Okotoks said:
sue said:
coyote said:
Here are a couple pictures of our Gay Lad sons that we had this year. I thought the calves would of been smaller framed, but they both compare very well with our other calves. They are very long with big testicles. Their Adjusted 205 day wt were 651 lbs and 659 lbs, our bulls averaged 650.
They do look nice and I think 650 is a good place to be for an adjusted 205 too.
I dont know if Weston Shamrock is really what the paper says... the bull was possibly a "misprint" .
What I have appreciated most about digging up old material with steers on feed and such - is even then the test was smart enough to take a close look at # DAYS ON FEED AND NOT just who gained 4 lbs/day.
So Weston Shamrock was born in Sept. of 1969 so this assumption he is not the right pedigree is 41 years old! There's quite a few bulls out there that I have heard the same thing about and most were used a lot and can be found in a lot of pedigrees. The interesting thing is no one ever says what they really were or what the facts are to back it up. I know of one influential cow in Canada and the people that make the accusations didn't see fit to report it at the time and supposedly they could have! It's a little disturbing to think we have influential bulls with the wrong pedigrees but if no one provides any back up what can you do? I find it almost easier to deal with the lack of a Dover pedigree or a Deerpark Foundation pedigree than the speculation on some. I did see the Weston Shamrock bull as an aged bull and he was impressive.
When I used to visit the Weston herd, they always had a binder with copies of all the cows pedigree's in the truck. I was always amazed that some of the very best cows had pedigrees with lots of Saskatchewan and Manitoba bloodlines in them. I remember several great cows " on paper" were bred in a Saskatchewan herd that I was very familiar with. I had never seen cows of this caliber in this herd, but just assumed that Doc Nold had got lucky and been able to buy the top end of the herd.
One of the main reasons I purchased Ready Go at the 1973 Polled Congress in Louisville was because he was a Weston Shamrock son. I had seen Shamrock at Nold's on many occasions and I felt he was an amazing beef bull. A few years later, I was looking for a bull to use on my Ready Go daughters. I went to the American Polled Congress again, and I was the runner up bidder on the Grand Champion bull, Mollie's Defender Adair( nicknamed Surge) who sold for $15500 to R Lee Johnson ( Millbrook Shorthorns). After the sale I tried to buy a 1/2 interest in Surge, but was not able to come to an agreement with R Lee. Surge was born and bred in the herd of Rueben Shantz in Nebraska, which was probably the best herd of dual purpose Shorthorns I ever saw.
Many many years later, I had the opportunity to have a visit with Bill Marsden who had sold Surge at the Polled Congress. Bill was now raising Angus cattle in South Dakota and we had a great talk about the Weston program. Bill was the herd manager at Weston for a few years, so he was very familiar with the herd.It was in this visit that Marsden told me that Ready Go and Surge were full brothers. He also told me that Weston Shamrock also was a Shantz bred bull. He also told me about some of the breeding in some of the best Weston cows. He said he was certain that the Weston herd was 100% Shorthorn, but that many of the pedigrees had been " adjusted " to fit the times. I was not certain if I totally believed what I was told, so I did some homework when I got back home. When I looked up the dam of Surge, I found that she had a red bull calf born on the same day as Ready Go, and it carried the same tattoo as he had. Was this a coincidence? I think it is highly unlikely. As a side note, Bill Marsden was killed in a car accident shortly after our visit.
So, my educated guess is that Ready Go was a dual purpose bull and his pedigree was probably steeped in some of the great Haumont lines. Does this information change my thoughts on this bull? Not really, other than I do wish that I could have accepted his pedigree as fact. Ready Go was an excellent breeding bull but his real pedigree probably helps explain why his daughters had such flawless udders and milked extremely well. He was a bull that would correct even the poorest udder in one generation. I remember selling Ready Go semen to a breeder who had some cows with about the worst udders I had ever seen. When I saw the Ready Go daughters out of some of these cows, I could not believe my eyes. They had well formed udders with small teat size, just like the other Ready Go daughters I had seen. As I have mentioned before on SP, Ready Go is the only bull I have owned that I am still selling semen from every year, despite it being almost 40 years since I purchased him.
I am certain that there are a percentage of pedigrees that are not correct in every year. Some are incorrect by mistake, and others are done intentionally. I find it interesting that when I was in Scotland, I was told that a well known breeding establishment had refused to provide DNA profiles on some of the bull calves that a group of British breeders were trying to purchase. There may have been good reasons for this, but the Brits certainly felt that this was simply because the calves in question were not what their papers suggested.
Does anyone know anything about the George Knox herd?I saw a son of Weston Surprise 14th a couple months ago that looks real good to me.The 14th was out of the same cow as the Lad and carried a lot of the Knox breeding.Weston Shamrock also was bred similar.
