In Canada, and specifically in the Ottawa Valley, we claim Big Joe Mufferaw as our most famous lumberjack about who many tall tales and a few true ones were written or handed down from generation to generation. In the USA, there was also a very famous lumberjack, Paul Bunyon, who’s statue stands proudly beside his trusty Babe the Blue Ox in Minnesota.
When I was a kid, stories about these two bigger than life shanty-men were intriguing. I knew that before skidders and track machines were used to move the heavy logs, lumberjacks used horses and oxen but when Paul’s ox was said to be blue I became very suspicious that the rest of the story was all a fairy tale too.
I had seen many colours of cattle but never a blue one. Then when I was about six years old, our neighbour and his family moved from a farm about 15 miles away and brought the family milk cow with them because there was about 10 acres where their home was. The cow was not only a family pet and provider of all the milk for them but she was a blue brindle cow.
I was fascinated with her colour. She wasn’t really . . .
blue but her hair coat was a blend of white and black hair that looked blue in the sunlight. It was 10 years later, that I began to learn about dominant and recessive traits in agriculture class in school and later in genetics class in college. I then realized that Babe probably was a blue brindle ox. A blue brindle cow or ox is usually the result of a roan Shorthorn which is bred to a black and white Holstein.
An example of a dominant trait is black hair colour. An example of a recessive trait is red hair colour. Another dominant trait is the white face associated with Hereford cattle.
One of the most accepted beef cow mothers is the black baldy which is result of breeding a Hereford cow to an Angus bull. The black colour of the Angus is dominant to the red hair coat of the Hereford and the white face of the Hereford is dominant to the solid colour of the Angus. Crossbreeding also brings out hybrid vigor for a healthier and stronger calf.
An example of a recessive trait is “polled” or an animal without horns. Both the sire and dam must be polled to ensure a polled calf. Polled cattle are much more desirable and safer for farmers to handle. Although most or all of the beef cattle breeds are now polled because of some very selective breeding, most dairy cattle are still horned. Sometimes other traits like milk production, health traits, calving ease, etc. are intertwined with the same gene as polled and this hampers selection of just one trait.
A trait that all cattle breeders select for is ease of unassisted calving. A cattle breed like Belgian Blue have very desirable double muscling which gives bigger, higher priced steaks when the animal is turned into beef.
Both difficult births for cows and people usually require a “C” section. Not that many years ago, before modern medicine and surgery, a difficult birth often resulted in death of both the mother and offspring. You can confirm this by reading the information on headstones in our cemeteries.
Sometimes when a baby is born with red hair and neither parent or grandparent had red hair some people scratch their head and begin to ask questions. Because red hair is a recessive trait, one must look back six or more generations on both sides of the family to find family members on both sides who had red hair. Since red hair is a recessive trait, sometimes even though the offspring is born with red hair, it may gradually fade to black. This has been an annoyance if a purebred calf is born with red hair, registered as having red hair and then within a few months the red hair fades to black.
A person with red hair is much more susceptible to skin cancer than people with other hair colours. If you or your child have red hair please wear a broad brimmed hat, long sleeved shirt and pants when exposed to the sunlight.
Because both red hair colour and blue eyes are recessive traits, if you have both red hair and blue eyes, you are rare. If you marry a partner with both red hair and blue eyes then all your kids will have red hair and blue eyes but there are a lot of other more desirable reasons to choose a partner for life.
Since the still very expensive option of using CRISPER to pick and choose many traits for your yet to come child, your partner may not be included and you may get some unwanted traits that just came along attached to some trait that you selected.
Because chickens only have 78 chromosomes or 39 pairs, chickens have been selectively bred for specific uses like egg production or meat. Now in 2022, the genetics are so closely the same that if a deadly virus or disease gets into the world of chickens, the entire population may be in jeopardy. Luckily there are a few dedicated breeders of heritage breeds that are preserving the chicken gene pool.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
