Goodbye horny cows

Historically most attention has been placed on improving production traits, Ambreed genetic development strategist Phil Beatson says, but in the past few years more emphasis has been placed on fertility and traits associated with cow survival and public perception around animal welfare and the environment.
“Longevity, animal welfare and the environment are coming to the fore – including reducing methane, FE tolerance and polled versus horned cattle, as farmers have discussed the animal welfare concerns of dehorning calves,” he says
“From the animal welfare point, it has to be better for cattle if you don’t have to dehorn them, and from an economic standpoint, the cost has been creeping up, especially for large herds.”
Farmers were increasingly getting the vet to assist, which was added to the cost of a general and local anaesthetic of $7-$10 a calf.
Beatson believed pressure would be placed on farmers to move to vet intervention and because there had always been a small proportion of polled cows in the population because of mutations, he said it made sense to breed from the polled cattle.
From a genetic point of view the theory was simple, mirroring the Mendelian punnett squares most people learnt at school.
Polledness was expressed by only one gene, which was dominant to the horned gene, so if a cow had one copy of the polled gene her offspring would be expressed as polled.
CRV Ambreed had a small breeding programme with six unrelated cows and four bulls and was working on the most important aspect, Beatson said, which was to identify animals with both polled genes that are also high Breeding Worth (BW) or NZMI.
“The trick is to have bulls with high index scores plus two copies of the polled gene.”
He was confident the programme would have calves born in 2016 with high index scores and two copies of the polled gene, and that they would have bulls ready for the market in 2017.
The Jersey cattle in the programme had BW averaging 240, the Friesians sat at about BW 220 and the crossbreds at BW 230.
Beatson said he was fairly certain there were no negative genetic correlations around polledness.
“The cattle are perfectly sound, just polled.”
The company had dabbled in polled genetics for the past 10 years and had been seriously screening cattle from commercial herds and breeding with them for the past five years, and he was excited by the progress.
“It will be exciting for the industry to be able to move away from the cost and animal-welfare aspects of dehorning cattle.”
Signs had been coming from European countries that farmers would be banned from dehorning cattle in the next decade.
“We need to have a proactive approach to something that may become a problem in the future.”