamb. Ha ha ha most of those ewes had udders on them, indicating they had previously lambed, and some of them had just weaned lambs which were over in another pen screaming for their mothers :lol2: :lol2: :lol2:
We moved on to look at some wethers for slaughter. He had a heavy muscled, light muscled and intermediate muscled wether there. He pointed out the places to look for increased muscle, such as down the shank, the eye muscle and over the chine. All of that I agreed with. But what I didnt understand was that he believes those light muscled, light boned, petite females will be capable of producing very good carcase wethers. :?: :?: Doesnt add up.
We moved on to talk about ram selection. He had a pen of five rams all roughly the same age. Here was where things started to get really interesting. He uses only two selection criteria when choosing his rams. He only looks at their testicle shape. You know how some rams have got flat bottomed testicles, and others have kind of knobbly bits at the bottom where the epididymus is. Well, in the pen of five rams, he picked the only one that had the knobbly bits. He didnt care about any other part of the animal, structural soundness, carcase attributes, masculinity, nothing. Just as long as it has those knobbly bits, its 'a good ram'. The only other thing he looks for in a potential sire is it's mother. He picks out rams, bulls etc at birth according to their mother. He also buys them before they are born. As in, he goes out to a person's stud, picks out the cow he likes the most, and says if she has a bull calf he's sold for 2500. He doesnt care if he turns out looking awful. As long as he's got a good mum, he's a good one. About the point he really lost everyone's respect was when someone asked about masculine heads. He said, you dont look for a masculine head on a ram, buck or bull, in fact you cull those that are masculine. You look for the most feminine faced sire you can find. :?:
So when we went off to the goats, he had two pens of does. One was the 'good' ones, the others he said were too muscled and thick to be breeders. The funny thing was, those 'too thick' ones, were about half as thick as our worst animals :lol2: Oh, boy, he'd cull all of our goats :lol2: There was no depth on any of them. They were pretty pitiful animals, really. We had taken some culls to the abbatoirs the day before, and they were a thousand times better than these animals.
Then we looked at the angus cattle. His sytem went - purple tags = elite animals, supernucleus for breeding; blue tags = next step down, really nice animals; pink tags = next step down, pretty average animals; yellow tag = culls. There were four in his purple tag cows - when the owner went to put them up the race one of them jumped out of the force yard. Then, when he went in to get it back - it charged him :shock: They were as mad as bloody hatters :shock: They were also very fine boned, dairy type, and they were not very balanced, particularly in the pelvis. The hips didnt seem to 'connect' very well to the rest of the body. The blue tags ones that he also liked were very structurally incorrect, poor feet and legs, very fined boned, very small pelvic capacity. No depth, no spring of rib, no muscle, no fleshing. The yellow tag culls were really great looking animals. They were correct, thick, deep, soft skinned, well muscled and still feminine.
This was the first time I had been to a workshop where people started leaving, or just walked away from the presenter and talked to each other. Kind of shocked me, but honestly I cant blame them.
It was interesting, they gave us a heap of promotional stuff about supergene to take home. I thought it was funny, I found an article about these cattle breeders who had used supergene extensively. One of the quotes was: "We cant sell our cattle through the saleyards anymore" and I just thought, 'yeah, cos your cattle look CRAP!' :lol2: There was also a heap of stuff about how he has been working extensively with the red poll breed. It suddenly answered a lot of questions for me. RPs in Australia are really pretty average, very dairy type, fine boned, small pelvic capacity, etc. and nothing at all like the animals I see posted from Jovid and others.
I just hope that this guy, who is a friend of ours, doesnt go down the drain using PC for classification. Last year he entered some goats in a carcase competition, and they were amazing animals, so much more muscled than anything I have ever seen in a goat. They won on the hoof and hook. They were nothing like the animals PC has told him to keep. I think he was on the right track before he started using this.
It probably says a lot that PC has been running Supergene for 30 years and I hadnt heard of it, my boss hadnt heard of it, and no one I have talked to so far has heard about it. Kinda tells you something.
