alexfarms
Well-known member
Jake":5z6v8vyu said:smnherf":5z6v8vyu said:Hereford76":5z6v8vyu said:Have you ever wondered why we still have so many horned Herefords when the polled gene is dominant and if nature were let take its course then the number of horned cattle in the breed should be slowly declining.
imo if they let mother nature take its course there would be no such thing as a polled hereford. imo there is way too much inconsistency, junk, whatever attached to the polled gene. sit at any sale barn, visit with any commercial hereford rancher or any feeder... there is no such thing as a commercial polled hereford ranch... maybe hobby but that about cover it. all opinion gathered all on my own.
I guess if we went by economic value then, there would be no such thing as a horned Hereford then either, IMO, as there is no economic profitability trait tied to the horned gene.
If nature took it's course there would be fewer polled cattle because the horned bulls beat the crap out of the polled bulls. Look at the Aleutian cattle for proof of that.
In that article I posted a link to in earlier in this thread it states scientists believe the reason the mutant recessive horn gene survived is because it increased the ability of the cattle to fight off predictors. Not very relavent today in the US and definately not rellavent if the horns have been sloped. The fact remains, without some type of selection pressure the dominant polled gene will over power the mutant recessive horn gene.