Genetics - How far back?

[savaged]

I have a Pale Face X Heat Seeker cross cow that I have had two better than average calves out of from Ace in the Hole (Easy Out X Grizz).  I do not know if she is clean or not.

My question is, at ay point should I consider any Heat Wave sons, WMW sons, or do the Heat Seeker and Easy Out bloodlines rule these out?  Can I use Double Stuff lines or does Easy Out (WMW X Double Stuff cow) cause an issue?  How far back in a genetic line should I consider? Is two generations separation enough, and with the clubby bulls X clubby cows how the heck do you keep it all straight past two generations anyway?  All that said, should I always use clean bulls on her?

It's amazing how many of the popular clubbie bulls have some lineage, somewhere,  or even a combination of  Heat Seeker/Wave and/or  WMW.  What's a guy to do?

 

[jbw]

sos

 

[Jill]

Just test her and then you don't have to worry about it.

 

[tadpole]

take jbw's advice on this one.  If yours turns out half as good as the one he has,  it will be great!!!  JBW, is that little heifer still looking as good as the last time I saw her?

 

[justintime]

The first thing to do is test your cow. That will determine what choices you will have, if having a defective calf is your main concern.

It really doesn't matter how far back the carrier genetics are, if your cow is a carrier also. You could be lucky and have a clean cow from two carrier parents, and she would not pass the defective gene on to her offspring herself. In the early years of TH, I had a TH calf from two untested parents. I was totally shocked as I did not know where this would have come from.  The defect calf was from two purebred parents, so I could research the pedigree. I knew that the sire had Deerpark Improver in his  background, but I did not know that he was also in the dam's pedigree. In checking these pedigrees, Improver was 5 generations back on the sire side, and 9 generations back in the dam's. To me, this is what concerns me the most about these defects getting into the commercial industry. The are very few commercial producers who can tell you what the pedigree of their cows are back even a few generations. Some people will say that it doesn't matter if clean bulls are always used. That would be fine if everyone did this, but this simply is not happening.

Some carrier sires are still very popular in the clubby industry. A commercial producer may decide to breed a few of his cows to one of these bulls to try to raise some steers and show heifers. Unless he tests his cows, he is running the risk of having some defect calves.

To answer your question, if you do not test your cows, you will need to use  clean sires of you could run the chance of having a defect calf  no matter how many generations a known carrier is.

 

[Okie Boy]

  WMW is not a carrier in the first place