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Carrier Bulls

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N

Northern Rancher

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I realize there are operations selling bulls that are carriers of genetic defects-what are the implications in your minds of this going forward into the commercial cattle population. I guess it's up to the individual rancher to do his own due diligence as to whether he buys them or not. I wonder about the purchaser of females out of or bred to them. As I understand they are identified in the purebred sector but not sure they will be in the commercial sector. I've got a fair amount of semen on a carrier bull that I purchased years ago-I'm leaning towards just dumping it out.
 
I'm not sure why anyone would sell a carrier animal? I can understand keeping them, mainly females, and trying to get a clean offspring. There were alot of good cattle hit with this defect stuff. And I still wonder how accurate the tests are. I have heard people testing with different companies and getting different results.

I had some semen on a carrier bull and returned it to the company for a different bull, but he was probabaly more recent than your bull NR.
 
as long as the seller makes it known who the carriers are, why not sell them? with that said, i don't know that i'd want very many of them in a sale. i watch a bull sale on superior the other day and the owner announced from the box that this particular bull was a carrier and to use him how you see fit...the bull brought $3500.
 
I see nothing wrong with selling a bull that is a carrier as long as it is up front so everyone knows what he is and what the defect is. We sold 2 carriers this year and we recommended them for terminal use.

I don't foresee many carrier bulls being sold in the future, as most everyone will be getting most of the carrier females out of their herds with the high cull prices. I don't see many purebred breeders using a carrier buoll in his own herd either. So between culling the carrier cows and not adding any on the bull side. In a few years you won't see hardly any, except for new defects that will be found.
 
I think your missing the point of my post-is what about the commercial offspring off a carrier bull. Who protects the buyer there? Rancher A buys a carrier from Purebreed breeder B then sells that bulls offspring into the commercial market either as heifer calves or bred heifers. Large operations run multibull pastures and have no way of identifying calves that could be from them. I think it's a slippery slope not to chop the heads off carriers.
 
We are no means a purebred place, but we have line bred 598 and never had a problem... I think a purebred place would be differant... Look what happened to the Quarter horse industry... I've also seen 1680 breeding go skyhigh on the auctions...... I'm no hep I guess....
 
who's going to protect the buyer in that situation? i'd say nobdoy. i wouldn't be buyin those carrier bulls if my plan is to sell heifers that are going back into production. chances are you may not ever see a problem, but there is a chance you would. personally, i wouldn't do it. to many other bulls to choose from to be taking that chance.

IMO :wink:
 
I just got back my DNA test on our 495 bull for AM he came back clean which I'm glad about as he cleaned up alot of pedigrees of owned and sold cattle.There would have been a pen of steers here if he did'nt pass.

I say cut them all if they test positive.I know guys that are breeding those carrier cows simmental and selling composite's which I would'nt do I'd just breed them as commercial cows to a hereford bull.I think it's such a minimal chance of ever having a problem it would'nt bother me to keep the heifers in our own commercial herd.

I guess if your a jockey you may have to worry some.
 
My understanding is that you cannot register a calf if it comes up as a carrier. Luckily, none of our cattle have come up positive, but I can see how it could devastate a program. Selling carrier cattle would be a personal choice, but I would have trouble sleeping at night if I did it. Just like if I am worried about the temperament, udder quality of the dam, structure, etc
 
I guess it is about ethics and integrity. Greed got us here and it will not get us out. We find out who has it and who dosent as the bull sale's progress.
 
I think that their are a lot of rancher's that just do not know what happens when carrier to carrier matings occur. Until most of Us see the result for our self, We just do not believe it can happen to us. We may have bought several bull's 7 years ago and had no idea that they were carrier's and the pedigree is long since forget. Then we calve in 2012 and find that we now have a 80% calf crop and cannot figure out why. Coyote's have ravaged the carcasses beyond identifying any genetic defect. Most of these ranchers believe that seed stock producer's, just wouldn't sell a defective product. And that is just the trusting nature of most of us. I would expect that a high profile breeder would hold himself to the Highest standard of all and resist, the greed of a few bull's and cow's that were carriers. I guess we all have to live with the decisions that we make every day. Yes some of us have to pay the price for greed. But we need to educate ourselves and our friends, and let them know who sells what. Free advertising can move Mountains.
 
I personnally beleive that carrier animals should only be sold as beef. My suggestion to anyone buying bulls is to make sure they are tested free of any known defect for that breed before investing your hard earned money. If a breeder is not willing to test his bull offerings there are others that will.

NR if you have semen on a carrier bull use it to produce feeder cattle destined to the packers but keep no replacements unless you are will to test for the genetic defect.

I know I hate loosing a calf for any reason and the possibility of loosing a number calfs and possible dams to a genetic defect turns my stomack. NH may require dam to have a c-section to get the dead calf out.
 
We moved all Red Angus carriers into our commercial program and tested all their offspring when the defect of the month was identified. The gelbvieh cattle have not been hit with this defect testing issue. As much as i believe alot of this genetic testing is a pure money grab and a strong arm attempt to have another set of fees paid to the big corps, once a defect is identified us pb breeders must act accordingly and remove those genetics from the fold.
 
A couple of years ago we sold our top selling bull to a purebred breeder and he had him tested, it turns out he was a carrier of OS. They decided to not use the bull and we could not figure out why he was a carrier. (both parents and grand parents had no carriers in the pedigree) We took hair on his mother she was free. We sent his semen to a different lab and that test came back free.

We called the association and gave them the case numbers and they looked into it and decided it was a human error and changed his status to OSF.

My whole point of this is that if they could make an error on calling a free one a carrier there could be some free cattle that are really carriers. I felt bad for the new owners because they lost one whole breeding season because of human error.

We used a carrier and tested our way out of him culled the carrier females (sold them as non breeders) and cut the bulls. We got some dandy looking free heifers that are have different genetics that hopefully will raise some top dollar bulls in the future. We certainly don't want to do that all the time.

just my thoughts

lazy ace
 
When Charolais cattle were first imported-some bulls came up as Arthrygryposis carriers-there was alot more at stake then -pretty much the future of the breed in North America. As far as I know the carriers were slaughtered-mind you numbers were small and it hadn't been diffused throughout the general cattle population. Charolais breeders of today should thank those early pioneers-the Conception to Consumer progeny test is probably the most informative and comparative tests ever done by a breed association. It exposed the cow killers at calving etc. It would be interesting to see the polar opposites of the Angus breed-SAV vs Pharo and all others in between randomly mated across commercial cows in North America and compared birth to hook. It would be more relevant to me anyway than EPD's and DNA profiles are. Sorry to get off the topic like that.
 
NR,

You hit on two of the biggest problems I have with EPDs: The data never comes from the end use population-commercial cattle and the matings are not random.
Also the genetic herd that did the carrier testing was at the U of A ranch and was not part of the the C to C program. Some very interesting information was gathered from this herd namely that the heterozygous state was selected for meaning carrier animals were some of the best in a herd.
A C to C program would provide extremely useful information that EPDs do not. Sadly C to C is dead due to the expense of the program.
Angus breeders are you listening?
 
I didn't mean the defects were tested through C to C-me and my run on sentences. I was fortunate enough to work for Bill Hunt for a year as a young guy and got to meet some of the early Charolais breeders. One thing I learnt at Bill's was it wasn't the breed you ran-it was the cattle within a breed and how you selected them-too bad it took me almost twenty years for it all to permeate through. He was a great old cowboy-there were 400 PB Char cows on that ranch that had to go out and work-calve on the grass and get themselves rebred. The Angus equivalent of the C to C would sure be an interesting deal-might dispell or validate alot of theories on the suitability of different cattle.
 

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