I have always thought that if I question the birthdates of a person's animals, what else should I be questioning? I had two ET heifers born on January 1st this year. They were unfreezable embryos that I had put into recips and they were due on December 28th. I was certain they would arrive before the New Year but both held out until January 1. At the time I was very happy they made it to the New Year, but I am now thinking it may have been better if one or both had been born on other dates than January 1. I am certain there will be a few people who will believe I fudged their birth dates.
A few years ago, I had another ET calf born on December 19th. She grew into a pretty decent heifer, and I had several people tell me I was crazy not to be moving her birthdate to the New year. Some said things like " not moving her birthdate is going to cost you a bunch of money" or" you have a real shot at having Heifer Calf Champion if you date her birth as January'. I know lots of others would have done so, but I didn't. It ended up not costing me any money, as she is still in my herd, and the fact that her registration paper states her Birth date as December 19th has not affected her producing ability.
I think this is another issue that has been around since time began. Almost 30 years ago, a couple of friends of mine, showed up at a well known breeders farm unannounced on a Sunday morning between Christmas and New Year's. The family had gone to church so they decided to stop at the barn to see if they could see a particular bull they were interested in. What they found was over 20 calves in a pen behind the barn, some of which already had two inch belly hair. They grabbed a camera from their vehicle, and quickly snapped pictures of as many calves as they could and especially pictured the ones with any markings to identify them. The next fall we had great fun at the shows as we sorted through the pictures and then checked the birthdates that were reported. I remember one calf in particular, who was born sometime before mid December for sure, that was reported as an April 3rd on paper.
Like Dan said, there is really no real fool proof way of policing this. They used to mouth cattle at some shows here, but there were too many errors made. I remember having a good May bull that was disqualified at a show because they said he was older than he actually was. There was no use in protesting too much as it would not do any good. I happened to have witnesses who were here when he was born,but the decision was final. The next show we went to, he was mouthed again and there was no issue.
Unfortunately, there have always been people who believe that " if you are not cheating..... you are not competing." From the stories I have heard, the problem has been around for a long time. I have a complete set of Canadian Shorthorn Herd Books dating back to 1876, and in the front of these books they always printed the minutes of the last year's Annual Meeting. I have read many of these, and I have often thought they could be confused with being the minutes from a recent annual meeting, if the names were changed. Even at the start of the century, there was a pile of discussion on how to handle breeders who reported wrong data when registering cattle. Many times a letter warning them was sent by the Association President, and if there was a second offence, they would be barred from registering for periods of 2-5 years. I cannot see many breed associations of any color cattle having the gonads to take this kind of stand today.
