Show Heifer.... if you lose Karma points for what I consider to be logical comments in your post, well.... I probably will be passing you on the road to negative Karms, as I agree with most of what you said. To me, if you decide to continue to use carrier bulls, you should have also decided at the same time that you will test all females and male offspring that you plan to sell for show and breeding purposes. To me, these are decisions that go hand-in- hand. Anyone who feels that the costs of testing are too high for you, well.... you simply are playing in the wrong ball park. If your margins are that low, you should be raising commercial cattle or using non carrier animals. Personally, I would never do business with a breeder who refused to test possible carrier animals or release the results to potential buyers. That is just me. But then, I would not buy a used car from a car dealer who had a shaky reputation as well. As I have said on here before, most people buy cattle from people they like, and trust. Trust and reputation are two commodities that can not be purchased at any cost. Both take years to develop and they can both be destroyed in a moment buy one stupid bad deal you make. Let's call a spade a spade..... if you use carrier sires and sell the female and intact male offspring without testing them and publically releasing the test results, I for one, will NOT be doing business with you, no matter how good your cattle are. Period!!!!!The same goes if you are using carrier females in your herd to produce breeding stock.
Both TH and PHA are called GENETIC DEFECTS for a reason. They are defects.... which means they are not normal, in the population. Only a few genetic mutations have been benefical to the beef industry.. such as the genetic mutation for polled cattle. To me, any defect that can lead to, or result in dead offspring, is one that should be eliminated as quickly as possible from a population. Both TH and PHA( and I understand that PHA is a different deal genetically) are in this catagory, and for this reason alone, they should be eliminated. I really don't care how much hair or how much more showy some of these carriers are, the fact remains that they are still defective, in their genotype. You can argue all you want about the fact that you can control having defective dead calves by never breeding two carriers. The fact still remains that you have literally zero contol on what breeding decisions take place once they leave your farm. I am not saying we need to load all carriers into trucks and send they to the hamburger factory as quickly as possible, but we certainly don't need to be producing more and more carriers each year.
I do not think it is possible for anyone to have absolute total control as to where their carrier animals end up, unless they personally accompany each one to the kill floor of the packing plant. We used to operate a feedlot and we oftentimes assembled slaughter cattle for order buyers. I have seen literally thousands of cows that were sold by farmers, to go to slaughter, sorted off and resold in bred cow sales. Order buyers used to routinely, preg test pens of cows and haul the pregnant cows back to town to bred cow sales. Why did they do this? Well, they were only interested in making money and I saw many of these cows sell for double or triple , what the order buyers purchased them for. Sometimes they had only owned them for a few days before they were reclassified as good replacements cows and resold. Just because you sell your carrier cows for slaughter is not a solid guarantee that is where they will end up.
In regards to yoru suggestions about spaying carrier heifers, I am not sure if this would solve this issue. I think that when heifers are shown in class you should be considering them all as being shown in breeding cattle classes. Spayed heifers, no matter how you define them are not breeding stock. I think it would certainly smart a little to have your non carrier heifer that you purchased for , say..... $10,000 or more, beat by a spayed heifer whose total value when her show career is over amounts to not much over $.60/lb. Worse yet, think of the potential uproar if a breed's National Champion female was a spayed heifer.
Spaying heifers is definitely easy to do, but right now, I am not convinced it is an answer that will solve more problems than it creates.
