Reflections Condensed

Hilly wrote...
As Larry alluded to, I think history provides proof that these prepotent bulls will become overvalued at some point to the dismay/delight of some.

And with the rate of technology coupled with human tendency’s none of this will matter much outside of the impact it has on us and our varying circles of influence today.

The little red hen didn’t have to worry about how much to sell the bread for as it had intrinsic value to her and her family not only in sustenance but in basic mental and physical activity needed to live a healthier and more contributing existence.

The hen’s example had a direct influence on the perspective her chicks had on a kernel of wheat, as they were dependent on her and were more of less a captive audience(TomD less so)...

The pig, duck, mouse and cat seemed to be getting along fine with or without the hen. An apparent abundance and subsequent complacency had formed their present normal, for better or for worst, a comfortable existence... although judging from the amount of physical and mental labour they are contributing, appear dependent on someone/thing, they just have no current need to care.

Only after the hen had finished the bread did she expanded her influence over the bystanders and more than likely could have sold the loaf to the now eager audience but at what cost???? Could it be the answer to that question is of less importance then the intent of example, a progression toward independents to enable more productive and fulfilling lives.

The road each of us travels is certainly not the only road so I see little use in stopping to build a gate with terms and conditions posted to gain entrance as it may be that I will find myself coming back through the same gate having to remove all signage and replace with a simple “Dead End”.

On the subject of independence I recently downloaded the book “John Adams” written by David McCullough and narrated by Edward Herrmann, I’m sure someone could find some factual flaws in it but I found it very worthwhile.

You can get it at iTunes like I did or here is the Audible link, if interested...

 http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_2?asin=B002V5H8ZC&qid=1351526262&sr=1-2

JSelte wrote...
This is the view from the unexperienced tru-line outsider, who has been watching for a while and not quite sure where to start.
Tru-line to me is exactly what LL states: the ability to consistently breed animals that will return you the highest net return over their life for the lowest cost.

What I find confusing is reading everyone else’s interpretation of LL’s words, because they seem to ask the same complicating questions I had or have or possibly will have too. Right now,  I find this a very simple concept. I believe it is all about concentrated biodiversity and environmental adaptability. For example, I recently watched a TEDtalk on seeds and the lack of biodiversity in today’s world. The point to the talk is that just about every family had an apple tree named after them. Why? Because that is what best suited their needs and the environment they lived in. To me, this should be the same with cattle, the cattle that I produce in my area may not be the same as the cattle Hilly produces in his or even Dylan produces in his and will definitely not be the same as LL or MK. Why? Our environments are different and our needs may be different. However, that being said, as just like the apples, I assume, the general functional design will stay the same.

LL said in his first post in Reflections that we should be further along and better equipped to breed cattle, but I will tell you that I am more confused than my father is and I am sure he is more confused than his was. We keep coming out with new tools, like EPDs, that are designed by funding from certain industries. However, I think many breeders forget to look at where they came from. For myself, I have put EPD’s on the backburner and have gone to history and tried to learn the visual markings as possibly Bakewell and Bonsma used. Really just trying to keep it simple and figure out what the animals can tell me, not the numbers.

My search for the quick easy answers to how to breed cattle has led me here, like, I assume, many of the fellow readers; however, I have realized my search for the quick and easy breeding has led me to wander in the desert looking for the promise land. Like the people who followed Moses, I will be taught patience, humility, and understanding, but I am preparing myself for the 40 year journey.

I still am yet to figure out the starting point for myself. Coming from an existing cattle operation, we have some cows that have been around for 15+ years and still going strong. They obviously survive and produce in our environment and have so for years. Do I isolate these animals and start a closed herd with them, even though they are like that dog dropped off at the end of the drive (mongrels). Or do I start with some cattle that may be somewhat closely bred, have the right phenotype, focused on the maternal (to a balanced extent) and have been selected for that for the last 20+ years, but, I believe, only have an average lifespan on their existing farm of 10 years tops? I guess my question is really should I (or we) be trying to use the square wheel and rounding it off, or use the oval wheel and adding different spokes to round it off, or find the pieces to make our own wheel from what others are not wanting to keep?

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the questions I have, but they are more focused in order to not make as many mistakes. However, if I get answers to them how do I learn to be patient, humble, and grow my understanding.

I do have one question about the theory that genes shut off and turn on. I read today about birds becoming more diverse as time has past. The article says that the birds will diversify to adapt to a niche. This happens until all niches are full and then extinction catches up. Could this not be the whole point of the genes turning on and off in linebred cattle? Those on off switches are their way of changing to adapt; however, we have to learn to see the adaptations with our own eyes too unless we let nature sort it all out.

Have included the TEDtalk. They are amazing talks that make you think about the future and where we are going and what could be possible.
http://www.ted.com/talks/cary_fowler_one_seed_at_a_time_protecting_the_future_of_food.html

Larry wrote...
MK quoted:

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Man's unique creativity is limited to the transformation of what has already been created  

Bob Howard wrote:

Is it the spirit of man or the spirit of god in man that makes us all so unique?
I also mispoke early by thanking just Larry for all of the wonderful females in my life, God should also be thanked by me for the wonderful humans that I have in my life, both male and female. Bob H

Great news to hear the confirmation of Pam's freedom of cancer, I vividly remember the radiance of our Creator shining in Pam's eyes and her gorgeous smile last August....what you may not know Bob is that I asked her if she would marry me and she said "YES!".....I didn't mention that this old man's herd of cattle wouldn't come with him.    

While I greatly appreciate your thanks Bob, you have paid me more than enough by just having all those wonderful females in your herd.   It was not me, but your unique individual power of the mind over matter that caused you to seek out those qualities you so enjoy in your cattle.....I am thankful that we both found a source from all the biodiversity that is available along with having the individual freedom of choice and self-responsibility....to choose a little bit of alot of things or alot of a few things.....while selecting for endurance with stayers or mixing them with sprinters depending on the length of the race.   We are certainly not lacking biodiversity in this business, what is sorely lacking is improvement in the genetic stability or "purity" of whatever kind we choose.
While on this subject of biodiversity, I'd like to respond to JSelte's sincere post of November 1, 2012 describing his contemplations of WHERE TO START or what  type to pursue and what could be POSSIBLE in the future.   To avoid extinction,  I definitely wouldn't try to start with man's "creation" of the cow that Eddie M found....thankful that Mother Nature renders freaks with sterility while I'm contrarily reminded that the moose successfully evolved from the left-over parts of other animals without man's help .  




While we live in the present most of us still think about planning for the future on a daily basis from whatever we've discovered during our own past.    .I suppose the Chicken Little's of the world would revere Ted Fowler as being a modern day Noah with his museum collection to preserve all the biodiversity in Ag for the future.    This has not been a concern for me since I rely on the natural biodiversity Mother Nature built into mankind to preserve whatever will be needed in order to adapt to whatever the future holds....I can rest assured that someone somewhere will do this since I am certain that mankind cannot be smarter than that which created us.

With that reassuring thought in mind, both extinction and renewal seems to be a natural process of evolution's survival of the fittest in this use it or lose it system.  I haven't got a clue as to how evolution produced distinct species that have survived to this day, but we know each species has only two kinds, a male & female...and legends suggest that Noah only needed to save a male and female of each species, it doesn't reveal what Noah's selection criteria was for each male and female in order to encompass all the biodiversity needed for the future....natural law takes care of that.
I don't know and don't care whether the Dodo bird became extinct or evolved into a modern day pigeon or whether dinosaurs evolved into birds.....I only know that many of the characteristics of those ancient ancestors have become extinct but life is programmed to go on in one adaptable form or another whether we want to preserve the status quo or not.   I have no personal need to know who or how the universe was created,  or how the ancient Egyptians mummified the dead and built the pyramids,  or who the ancient ancestors of todays cattle were......I only need to accept that whatever is....is.    I have my hands full focusing on what I can control with no time left for things beyond my control....so I'll let Hilly carry all the burdens of the world with that invisible atlas on his shoulders, I need more sleep than he does.  




I've often wondered what thinkers and philosophers contribute to society and why some practice what they preach while others are hypocrites.   MK was being humble when he said "as to turn on/turn off genes, the switch in my brain hasn`t turned on yet...  "     To the contrary, despite external forces, MK's experience, a gift of reason and common sense, some of the switches in MK's mind have been turned on which have caused him to adapt to change from the status quo....and whether MK likes his preprogrammed role or not, he is a part of the slow but inevitable ongoing evolutionary process in the big picture of the cattle breeding world.    MK would scoff at the thought that he is among the "chosen ones" of this inevitable evolutionary process of checks and balances......we all are and those independent thinkers on KC are just the temporary evolutionary outliers that began eons ago.
I don't need to know why we are all uniquely preprogrammed to do whatever it is we do, or why we each think like we do.....or how we are influenced by our environmental factors.    Those factors must've caused some switches in my brain to turne on causing me to search for the answers to the problems with the cattle in my life, and beyond my control each switch turned on another light until finally the enlightened evolutionary process became amazingly simple.  So Tom D and I laughed while discussing his posted picture explaining to Iain that " those are the lightbulbs turning on in their heads, we're reading Leonhardt.   .  

Tom D wrote:

Isn't it amazing how imbedded it is in us to want to learn by asking questions and enjoy discoveriing the mysteries of  life.....I see those twinkling lights in Bob Howard's eyes as we sit and laugh while discussing  how simple SUCCESSFUL cattle breeding can actually be.....and those twinkling eyes and smiles on the faces of those who come to KC gatherings not to satisfy their own egos, but to discover and enjoy any merits shared by what others are doing......who could ever forget the continuous gleam and smiles on DV's face during his after dinner talk at Miles City, or when Bootheel talked about his search to discover the truth......all just to find contentment from the frustrations in our lives.   I liked that OLD ad that said "our milk comes from contented cows"....no more, today's milk comes from short lived stressed out cows.   I'd like to resurrect that theme with "TruLine beef is produced from contented cows".  

It is an established reality that birds of a feather flock together and MATERNAL cattle breeding is nothing more than selection for those characteristics that adapt in harmony with whatever environment is provided.  Whether we're lucky or unlucky, nature ALWAYS gives us what we select for over time.  At the PRESENT time, within my isolated population my first priority is not for the greatest,  but good maternal function....those with the least problems.    Now, all I do is select the functional sons out of those same type of cows and ALLOW the cows to pick their mates as they "flock" together.....Bob calls it putting the boys with the girls and they have little ones  .   If  fertility/reproduction  is the most important economic trait, the simple annual preg test sustains and increases the frequency of the selected characters over time while reducing the frequency of any disruptive genes.     The proper cow size and type will automatically adapt to the environment that is provided....if that type is not an acceptable choice, we either need to change the environment or suffer the consequences.

Believe it or not, in life I have observed that opposites attract only to restore a more favorable balance, readily conceding that after millions of years, nature is smarter than all of us.  Yet, we call this a reversion process when in reality it is sustainable progression.   And I've watched how that one "sub species of birds" on Keeneys Corner attack any other disruptive "birds" to protect or defend their environmental harmony....I suppose that is how sub groups of like-minded communities are formed with a bias against disruptive invaders.      But of course if making money is the primary objective, no individual or group will ever make enough as class warfare begins and sub-divides over and over again.    The AAA society provides a great example.
For the FUTURE, the TruLine theme of harnessing hybrid power may be getting monotonous but the principles have been known for over a 100 years....and the benefits are inevitably being improved  in a subtle way during this ongoing evolutionary process....fighting it only delays this natural process of man's unique "creativity" to transform one form of energy into another more efficiently.   So anyone interested in developing pure strains, for guidance I'd suggest you make a copy and absorb the content of Kent's post of Nov 26, 2012 "Pure Lines" under the general topic of "Breeding Philosophies" along with his other related posts on that topic.

I've discovered that perpetual intensive inbreeding expecting perfection some day is not only very expensive, it is an impossible dream which ultimately will be a path leading to extinction.  And it is certainly against the rule of natural law's efforts to sustain adaptable biodiversity via its mutations and distributions.   So what is...is, and besides that.we would never know what perfection was without imperfections and if everything was perfect in our Garden of Eden, how boring it would be with nothing left for any of us to do.....living in a garden without any forbidden fruit or anything to be thankful for    .....finally acknowledging that we have to have poor cattle, sickness and death in order to appreciate good cattle, health and life.  .    

So we'll always have plenty left to do.   MK said, "this one line says plenty; and I think we know why the following is true:..."We have not focused on maternal and paternal lines...we have spent far too much time trying to blur those lines rather than utilize the differences."Well, I suppose we should be thankful  for this circumstance cause if idle hands are the devil's playground, it gives us more to do to keep us out of trouble.....      .


LL starring in "Its a Wonderful Life" adding lights to Tom's Christmas tree,  whistling "Dixie" while I work to reduce the monotony among the KC elves in Santa's workshop jus' tryin' ta keep'em busy building unique TruLine Playhouses for all the wonderful females in our herds who haven't been naughty.....but nice. .

Larry wrote...
It's too damn cold and snowing outside to do much so here I am trying to avoid all those inside"honey do" jobs that keep stacking up by pretending I'm busy working on "more important things"......philosophical differences.

While celebrating this annual Christmas spirit of giving, it always reminds me that man cannot fully comprehend all the absolute laws of the universe.   While searching for truth, some men rely on faith praying for Divine guidance, other's scoff demanding scientific proof.   My wife Queen Elizabeth is zealous in both politics and religion where nothing seems absolute in either.....nor is it in cattle breeding.   It's been said the only thing certain in life is death & taxes  

I can see how it might be possible for a man
   to look down upon the earth
   and be an atheist,
   but I cannot conceive how
   he could look up into the heavens
   and say there is no God

   Abraham Lincoln



Photo courtesy of Dylan......lookin'  up

From those searching for black and white answers in cattle breeding,  I've received a few private inquiries relating to homozygosity's influence in fixing traits.  My most immediate concern is that some of my statements related to close breeding may have been misconstrued.  Feeling somewhat guilty,  I must learn to defer the inner workings of DNA to geneticists, I can only see the outside.    My disclaimer is that any assumptions I've made are entirely hypothetical only based on observations and should  not be presumed to be the absolute gospel.    

Not being a scientist but a simple farmer with only a high school education,  my limitations are only consoled somewhat by the fact that  even among professional scientists it is common that what was once previously thought to be an established truth is often later disproved or to be in error.   I have often been reminded that no one really likes an egostical "know it all"....that an admission to any of our "screw ups" is more appealing.   Despite my wife's best efforts to change me, my being an independent "know it all" is probably one of the reasons I have not been converted to Catholicism whose members must go to "confession" seeking absolution on a regular basis..... along with my own failure to understand and focus on the real reason behind the repetitiveness of the "Hail Marys".  

Eventually we all develop some kind of philosophy to follow in our own lives.   From birth, we become excited over new discoveries but after awhile when they become routine or taken for granted we become complacent and bored, re-ignited only in our quest for newer discoveries.    While my own "discoveries" over time have become rather routine and monotonous for me,  at my age I now prefer wiling away my time rekindling those original joys by adumbratively sharing the reaffirmation of my "discoveries" with those who may have difficulty in accepting some of them.  I will try to be more complete in the future.   It is my way of atoning for my sins along the way rather than seeking absolution.
 
In my previous post discussing biodiversity I noted the general sterility of a Beefalo (I could've used a mule as another example) yet the non sterile Yak strongly resembles a Beefalo....or the mule the Zebra.    So when I forewarned that continually intensifying inbreeding would be a path leading to extinction, that exclamation apparently  caused some consternation among those who prefer private over public discussions.    I learned a long time ago that often in life ours is not to reason why, ours is just to do or die.      

So, with those perspective thoughts in mind, to publicly elaborate on those questions relating to homo/hetero percentages and fixing traits, I've resurrected the following scientifically prepared hypothetical chart.... I don't know if it is absolute in general or not, but we've observed that both ends of the spectrum generally result in sterility beyond the charts 80 to 90 percentile of either direction.....I don't know why, the spider ate the fly, they just do in order to survive so I accept that it is just the way it is not needing complicated scientific explanations of why things happen.   I do know why I do what I do here on KC..... it's to justify why I chose to do what I do    



Chart courtesy of CSU.....lookin' down

In an attempt to separate BS from truth for any "doubting Thomas", following the CSU chart I could  presume that somewhere in between there must be an optimum hetero/homo combination to sustain or stabilize whatever our objective is.    Hypothetically, to move from whatever an optimum is to either  the left or right the percentage would change and assume the cattle would also change.   Established data strongly  supports that intentional movement would also either increase or decrease the spherical distributions for better or worse as illustrated by my simple hypothetical spherical distribution charts previously shown on KC.  

Since science has difficulty with laymen simplicity and bell curves are more commonly used to describe the distributions of a trait or characteristic, I decided it might be better to borrow Kendra's distribution chart to illustrate a single point.  Kendra, you have my sincerest gratitude for your timely "qualitative vs quantitative" post.    Now I need your skills to help create a scientific formula for what I'm trying to illustrate.....and since you posted MY PICTURE below your posted chart, I was hoping you would marry me to keep that happy look on my face if my polygamous cow herd and dowry came with me......of course you'd also be sharing me with Betty, DeAnn, Erica, Kristina, Linda's, Pam (in alphabetical order) and more as I increase my imaginary harem to help take care of me.     Let's assume this bell curve chart is the absolute gospel according to Kendra.  



If we bundled up all the cattle into a single group, the distribution from the average or means might look like that.   Without any other selection, if we isolated all those that actually were 80% hetero, the distribution from that average might look like this one below



And if we isolated all those that were actually 80% homo, the distribution from the average or means might look like the one below, the distance between the groups should be significantly closer, in theory 96% of this population would be as much alike to their own  means as the 34% would be in the 80% hetero group.   And if we put them all back together, in theory we would be back to where we started



Now in a real world scenario, I have no idea what the ratio of hetero/homo percentile actually is in my isolated herd...and I don't really need to know other than just to satisfy my curiosity.    WITH CONSTANT SELECTION for a single maternal composite of functional values towards a SINGLE maternal TYPE,  based on CSU's hetero/homo percentile chart, I could safely say the population of the herd should be about in the middle, or a means of a 50/50 ratio of hetero/homo genotypes...excluding any of my separate side projects.   Within these separate side projects, in the traditional world some believe that going beyond a 50% relationship is incest and detrimental, depending on what our objective  is.   That is another story but for an example taking this one step at a time, from my isolated population Hilly temporarily selected this cow to represent his long term objectives so whatever her actual hetero/homo percentile ratio actually is, regardless of pedigree, it could be presumed to be the optimum hetero/homo combination within this population's biodiversity.




Photo courtesy of Craig Hilman in her Montana environment....lookin' forward




Photo courtesy of Craig Hilman - Same cow a coupla years later in her current Canadian environment......still lookin' forward

And MK temporarily selected this cow from my isolated population  for his long term objectives so whatever her actual hetero/homo actually is, regardless of pedigree, it could be presumed to be the optimum hetero/homo combination within this populations biodiversity.



Photo courtesy of Mike Keeney in her Kentucky environment......contemplating which way to look from where she is

And someone  temporarily selected this cow from an isolated population representing the optimum combination of hetero/homo for their objective within the existing available biodiversity



Photo courtesy of the internet in a completely supportive environment......all fixed up lookin' georgeous

We can presume they all have the same number of genes.  While I can't see any significant functional differences between the two cows Hilly and MK selected (presuming they would want an entire herd of this type of cow) we can all see a distinct difference in the Jersey cow being much more delicate, yet the percentage of their hetero/homo percentiles may or may not be similar in all three in order to sustain their types.    We know its not just that simple but I am just using these as examples to make a point.

Tom D and LL selected this "cow" pictured below from an entire population not caring one whit what her combination consisted of or how efficient she is to fulfill their short term objective.....an impossible figment of their imagination.....and from experience I can say with absolute certainty that age never diminishes a man's appreciation of gracious maternal symmetry.  



Photo courtesy of Tom Dykstra - lookin' up near the Garden of Eden definitely more different than others I'm collecting in my harem who will take care of my  LOOOONNNNNGG  term objectives

I have no clue what the actual hetero/homo percentage is in any of my cattle nor of those in the above photos, and even if I knew, I am 99.9% certain that it is an impossible figment of our imagination to think that we could replicate or sustain that optimum combination of hetero/homo with selected mating systems which would move the progeny to either  the left or right of that percentile chart by either inbreeding or outbreeding.    So to all of you cattle breeders out there flushing cows, WHOOOAAAA, STOP AND THINK....why in this world would we EXPECT further INBREEDING an optimum type to reproduce that same optimum type when the progeny average would actually move to the left of the chart.  And on the other hand, we need to be reminded that MARC research reaffirms that without selection we must sustain a given percent of heterosis lest we revert to the average of the parents.....whatever that was.

Percentages....Bob Howard's current herd descended from mainstream variation..... switching about a dozen years ago with constant selection for his preferred maternal functional type.   I think we could safely theorize that his current herd may have reverted  into the 50 to 60% hetero/homo category.   As form follows functional selection, Bob says his culling rate for "good enough" work & wear cows has dropped from about 75% to 15% using "good enough" maternal bulls.....a huge economic factor for his business......adaptable uniformity without the need to compile contradicting  measures....evident from his picture below.



Photo courtesy of Bob Howard .....lookin' every direction in his Idaho environment

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I want to again offer Bob Howard a special thank you for demonstrating the power of prepotency of purpose with affordable population genetics.and for taking the time and having the patient faith in applying the "tru-line" concept.   I couldn't help recalling the time when Gavin told me his primary production consisted of bulls, beef & cull cows.   Bob's has stated that his production primarily consists of seedless fruit and replacement cows.

So, when stabilizing a preferred type, the two individual cows that Hilly and Mike selected are certainly not considered by me to be among the 2% outliers, rather they are only the pinnacle, the centerpoint, the MEANS  of the population from which all others descend.    And for all practical purposes, if 68% of those surrounding that centerpoint are ALL genetically the "SAME AS OTHERS", a percentage which is relatively close from my observations, so then it just becomes an economic decision whether to cull 4% or up to 32% depending on how finicky we are.   Consequently, practical simple farmer common sense and economic logic causes me to wonder why in the hell anyone in the beef  business would continue to support that portion of the mainstream registered society who are persistantly chasing the 2% that are DEFINITELY  more different than others....implying that 98% of our cattle today need continual changing for improvement/progress.    Ooooohhhhh my gawd, that tradition must be considered one of the greatest marketing scams ever successfully conceived by mankind.

I once thought I needed to pray for Divine guidance for the multitudes, to forgive us for we know not what we do....finally realizing the traditional mainstream elite among us  SURE AS HELL KNOW WHAT THEY DO ....ALL TOO WELL.      Indeed, while reality is often depressing, it also offers optimism for tomorrow.   I hope the point I've tried to make here is fully understood.....that we can't change something without something changing .    As I zig zag back and forth around a preferred centerpoint, I  fully expect selection and natural law to self-govern whatever hetero/homo level the herd has.  And I hope this post better explains why I run multiple sires together since essentially they are the same as the others... and why I can fairly  price at least a minimum of 70% of my bulls and cows all the same.  

It is not a matter of being right or wrong, it is very simply just my choice.

Stabilization of functional types is just the beginning phase of this OPTIONAL "tru-line" concept.    While working towards the basic objective, the possibilities for improved refinement  are limited only by natural law and our imagination.    Thank you Dennis for your support of this movement with your graphic illustrations.



To end this post on a lighter note, hypothetically, Adam and Eve must've looked somewhat like this......



Photo courtesy of Guess Who
Eve in order to entice Adam to eat the apple and Adam in order to provide the genetic biodiversity needed by Eskimos......and Santa  

LL, near a vicinity where old DNA pedigreed heteros and homos are becoming  extinct and buried in Bootheel Land where Kraziness battles Craziness.....evolving into transformed pituitary glands

Larry wrote...

Grassfarmer wrote:

Larry Leonhardt wrote:

I have no clue what the actual hetero/homo percentage is in any of my cattle nor of those in the above photos, and even if I knew, I am 99.9% certain that it is an impossible figment of our imagination to think that we could replicate or sustain that optimum combination of hetero/homo with selected mating systems which would move the progeny to either  the left or right of that percentile chart by either inbreeding or outbreeding.    So to all of you cattle breeders out there flushing cows, WHOOOAAAA, STOP AND THINK....why in this world would we EXPECT further INBREEDING an optimum type to reproduce that same optimum type when the progeny average would actually move to the left of the chart.  And on the other hand, we need to be reminded that MARC research reaffirms that without selection we must sustain a given percent of heterosis lest we revert to the average of the parents.....whatever that was.

Larry, this part of your latest post has been making my head hurt for most of the day. Maybe if I sleep on it it'll help me to understand it better and relate it to what some of us are doing. What is the relevance of the part I highlighted in red - I just don't know what that means.
Thanks again, Iain

Iain, while writing my posts, they make my head hurt during that time which often takes several days to coordinate my thoughts for coherency.      We all practice some kind of selection.   We describe heterosis as a phenomenon.   I've presumed the "restoration" of inbreds is due to this same phenomenon.    The MARC research I was referring to is the phenotypic effect from the non-additive effects of heterosis.    

We've observed how the phenotype of inbreds generally breed "up" from where they were when outcrossed and outcrosses generally breed "down" from where they were when inbred.  With every animal being an isolated "population of germ plasm" and breeds being represented to be an isolated "population of germ plasm", crossbreeding then would be a continual expansion of a "population of germ plasm".   The CSU hetero/homo chart theoretically suggests what the range or trend of percentages each population should consist of depending on the mating systems.  

If I understand correctly what you've told us about the foundation of the Luing breed, the founders were not satisfied with the SELECTION direction of the existing breeds and sought different characters from different sources to establish their ideal.    Surely any initial affects of heterosis from this expanded population of germ plasm would be reduced over time by their SELECTION  for their preferred functional characteristics.....increasing the frequency of those preferred characters and reducing or culling those unwanted characters from the distributions within their new isolated population of expanded germ plasm.    Selection for only those preferred characters could be expected to reduce the variation in the distributions...I call it a refining process.   Obviously inbreeding offers a quicker way to reduce variation but it is also a double edged sword and that is why I said somewhere in between our selection determines a functional preferred optimum.

Of course you already know all this, but the industry's frustrations begin cause we all want only the "best" of everything, the ones that definitely express more than others       Iain, I assume you have a "purebred ideal" in mind, otherwise you would be "crossbreeding".    From the distributions in your isolated herd, which one would you be satisfied with having a whole herd of?    From your breeding records, determine where you would place that ideal on the "CSU chart".    Is that ideal the average or means of your population......the nucleus from which others in the distribution flow on both sides of that means?    If not, where in the distribution is the ideal type you would like to "stabilize"?

Wherever that ideal is, it seems to me you have to maintain that same amount of variation to sustain the phenotype.    About the two cows Craig and Mike selected, to renew that functional phenotype, it's been my experience they would need to maintain whatever amount of heterozygosity they carry in their genotype in order to sustain their individuality?    What confounds me is how a pituitary gland produces the chemicals for the ranges of quantitative values like milk or growth ranging from dwarfs to giants.....so I've resolved myself just to accept that form follows functional selection, self-governing any hetero/homo mix and just let it be for peace of mind.

I'm recommending we both just take a coupla tylenol to relieve our headaches not expecting them to cure the cause, just remember Kendra's bell curve only provided a formula for "happiness"       Thanks for your inquiry Iain, I always enjoy your posts on KC broadening our views.   Its cold and snowing here today about an inch an hour, at least the nutrients in our dirt in these shorter growing climates will last longer than in Kentucky....and with the southerners need to Import more fertilizer from Canada, it's good for your economy.....there is always a consolation for everything.

LL

Iain replied...
Thanks for your comprehensive reply Larry it's certainly given me cause to WHOOOAAAA, STOP AND THINK.... I understand now the selection part I asked for clarification but the rest of your reply combined with your original post has really got me wondering what the heck I'm doing. I figured out before I'd ever heard of you guys and your "line breeding/inbreeding" web forums what my ideal type was .....

......all I needed to do was find a way to reproduce her with some consistency.
She reared an acceptable calf a year trouble free until 23 year old, what more could a person ask for? So began my quest for knowledge on line-breeding or a system that could reproduce this kind of "super" cow with some predictable consistency. Until I read the comments yesterday and started to really think about it in my situation I thought I had a plan.  I'm approaching this from the opposite end of the tunnel to most of you who start with a big population and narrow it down to your refined "ideal type" - I'm starting with my "ideal type" and trying to produce a population from that one animal that would hopefully be my ideal type or at least allow me to start selecting amongst them to build a herd of that ideal type. Problem is she was a total outcross combining a not particularly close bred Scottish Luing with a closer bred cow of the Snowlander strain of cattle - resulting in an F1 cross by most peoples definition. She may well have been an outlier to her population as she was marginally the longest lived, I have no idea where she sat amongst her peers as there wasn't a big population of similarly bred cattle and it was before my time.
So I started well to the right of the CSU chart and my best guess and only real option to reproduce her was to breed her to the closest relative she had - a fully 3/4 brother which has given me what I thought were the "foundation stock" of my future program. So I've unconsciously moved my matings quite a bit towards the left side of the chart and have been "expecting to reproduce the same optimum type". Combine this with the observation that "outcrosses generally breed "down" from where they were when inbred" and I guess my plan isn't looking so clever. Although technically I'm not inbreeding going by the Lents definition - my matings mostly produce offspring carrying 50% of the original cow's blood.  My severely limited gene pool always was and always will be my biggest constraint. It's doubtful if I've got the gene pool variation now to move my matings back to the right side of the chart in an aim to maintain an optimum type even if I wanted to. Saying all that I'm happy with what I'm seeing on the ground - the cattle are certainly becoming more of a type phenotypically and quicker than I'd expected. They are good enough functioning commercial cows for my conditions. So where do I go from here?

GF, head now pounding not from thinking about this but from beating it against the wall

Larry wrote...

Quote :

.......................Saying all that I'm happy with what I'm seeing on the ground - the cattle are certainly becoming more of a type phenotypically and quicker than I'd expected. They are good enough functioning commercial cows for my conditions. So where do I go from here?

GF, head now pounding not from thinking about this but from beating it against the wall  

Iain, your signoff triggered a giant overflow of endorphins in me , a high I don't experience often enough.      You cannot imagine how bloodied my head was after the first 15 years of breeding cattle, especially after paying for a part of a couple of $75,000 "disappointing miracle bulls", and even moreso after having to return the genuine $60,000 I received for a bull I re-named "Shoshone Sterile Darrell"......pedigree nuts won't find him listed as such in AAA's data bank.   So, since you're happy, I would guess you are already getting very close to where you want to go.....unless you want to go somewhere else and start all over again.      

Wouldn't it be neat if the parents of your "ideal cow" would have been unusually prepotent strains so you could go back and cross them to reproduce a herd of these "restored" cows with unusual consistency..... at an affordable price to produce the grassfed beef your customers prefer....imagine how you wouldn't need to worry about their ability to reproduce replacement heifers for at least another 20 years.    Ah, but that would be a wishful figment of our imagination since no doubt then we would want something even better.      Yet, those are the basic fundamentals behind this figment of my imagination called TruLine.

Quote :

MKeeney wrote:.

LL,
This is a leading question on the way to a treatsie "the problem with close breeding" authored by me  , discussed by whoever  
the question...
what phenotypic stages of development are most affected by closer breeding?

I have read somewhere, that the effects are greatest pre-yearling...your experience?

Now Mike, there have been nearly 500 views on this topic since last Sunday so we can't paint ourselves into a Keeney Corner.    Whatever you read somewhere was likely based on some randomized population out in this randomized world which may have shown a meaningless trend from several causes.      Remember that very long term Guineau Pig study you sent me years ago....how the phenotypic effects of intensified inbreeding were dependant on each family's PORTION of whatever isolated germ plasm they inherited from the controls.....and at the end when those isolated families were restored together again , the 7 traits being measured after 15 years were only slightly improved in the remixed families over the controls simply because a few of the isolated families became extinct along the way.

So I'm sorry, but I wouldn't even venture into that arena trying to decipher which phenotypic stages of development are most  affected specifically the greatest by closer breeding.   Your "treatsie" sounds more like a research project for you and DF .   Lacking  specific "before and after" comparisons in my own cattle, the only thing I can say for certain is that embryonc deaths from whatever cause happen at the earliest stages of development.

LL isolating myself from MK's treatsies      

P.S.
Just wondering if this was one of those genetic rustlers DV's comrades caught lurking on the Butte,  I am absolutely certain that is DV's truck and that the rustler is Bootheel    

Hilly wrote...

MKeeney wrote:

Chart courtesy of CSU.....lookin' down

In an attempt to separate BS from truth for any "doubting Thomas", following the CSU chart I could  presume that somewhere in between there must be an optimum hetero/homo combination to sustain or stabilize whatever our objective is.    Hypothetically, to move from whatever an optimum is to either  the left or right the percentage would change and assume the cattle would also change.   Established data strongly  supports that intentional movement would also either increase or decrease the spherical distributions for better or worse as illustrated by my simple hypothetical spherical distribution charts previously shown on KC.  

the above pretty well sums up any need for a "treatsie"...the benefit of working on the right side, the hetero side, is "weight/performance" is maintained so that when the variability that may be greater is sorted and the cull sold, it has greater commercial value.
the further one works to the left side, the more regression, the poorer the performance, and the less value in the "cull"...we expect and generally accept the right side selection to breed down, and hope the closer bred left side to breed "up" when crossed to produce seedless fruit", but separating the cull that is going to breed culls, from the merely regressed/supressed that is going to breed up, is difficult for me...and surely others, a reason most breeders operate at least in the right side center columns of out crossing and crossbreeding...

As I mentioned before I’ve been offline for a while, so I’ve been catching up...

As Larry has patiently tried to share his experiences using different illustrations realizing the diversity of the reading population, the most helpful for my simple mind has been the CSU chart in tandem with the Spherical Distribution chart and for those that have been here for a while will be getting tired of me saying that.

The somewhat recent exchange between Larry and Iain was appreciated as it once again revisits the basic premise of the Tru-Line objective from practical starting points of isolation for the average breeder, as we all have to start somewhere.

For those that see the advantages of a Tru-Line approach to cattle breeding as I do, the first step in my mind is isolating a population. This process doesn’t need to involve your whole herd; there are no set population numbers or need to rush to high scientific guesstimits of IBC% to be a part of this simple approach.

At isolation the breeder would identify the functional purpose of the population and presumably the selected population that would possess traits relevant to that purpose.

Using the two charts helps me gain a general perspective of relativity on where an isolated population may be at when compared to the general population...

As Larry pointed out no matter where you start, if you expect to maintain your population at that level, you have to hold your spot on the two charts. As JD coined “you can’t change them without changing them”
So to me that means at the simple decision to isolate a population you’ve committed to the fact that the population will never be the same, as selection moving forward by both the breeder and the environment will cause movement.

So then the question becomes how to interpret this movement... If the preferred genes were present at closing they can only be eliminated by selection, if selection is performed by function within an environment, you can then start to see why there is safety in numbers as it is easier to identify the average of the population.

If for example you close a population and your bull selection practice is based on bigger outlier weights, the cows that survive the environmental selection have to pull that outlier bull pen back toward the average that environment can support so they would generally be the smaller cows, but both the smaller cows and bigger bulls would tend to breed truer to the average of the population then themselves anyway. So without opening up the population sooner or later you with end up in the middle and time being methodical, why take the long way around when we could just select from the middle to begin with.

The hardest part I see is encouraging breeders to not get overwhelmed with the “weaknesses” of a population and open it up and negate the prepotency as well as the Time-Saver aspect. The beauty of the Tru-Line approach is the ability of lines to breed true to their fix traits for use in complementary crosses.

I think Larry has proven that you can get along just fine in the center of the chart, I also believe that’s were natures populations reside. I see little need for the average breeder to push his population left of center until they have resided in the middle and understand that production level, realizing further movement to the left will have to be subsidized with luck, knowledge and money unless exploited from a marketing purposes.

So with that in mind the recent statement made by JHooligan “you know Keeney, anybody that spouts off as much as you about cattle breeding, should know you can`t create the right side of the chart unless someone creates the left side of the chart...   ”

I agree does show a basic understanding of the concept, the implication that Mike doesn’t understand the basic premise is a little over the top, as it is a big reason for starting the corner...

I don’t believe you have to be left of center to make right of center, just further left to make right, the greater the distance between the two points would be more a matter of efficiency as breeding left of center without a planed and more systematic approach then the steadily right creeping increasingly mongrelized population of current seed stock, would be costly.

So Grassy you can quit beating you head against the wall, as I see it you and your population will be cutting edge once the genes are thoroughly mixed and stirred under the current guise of a seed stock industry.

Hilly wrote...

Basically if I remember right I was considering herds such as Line-One and Pinebank where the bull selection has less to do with the cows behind the bulls, but more with bull performance and focus is on avoiding inbreeding within a closed herd.

In such cases, in my mind you would get a Yin and Yang affect helping to create somewhat illusionary progress by avoiding the “true production capability” of the population through maximising Heterosis within the confines of the population.

So I then overlaid the Yin and Yang idea on top of Larry’s Spherical Distribution Chart to try and illustrate how the opposing forces balance each other out regardless of bull selection, as consistent selection in any direction will concentrate gene frequencies in turn restricting the diameter of the gene pool (essentially breeding in) until inevitably you get to the center of the CSU Mating Systems chart and survival of the fittest could take over in similar but more randomized selection as it attempts to maintain the population in that environment.  
   
Probably a dumb idea... I may not be even remembering clearly the details of that thought process and will regret throwing this rush job out there in an effort to respond quickly.

W.T, if this was not the way you remember it please feel free to correct me... TIA  
 

               

Larry wrote...
Things seem to be getting a little slow here on KC , so I've developed this post  I'll call "MASTERS & RULES"  -  sporadic unorganized flashbacks -  a perfect storm designed to create enough controversy on KC to last a whole New Year.... it took me 78 years to prepare it ..... you'll need at least a year or two to get through it.  

Bootheel wrote:
I was curious as to how Larry Leonhardt was holding up at, what is it 77 now, with hareem of women? This topics come to mind as I got a new woman today. Remarkably similar to the old one but this one is dark haired. I feel a bit adulterous, and wondered how a master cattle breeder handles this situation? It is new territory for a young whippersnapper such as myself.

Bootheel, Truline Bound

Well Joe, a hearty congratulations for adding more smiles to your family......at 78,  I don't feel adulterous, but adulterating my harem improves the whole, the more the merrier as long as I can keep them separated     ....the same basic premise behind TruLine.     Dark hair from a blonde eh, the master breeder would accept it as part of his production, any breeder of cattle has the choice to either accept or reject it.   Given enough time all hair turns gray....any way.....an old gray mare just ain't what she used to be  

I have no idea what a master cattle breeder even is, my bulls breed my cows, I'm just their temporary "master".   Joe, how I handle the begrudgingly aging process is trying to be a master at enjoying and cherishing whatever life I have, to try to make every ordinary day a very special day.... especially after hearing "only the good die young".   I do hate the thought that all us old guys are the remaining most bad of the bad asses.   Tis said "smile and the world smiles with you", another misnomer when taken out of context.  I've filled my posts with            to express the emotion behind some words to complete the context in which they are given..  There is certainly a time for justifiable anger and a time for joy, the irony of life is that, by the time we're old enough to know our way around, we realize we're not going anywhere.   The aging process overrides the invincibility of youth providing a greater appreciation of life, the most precious commodity we have....why waste it arguing over frivolous things.

When we argue over differences between BS and the truth, there is a vast difference between telling the truth and NOTHING BUT THE WHOLE TRUTH, so help us God ](only required  when under oath ) .       My attempts to sequentially explain "nothing but the whole truth"  is the primary reason my posts are relatively long.....to please MY "god".   It is simply not in MY nature to splatter bits and pieces of either my own or someone else's "partial truth" extracted from somewhere to apply wherever it fits our own agenda.  There could be several different interpretations of the differences  between an ass and a jackass, dependent on the context in which they're used.

Greater understanding is reached by identifying the motivating forces behind whatever we do...we could call it detective work.   The whole of everything is the sum of all the parts governed by natural law.   So I figure part of my punishment for my trangressions are the preparations of these long extended posts and yours for reading them.....compelled by my acceptance of natural law, I no longer have a choice, you still do.  

Since life is not a "bowl of cherries", we search for the motivating forces behind it.   The miraculous mystery of life is full of perplexities, often filled with a multitude of man's ILL- CONCEIVED perceptions....my nickname should've been "Incredulus", born a son of Zeus, known as ILL.   At the core of it all, I ask why are we here and where are we going, it matters little to me where we came from.   In the beginning my search for the unadulterated whole truth looked about like the background of KC without words or pictures, like an earth without a sun, or Amish Christmas tree lights without electricity....groping around in the dark I just kept lighting candles .....and cigarettes.  

Very few people can accept the notion that nicotine triggers inspirational thoughts, Indians smoked peace pipes while making important decisions.   The white populace now frowns on smoking  preferring the euphoria of opium or alcohol that numbs the brain as a temporary escape from the troubles of reality.   To improve the current state of affairs, I am recommending that the entire world take up smoking or chewing tobacco to boost the economy of Ag while simultaneously reducing  any concerns about over-population, thinking half a happy life is better than a long life of bitching and moaning.  

Some think the world is going to hell in a handbasket as the persistant consequential trade-offs from our choices not only prevail, they seem to be growing negatively worse, however, on the whole I doubt our troubles are getting much better or worse than they have ever been.   The age of technology has made our world much smaller, now we're all like small town neighbors where we know everyone's business with worldwide gossiping and bad news on the internet.

It is in our nature to want to blame someone else for our troubles which initiates more and more rules.   I just received an urgent telephone call that I needed to fill out the Ag Census Survey required by law, informed by the automated recorded caller that MY FUTURE depends on it.....which increases my wrathful resentment of our own self perpetuated non-elected bureaucracies which eventually results in a revolutionary movement and supports my belief that things have to get worse before they get better.....not by fundamental laws but by strangulation from their regulations.   Yesterday the news reported that there have been over 5000 new federal regulations issued over the last 90 days.

Joe, your "FREEDOM" post under the "Rules" thread along with your origin of the subject "The Oblivious  Nature of Man" (forgetful) with all the different reactive comments were the inspiration for this post.  So here I sit smoking cigarettes blowing smoke rings watching them always disappear into the atmosphere,  wondering if my posts on KC are in vain, subject to a similar adulterating  fate.

http://www.absolutesurvivalist.com/1/post/2012/12/im-a-dead-sandy-hook-teacher.html

Copywrighted material and a somber message above. The thoughts have been echoed, it just gives me relief that I am not alone. Other people understand FREEDOM.

Thank you Mike Keeney for opening up the doors of my mind to Freedom. It started as a Cattle Breeding methodology, but the the thoughts creep into all facets of life, wherever there is organization of men. The organization of men comes to exist for the sake of its own existence, instead of serving the needs of its members first. The cycle begins anew. Shall this gathering of men suffer the same fate?


Another example of the major tragedies of life that often brings things back into a proper perspective.   The wars of words on KC are diminutive in comparison but remain of utmost importance to those raising cattle.  In my effort to offer a justifiable reason for the motivating forces at the very core of these events, at first I didn't know whether to post a response to you under the TruLine topic or under the subject of "Rules"...or to even respond at all to things I cannot change.  

At my age I have little to gain monetarily by posting on KC or the promotion of TruLine .....it is simply my desire to aspire to inspire before I expire.     I see cattle breeding methodology creeping into all facets of life simply because a man's cattle are a reflection of a man's philosophy of life.... and I've noticed over time that to know a man's cattle reveals the man's true nature....which may be subjected to change over time by environmental influences.   I know my nature  has changed, being more tolerant yet  my personal pet peeve became hypocrisy.   Politics (governmental bodies) and religion are two subjects that are alway very controversial both affecting our FREEDOM.

When major tragedies happen, we wonder why, trying to figure out how to prevent destruction and unwarranted death.    Some of us wonder how God could let these things happen, looking upward for consoling answers for a peaceful state of mind born out of man's continual search and hope for everlasting life.   My chosen "god" is not above, but imagined to live in the calm of the eye of a perfect storm I call the evolving rules of natural law.  Astrologers might call it a black hole, and also not understanding what holds matter together they call dark matter.   Religions might call it heaven and then each of us must then be a particle, an image of it all.    

Oh man, now I"ve gone off the deep end, digging myself into this wormhole, the tunnel described by those who died and were revived, as being in a weird place seeing a light beckoning for them.....or hovering above their dead body looking down watching the doctors and nurses busy trying to save their life.    Although MK says cattle breeding is more about human nature, I'm still worried that Master Mike will not post this weird stuff under "TruLine", but create another new topic with it on KC.....perhaps "figments of our imagination", .nevertheless, I'll proceed and let the chips fall where they may.     .

Being a "vital part" of human nature, we're born with this innate desire for independence and love.  We're possessed with many different weird kinds of "love".   We know that a parents love is essential for a child's well-being, and that "tough love" is needed to discipline that often rebellious urge of youth needed for adult independence...to teach our children the innate joys that comes from love and giving, as well as the innate sorrows that come from hate and taking.  Setting an example seems to be more influential than the teaching.  

That is about the best we can do as we turn them loose to enjoy the independence and freedom to the choices they will make in their own lives.  The price of freedom is self-responsibility for our actions, so parents become both preachers and teachers for the survival of a life with less turmoil.   A recent research study confirmed that 96% of the people enjoy the Christmas SPIRIT of giving more than taking.   I see all the happy faces, and yet we have our Ebenezers and Scrooge McDucks whose primary "love" in life is accumulating wealth.  

To say the least, my life has been totally overwhelmed with absolute amazement at what the evolution of natural law has provided from its' own creation OVER TIME.....if I didn't witness all the monumental diversity, I couldn't imagine the wonderfullness of nature.that exists all around us that we often tend to just take for granted.   So we ask who created natural law .....and then science and religion enter the arena of controversy, faith vs. fact.

Man celebrates life with holidays.  When I first discovered that Santa was only a figment of our imagination, a joyous symbol of giving whether we've been naughty or nice, however, the downside also encourages pretentious behavior and greed.  I have seen the lifelong negative effects of showering children with too many gifts....the more we give, the more that is expected and less appreciated....a victim of our own prosperity.   Prosperity may be the seed of the current trend of our cultural habits, and explains why throughout history empires rise and also ultimately fall....also reflected in the cattle breeding cycles where one gain is another's loss.    .

Seeking greater understanding, I've pondered why we celebrate Christmas at the end of a year followed by the birth of a New Year with resolutions to do better, or Pentecost on the 7th Sunday after Easter (symbolized with bunny "eggs") commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles causing them to be frowned upon by most societies......And reasons for establishing other holidays like Mothers and Fathers Day, Thanksgiving etc....... and yet there seems to be a growing number of those among us who want to take Christ out of Xmas converting it to a Holiday (holy) season to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.  I sometimes doubt agnostics even fully understand the real reason for celebrating Independence Day with all its jubilating fireworks while the other 364 days we seem rather  indifferent to the increase of rules and regulations that decrease our independence.....aaahhhh, well, it' must just be the whole of our human nature..    

So here I am, my mind whrling in all directions.  So first I want to clarify that this  post is not intended to render judgement of either religious denominational sectarianism or secularism.   To put the contents of this post into the context in which it was written, I would like y'all to take a few minutes to listen to the lyrics of the "unchained melody",  two appropriate words for my own TruLine national anthem  www.lyrics.com/unchained-melody-lyrics-leann-rimes.html .    This post is a story of why my "love affair"with cattle breeding grew stronger rather than weaker, how I discovered that giving provides more than taking..... and hopefully explain why I broke man's traditional rules in favor of natural law......an example of my evolving philosophy which could be called  "Identifying the Rules and Motives behind the Christmas Story".  

The Christmas story  is a one hell'va phenomenal old story that we're all quite familiar with but I want to present my own interpretation, a revised new rendition from a different perspective.   We often explain away a situation by saying "well,  that's just human nature.   What is and where did our human nature come from?    Attached to the freedom to choose comes responsibility for those choices.  When I started my cattle breeding objectives ALL OVER AGAIN, I chose to abandon man's traditional conflicting rules in order to abide by the unchangeable rules of natural law.   Now that I've laid out a confusing background, I'll try to explain how I see all facets of life fitting in with my philosophy and methodology of breeding cattle.    If this tale be heresy, so be it.
                                                             ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once upon different times,  Mr. Craig Hilman (Hilly) from the north, Mr. Mike Keeney from the south, Mr. Bob Howard from the west and Mr. Ken Clark from the east converged onto me somewhere in the middle of an oasis, to help explain the TruLine concept to many young whippersnappers like Mr. Joe Hendley (Bootheel) who also want to understand how all the facets of life fit in.....wow, when I enter into the arena of life, I sure do need and appreciate all the help I can get from any gods since we are all just plain and ordinary people.  

So let's imagine that CH, MK, BH and KC are modern day apostles who have searched for the whole truth, finally being "born again" accepting TruLine and are spreading what they believe to be the gospel truth on KC.....Bob Howard testifies to the miracle of how he feeds the multitudes with "two loaves of bread", one black & one white.....Hilly's faith was derived well before he ever heard of TruLine, from sound logical raasoning after watching the torment of thy neighbors chasing more and more growth...and Mike Keeney's faith was derived from his years of disappointing torment searching for a "saviour" .....  (that bull that will do everything better    )   The question I asked myself is why do we have to suffer torment before seeking the "truth" and the answer finally became quite clear shrouded under the cloak of "many loves".....represented in my "HAREM".

Of course there have been many, many others who have helped me along the way.   The most influential was Mr. Clark, my "Moses" who nearing 80 also served alongside me on the Wye Advisory Panel for about 5 years beginning in 1978 when I was a young 44 year old whippersnapper still searching for answers to my torment.....forewarning me that one man cannot accomplish much in his life span, that time only goes by so slowly when we're trying to improve the prepotency of our cattle....telling me that those we serve must be educated with the WHOLE TRUTH in order to sustain "harem harmony" while "freeing ourselves from our frustrating traditional slavery".

Mr. Clark (a very distant relative of Moses) was a man who traced and publicly registered every animal ever born over a 40 year period in his herd, each with its' own personal first name  back to the very origin of the breed....recording all the begats of who begat'ed whom.   I explained to him why I was going to obliterate from public view the identity of the cattle in my 1983 TruLine booklet, testifying that this would be a "new era"......that at some unknown point in time the parentage of my cattle would become proprietary in order to "fulfill the prophesy" of this new mission.  

Fortunately for me, while I descended from a race that created Nazism, it was natural law that caused me to rebel against those who sought perfection by force....and glad Mr. Clark didn't descend from Judaism, rather the "braveheart" of a Scotchman, who recognized that this single trait of being brave wasn't enough to overcome the force of the English who's "love" was to colonize the world.  Natural law created such a burden to sustain their empire, that England reluctantly started giving back those colony's independence, still wanting the benefits of those colonies for themselves.....a manipulating approach in human nature "loving" to give a little to take back more.   It's a hell've lot harder job to control a bunch of people compared to a bunch of cows where all we have to do is put up stronger fences.....some people think building bigger stronger prisons while manipulating the rest.is the best way to control people.

It wasn't a surprise that Clark the Scotchman strongly encouraged this independment proprietary action and some of you know he was the only supporter I had until just a few years ago. When I finally reached the point to quit publically registering my cattle about 10 years ago, I was met with a clamorous reaction, troubling even to my closest friends.   My reaction was to go to great lengths to explain my reasons in my booklet "The history of the Shoshone X Strain".....and still only  a handful of people accept the concept, even fewer fully understand the true mechanics of it.  And today, I can finally recognize why I have been so bewildered over what seems so simple to me seems so complicated to others.   Dang, I've finally recognized after all these years it has just been HUMAN NATURE to blame, people's "love" of fantasy over reality.

Are you keeping up with me here, or did this bedtime story lull you to sleep while reading thus far ....or might you just be in a hypnotic trance reading this with glazed love in your eyes.  

The excuses offered were that papers were needed for a succession of authenticity, I would be robbing our children of their rightful heritage to identify the ancestry of the cattle.    What a bunch of urinated baloney spewing from man's own self induced brainwashing... reflected thoughout his history.   The evolution of natural law places no value on past succession, never going back to begin anew, rather a selection process from what is to assure the survival for the future.   The absolute truth is that at the core of man's rule to maintain public registration papers, it is to perpetuate deceitful montary values.   Seems like I heard something about "the 'love' of money being the root of evil".   Illusions of grandeur and exploitation would end and self-responsibility would begin with "loving" thy neighbor as thyself.

Not having gained many "friends", only being successful in gaining more "enemies", I decided to watch what PHD's do.   For example, I decided any applicable  breeding values learned from MK's post;  an extensive study of "The Origin of Species" at http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/ ,  are about as useless as my posts and the big bang theory.  After reading the "origin of species",  I laughed triumphantly at being on an equal plane of understanding with their conclusion of still not understanding how evolution works, my victory is that I accept the evolution of natural law as it is.....science will spend eternity trying to figure out why it is.  

So now I'm desperately trying to figure out what the hell DV found somewhere on the Butte, or maybe under the Two Dot bridge, what on god's green earth is a Grover....a newly evolved species, a gift of "love" for Erica, or a symbolic god representing DV's overall views including his "love" for emoticons.....so I'm borrwing MKeeney's as a symbolic portrayal of myself while preparing this post under my blue cloud of smoke.


                                                                                                                                 

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Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
― Christopher Hitchens

Dennis Voss wrote:


Thus we have a perfect example of the terrifying miscommunication involved in the very impersonal act of blog writing. Christopher Hitchen's grotesque, facile, superficial, cliched statement confirms all the suspicions I ever had about the man's lack of understanding of anything in the organic world.

To see is to see. To dodge the truth is to lie. To skirt the problem is to be a coward.

I won't explain this photograph "I Am Grover" to anyone.

The expansive misdirection from the heart of this thread confounds me to no end.

Dennis Voss..... in the vicinity of what was once a loose cinch

OK Dennis, you be one-eyed " black jack" only seeing one side of the story, I be too pooped to pop "white korn" trying to see all sides of the story, and everyone else be "brown king" only seeing from one angle.



I AM BETTY's "MISTER", er I mean MASTER



NO, I AM NOT MK, I AM WHAT I AM

Mongrelized dogmatic turmoil gets more attention on KC than tranquility.  I know my same ole story of my evolving philosophy can become as boring as a dog chewing on a bone, so he just buries it, right Tom?.   But wow, I just can't get over my fascination with all the weird things natural law brilliantly produces, I can't even imagine that in the dark black depths of the oceans that those creatures could actually produce phosphorus lighting of many colors....without even being a chemist, it seems completely preposterously impossible, yet it is true.

So as DV suggests, let's get into the strange organic world of natural law where I've exhaustingly practiced what I preach with examples for proof ,  no longer relying on the hypothetical philosophical world of faith,  posting whatever snippets someone else has said that pleases ourselves.  If what I do works for me and not for you, "judge not for so ye may be judged", it's OK, all's well that ends well.     With each person religiously believing in whatever he does, let's look at things organically rather than spiritually......where indeed truth is very much stranger than fiction.....or is it?

To control others, man's never ending expansion of rules with more expounded regulations designed to explain, complicate, restrict or correct the loopholes of previous rules or regulating forces have always been a part of integrating freedom with increased responsibility and punitive measures for disobedience.   In the organic world natural law is simply the controlling mechanism for a surival of the fittest that determines the most favorable for whatever, often considered ruthless, but vital.  

Based on anthropological remnants rather than faith, existing natural law has allowed man to evolve with dominion over his animals, not by appointment nor increased physical strength, but by advanced superior INTELLIGENCE.  I'm thankful that intellect ultimately overrides brute force or my life would have become extinct a long time ago.....being barely smart enought to know when to fight and when to take flight for another day.  Now I'm scratching my head like Craig, should this paragraph have preceded my current train of thought, or should it be near the end of this story of jumbled thoughts.....or does it even matter.  

Logical reason can sort out from confusion in order to explain how man's intelligence evolved to the point of questioning his own existence..... recognizing that there must be something superior to him, he began worshiping imaginary gods and created rules to appease any potential wrath from these gods...not myth but factual history...for to deny the existence of a superior force would be a denial to the "miracle" of our own existence.....we see the organic proof all around us every day.   I cannot conceive or accept the notion that there was a big bang, and POOF, all of a sudden here we are.    This notion contradicts all the organic material that exists today where there is always a master over something else.    OK, now we wonder what or who is the SUPREME MASTER and what are "its"rules.

Points to Ponder......When man cannot fully understand an event, it is often called a miracle of the god prayed to for guidance.   Fact or fiction, it is written that one day a miracle occured to a race of persecuted people yearning for freedom......WHAM,  one day from out of the blue a "godly" force inscribed on stone tablets a constitution of ten simple guidance rules to follow or suffer the consequences.....THE ULTIMATE OF DIRE CONSEQUENCES to spend an eternity suffering in hell in some man conceived place.  Whether or not that event actually happened as described is irrelevant.   Nor does it matter a hill of beans if those rules were in some form of a spiritual inspiration given onto Moses.....or maybe they simply came from inhaling the smoke from the burning bush.      

Now hang on folks, this is where this post gets to be fun for me since I "love" word games, my favorite pastime as much as it is for internet bloggers.   Not intended to be blasphemous, rather harmless fun, whatever the origin, the fact remains these rules exist and are still prominent today.  Some men believe the Ten Commandments represent a specific denominal religion, others demand authoritative organic proof still searching for those tablets....IF we're not a staunch Jew, it's still our own independent choice of what to believe.....so far at least.

Initially I thought the Ten Commandments offered a simple perfect constitution for man that would cover all that was ever needed, however, the organic evolutionary process of natural law requires adaptability.  I once even thought the only amendment ever needed was an adoption of the Golden Rule and we could all live happily ever after.    The logical fallacy in that is that if all mankind adhered to these rules of perfection, what would be the need for them in the first place????  

Secondly, based on an uncertain faith that there is life after death, how in this world can frightening punishment coming after death for violations ever be as effective as the certainty of punishment during life.   Hmmm, the primary question arises, why would our perception of a perfect god, who is an all knowing, always has been and will be, create such an imperfect human to have dominion over this earth.    Blowing all reason out of my mind, I evolved to believe that this "perfection stuff" whether in cattle breeding or in life is just another figment of man's imagination from wishful thinking......perfection can only come from perfection.   I put that in my pipe and smoked on it for quite some time.

So, from the inspirational  power of smoking el naturel ingredients, I grew into one of those smarter people who have this need to explain to stupider people what someone else said after they said it....interpreters.      I have definite organic proof that smoking the spirits of natural law works, captured on film proving that form follows function selection, that intellectual superior intellect are the ultimate master over the inferior......but sadly there are consequences, my once debonair qualities and my John Wayne good looks were gone with the wind......now I'm kinda like the more extreme left side of the CSU hetero/homo chart....but yoooouuuu oughta see my daughters and grandaughters, they're absolutely gorgeous great mothers, thanks be to my God of natural law.   Why even Dennis the Menace sincerely "loves" and protects me so much,  he has adopted me as his father and I have adopted DV as my son, honest to goodness, really, really this is absolutely the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.....if I were black like Grover and my cattle,  I would be what I be     .  



I hope you are now beginning to understand a partial truth why registered eye-ballers who are reflections of the images of their cattle don't want that image to look like me and why they would prefer to be the farthest away possible on the right side of the CSU hetero/homo chart.    .

Preachers are interpreters, taking one small verse out of the extensive volume of the Bible and talk for an hour explaining to their lay people his interpretations of WHAT IT MEANS.....and I laugh how we interpret and appraise the notable quotables posted on KC when they suit us.    On KC at least we can't interrupt each other,  like they do on TV or talk shows where they all talk at once unable to understand the babblegook of anyone.    So, without interruption I'm going to express my organic interpretations and reaction to the Ten Commandments before I expire.     The very first rule "boomed" from a heaven "above" at a time when the earth was still flat,  is:

"Thou shalt have no other gods BEFORE ME".    
Well, that sure enough wipes out all the previous gods of both the past and future.....a clear choice that man can either accept or dismiss for lack of specific proof.    In cattle breeding, one day I declared to quit worshiping those unsustainable, individual illusionary godlike forms or animal types set before me, the best of the rest,  and set forth in a desperate search for the specific organic truth behind those idolic images.....wondering why like doesn't beget like.....and smoking more.    No,  this post isn't sponsored by the American Tobacco Co., its paid for from Keeneys tobacco subsidies    .

The second rule.... Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any LIKENESS of ANY THING that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.   Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am A JEALOUS GOD visiting the iniquity (gross injustices; sins) of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation of them that HATE ME; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.  
Well, "as time goes by so slowly longing for a touch of love", what did man do.  Right off the bat despite a DEFIANCE OF HIS FORBIDDENCE,  man's imagination coupled with artistic talents (like DV has) have continued to create all kinds of symbolic graven images of his one universal God, creating many likeness's of EVERYthing, heaven above and hell beneath the earth and its waters.   Heaven being artistically illustrated with man in his organic body as being in an above place of everlasting serenity with nothing to do, filled with winged angels and halos symbolizing  goodness......and hell being a place of fire and brimstone patterned after the molten center of the earth, supervised by a red devil with horns, originally a befallen angel transformed and banished from heaven, a consequential place of everlasting suffering in our organic bodies for those who do not keep His commandments....MAN'S  symbolic consequences of our choices.    MAN's imagination has even created a place of limbo, called purgatory, a temporary place provided somewhere in between the two extremes of H & H offering redemption and hope.....giving us a chance to get our heads out of our posterior.      

With the evolutionary power of the internet, if you have 6 minutes to spare, enjoy viewing the great visual graphics and images of what man has illustrated and hear his interpretation of these commandments,  Heaven or Hell - YouTube   www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLOgAy4fgX4      

Well, that piece of work is certainly man's design to put the fear of a ruthless and vengeful god in all of us.   In cattle breeding, I've spent a considerable amount of time in purgatory right here on earth with the image of the devil on one shoulder prodding me with his fork promising me monetary rewards and the angel on the other only offering serenity.    However, as I moved closer to hell getting singed from the heat,  I had no choice, it was my own organic natural reaction, even "dumb" animals withdraw from fire. So .I've changed my mind about being cremated if man's interpretation is that we'll be reunited with our bodies in its most perfect heavenly form...shucks, I was hoping for a better body.      

The third rule......Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.  
Vowing not to hold ANYONE GUILTLESS for thinking he is worthless, useless, having no real value, foolish, silly or conceited.  I thought it was my evolving natural conscience that caused my guilt, and I suppose it would be too much to ask for DNA proof that he is indeed my father, claiming that he also created my mother (Eartha).....surely this unisexual miracle explains man's illustration of Adam and Eve's instant creation.....and the devil's serpent....and I wondered if conscience is spirital or organic, surely it is influenced by our organic environment.    

The fourth rule.....Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.   Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God:   In it thou shalt not do any work, thou, not thy son, nor thy daughter, thy mansservant, nor thy maidservant, NOR THY OXEN, nor that stranger that is within thy gates.   For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and ALL THAT IN THEM IS, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.    
This one sounds a little braggy, but I like the idea for it to be on earth as it is in heaven, it means there will be something to do besides floating on clouds flying from one to another with wings.   We'll still have to work 86.7% of the time and 14.3% of the time putting on our halos and enjoy the serenity of sitting amongst the angels on earth in prideful appreciation of and thankful for the fruits of our labors have given us....time to count our blessings and renew our energies in preparation for the next six days of work, although  I'm sure some labor unions won't go along with this.  Although many may think it to be sacrilegious, MK and I enjoy sharing a part of our angelic sabbath recanting the trials of our tribulations the previous week while thankful for our blessings.   MK enjoys golfing, I view golf as work, but if we both enjoy our organic work, we can be on earth as it is in heaven seven days a week.....suddenly I'm beginning to feel a little toasty from my remarks here even though it's only 8 degree F      

Ever since Noah's time, I imagine man's evolutionary process eventually culls those who don't follow these rules similar to the way we ruthlessly cull our cattle of those who don't live up to our stamdards, often BLAMING THEIR PARENTS or great grandparents......however, due to my organic evolvement I'm no longer a primitive ape like animals, even before the days of Noah and now Moses,  so adnauseum prevails within me since from my weakness I just don't have the stomach to ruthlessly sacrifice my loved ones like animals, nor can I imagine a loving father banning his children to an everlasting life of fire & brimstone.   I can imagine natural law providing consequential examples of good or bad from the freedom of our choices.

The fifth rule....Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.  
This is a tough rule if it would also require honouring those parents who are worthless, useless, having no real value, foolish, silly or conceited who fail to teach their children from birth to honor the virtues of these 10 Commandments....or else.   The stipulation reminds me to go back to the second rule, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation of them that hate this god who shews only mercy unto those that love him and keep his commandments so thy days may be long term.  

This one universal God proclaims I am in you and you are in me, then indeed we must be created in the image of our creation and so it must also be with our cattle.    Man's superior force ruthlessly selects those cattle favored to be the parents of the next generation and kills all the rest.   If natural law considered humans to just be another blindly selected more advanced animal, hummmm, then it wouldn't have been smart enough to miraculously instill within us all the traits needed to guide our increased responsibilities.    Oh can you see in the dawn's early light....it's just all in our human nature.

The sixth rule......Thou shalt not kill.  
Uh oh, the rules are getting tougher without conditional stipulations.    To defend ourselves during changing times from those who don't follow these commandments, the only alternative I can visualize is an anti-nuclear device as common as a cell phone issued to anyone over the age of seven after they have been taught how to use it in pre-school.   Of course, an arms race would follow and hasten the day of Armageddon.   Even though the children of parents who protect the sanctity of life will always outnumber those who don't by killing their own progeny,  I cannot fathom how natural law could ever coordinate a final massacre of evil over good or vice versa.  

And in cattle breeding, Pat B, I cannot even begin to visualize how good could win a final battle over bad since natural law is also an unchangeable deterrent to insure long term viability.   The greenies and animal lovers would fully support this commandment while breaking the others and yet natural law prevails encompassing everything for our own good.   How in this earthly state of heavenly perfection could we ever appreciate life without death, appreciate good genes from bad ones, or niceness from naughtyness.  MK recently suggested I should be more charming to my wife, how it  brought about a more heavenly and blissful marriage for him, however, I have too many wives in my harem and not enough charm even for one, which would be hell for me trying to keep them all happy.....the reason for the next rule.

The seventh rule.....Thou shalt not commit adultery.  
This is a relatively easy rule if we have a surplus of discipline and a shortage of testosterone, however, the devil is probably winning  the majority of this common practice.   History records supplemental rules were created by man.   Initially,  the female was stoned to death while exonerating the male, surely the primary reason behind the feminist sexual revolution...which resulted in the exoneration of the female punishing the male....touche.  To counter the unisexual creation of Adam and Eve, I'm convinced it had to be natural law who is responsible for creating the serpent in the Garden of Eden, not a god of perfection nor a devil of deception, in order to insure our adaptable survival.   Natural law has created  the invisible force of sexual attraction to sustain equilibrium, yet man has also created images and even established a sybolic Valentines Day "til death do us part".      



An example to compliment your talents of artistry Dennis, just another of hundreds of the evolving creations of natural law is man's instilled ability to illustrate mankind`s imaginations.  

The eighth rule......Thou shalt not steal.  
A common violation by man seldom deterred by the wrath of a god.   With strict obedience, genetic rustlers would become extinct giving more time for DV to enjoy his work     and jails would be nearly empty.
Well if the violators of the first five rules are banished to a hell of eternal fire and brimstone,  a more merciful god would only banish thieves and robbers of life, liberty & love to one isolated secure place like Death Valley, CA,  the Sahara Desert, the Antarctic or Siberia where they were free to plunder each other all the days of their lives.    This is where I would send those yearning for freedom without accepting responsibility and that would also solve any concerns about over-population


The ninth rule......Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
OK, let's get real here, that would take all the fun out of life.....without gossip and deceit, there would be no social life, lawyers, merchants or crazy cultures, and most importantly, registered breeding of all animals would become extinct .  

The tenth rule .....Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his OX, nor his ASS, nor ANYTHING THAT IS THY NEIGHBOUR'S
Well, saving the best for last, it's no damn wonder these Ten Commandments could never work in their entirety.    HOLY MOSES, after the Noah deal failed to cleanse the overwhelming wickedness of the earth and even after   threats of Armageddon, did you really and truly think your tablets freed your enslaved tribe, or did they enslave them more expecting them to perform like robots.   HOLY MOSES, did you really believe threats of uncertain fire and brimstone after death would be more effective than punishment during the certainty of their life.....

If you can hang on just a little longer, I'm getting near the end of this hours long sermon on the mount walking down into the valley of the deserted desert.   Within a shadow of death,  my words here are certainly blasphemous but I have reached a clearer understanding of why a new saviour was prophesied.....and why the evolution of natural law created one who sacrificed his own life, who did nothing but preach love and forgiveness for a coupla years.   Most of us know this remarkable event and story, yet what did the "chosen people" do but crucify Him out of a fear of the truth.....no wonder they are still being persecuted, do they not know that the truth shall set them free, or are they just an example for us to learn from.

Rather than believe in man's self-created aberations, it makes more organic sense to me that the Holy Spirit did not rise somewhere above but dwells in the "house of righteousness" first in the Apostles and passed on for 2000 years, that it is our freedom of choice whether to open the door or not to a Trinity of infinity, to reach a state of mind choosing "heaven" or "hell" living side by side.   I do not sit around waiting for the "second coming", it is here every day with each new dawn, and shalt not perish but be passed unto our "children's children".

The Creator of the evolving forces of natural law is indeed my one universal God and all the proof I ever need is that which surrounds me every day.....it is much easier for me to believe in the invisible Holy Spirit we call the soul than it is to understand how all the invisible forces have been transformed by superior technology from that which has always been here since creation......it is that damn free will that causes all our problems, that damn desire for independence, that perfect formula provided by natural law necessitating all the imperfections just in order to preserve an appreciation for the gift of life with love and freedom.....for there would be no value to life if it couldn't be taken away.    I do believe in the Holy Trinity that lives in all of us, and from that there is absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain.

So Joe, I do not say these things to depress you, but you as a devoted father, these things are intended to lift your "spirits" up.   Its been said "never look down on anybody, unless you're helping them up".   I've picked the parts or quotes for my own objective, chronicling my trip from the dark side and the candles lighting up the way as an example of how life  fits in with the evolvement of TruLine....not a miracle but simply an organic way to better enjoy the fruits of our labors by managing the organic imperfections of life......knowing that the Holy Spirit helps those that help themselves, otherwise casting the bureaucracys upon us.    

Though I walk down the valley in the shadow of death, I fear no evil, I am consoled, my fear is not for me but for those left behind.   This is my time for reflection, and giving my organic interpretation of why we need to understand the true motives behind the Christmas story, to choose to make our life here on earth to be either a heaven or hell, passing those choices unto all our children's children who are our everlasting lives.....it works for me, this is my story and I'm sticking to it.  

Thanks a million Hilly for a true symbol of organic natural law.  Now that I got all this political and religion stuff out of my system, its such a relief to just go back to my  simple life of cattle breeding  




LL in the vicinity of just seeing the core of wrongs and trying to right them, hiding my pain behind a cloud of smoke watching it disappear transformed into serenity....have a Happier New Year than ever before.

Thanks Mike for your ongoing work to record LL's reflections in a more concise and manageable format. Last night felt like a Christmas morning as I treasured unwrapping Larry's replies and comments once more. Tinged with great sadness of course as our friend is no longer with us but the wonderful memories of the wisdom and experiences he shared with us live on.
The questions I was asking, based on the stage I was at back then, are different to where I'm at now. Re-reading the posts helps me to understand some of the questions I have now and makes me realize the "Reflections of Larry Leonhardt" is truly a work for the ages.
Thanks again, Iain.

Larry replied...
MKeeney  wrote:
Oh come come, Larry, cattle breeding is not a religion; it`s a business; little jimmer said so...and I`ve been told, "Now we're not talking about life and death; heaven and hell; maybe not even about truth and lies. We're talking about cattle; breeding and marketing. "It's a game scored in dollars", as a promoter put it. I still believe that if I can outbreed the competition, the principles I use will win out. If I can't they won't. So I'm not offended by any cattle breeders story. They're playing the game and they aren't breaking the rules of the game because there aren't any. There really isn't very much absolute truth either with genes that turn off and on and all the things that we don't know or understand...
Words like true, truth, pure, predictable, slow, steady, charity can`t even be sold by religion without the promise of an afterlife of either the joy of heaven or the punishment of hell...how are we going to "sell" those words on their own merit in this business of cattle breeding life when there`s a sucker born every minute searching for my favorite song from the New Year`s party?

I Believe in Miracles, where you from, you sexy thing?

Tru-line needs sexying up...truth ? Ain`t nobody got time for that...
but over 14,000,000 people got time for this...  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFEoMO0pc7k

Oh come come Mike!   Surely you jest, cattle breeding and Theism go together like love and marriage, ya can't have one without the ooootthherrrrr...... surely you know I am neither an avowed atheist nor a rabid  evangelical, perhaps I am more of a revisionist, or maybe I am a reformist... at least a centrist.     Name titles....the only thing I know for sure is that I AM a human, one of the most advanced and amazing creatures evolving from the miracles of the chain of life....wow, what a stroke of luck that I am what I am.....I think??  

And holy toledo Mike,  "religion" is just a "belief".   If you weren't such a skimmer and paid more attention to details, you would know I am one of the most sexually oriented men on the face of God's "green, brown, white,  black and blue'd" earth.  All my posts about TruLine have been about "sexing up" the cattle breeding business with X-rated strains.      I am not "selling" anything but truth....I may be a wimp but I am not a pimp.  My reflections on KC are free, they're worth that much I'll agree, but along came this theistic spider, spinning a web of common core connections from insider, and with no "red" insider caused many on KC to flee, not wanting to be entrapped in this web of decency..  



Humans have this innate desire to be entertained, how lucky we are if our work is also our play.   With laughter being the best medicine, there is no greater resource than in our reflections.   We can laugh or cry about all our imperfections but never perfection....and the fundamentals of TruLine are nothing more than a reflection of colors.    Mike, if you weren't such a ...well, let's just say,  good grief Charlie Brown, if you were his white dog instead of being a brown dawg, you wouldn't be nearly as entertaining.    



NO, I AM NOT MK, I AM WHAT I AM

and if  you, if you didn't just happen to be such a self-centered skimmer who could just stop and look in the mirror, mirror on the wall and see that none of us are the greatest god of  'em all,   behind this indifferent Charlie brown expression,  you would notice how his dark side is portruding, how the red devil inside him is reflected in his sad, bloodshot eyes....and those ears, oh those ears on impatient skimmers, designed to block out anything they don't want to hear, with barely enough lifting capacity for alertness to let whatever is heard in one ear go right out the other with too few receptors in between to cause the alarm bell to ring.... .and oh my gosh (God), I suppose you don't  even think about how different Grover evolved from the same common core of connection......just taking whatever surely came from "TR" (Theistic Reasoning) for granted.....  

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.....and Mike, just so you know, Grover has a new girl friend Chloe, named  after a lover of Daphnis, translated from Greek to the English word describing daffiness.  Grover just happens to be a skimmer who only sees half the truth from one view..... depending on which the way the wind is blowing.... altho you can't see 'em both, surely you know that Grover still has two eyes, and "TR" completely filtered his ears so that a Grover doesn't get side-tracked from being completely  happy with who he is.   Grover is completely happy with just his invisible sense of feeling, that feeling of love and protection from Dennis and Erica.... in fact I know firsthand that is why they unselfishly selected Grover's new girl friend......there was more than enough love to go around.   So Mike, is that the kind of invisible "miracles" you believe in?.... surely they evolved from the "TR" found in Theism.    I also ask you Mike, since you have been around "Mister" for several years now.....

 

I AM BETTY's "MISTER", er I mean MASTER

.....I'm sure you know Mister is about the smartest, happiest, most lackadaisical dawg you have ever seen....being so friendly to everyone, he does tire more easily from wagging his stubby tail so fast......and altho as pure as the driven white snow, unfortunately he has a genetic defect that doesn't allow him to be registered....man's rules required that he had to be neutered by 2 months of age, or destroyed......maybe that is why he is so happy, however, I bet you didn't even notice that his "defective overbite" gives him the appearance that he is constantly smiling portraying his God-given personality......his love is so intense and loyal, that he replaced me to fulfill  Betty's innate need for more affectionate and obedient love in her life that I am unable to provide.   Albeit that atheists would call this defect a random chance, however Mike, I choose to believe it is one of those "miracles" of exposed evolvement from theistic mutations that man's interference often wastes....dammit the "hell", now Mister is unable to reproduce his innate happiness !!!    

Geez (Jesus) Mike,I've told you a hundred times that the expressed form follows functional selection, that cattle breeding is a freedom of religious belief to choose what we want and how our cattle will be like what we be from our common core connections..... that we thinking we be a god and can "breed animals" any way we want, that we be wrong, but you just won't listen.   So, why in the "sam hell" do you think all mammals are red inside where the devil resides and are still capable to produce white instead of red milk for our young.   Haven't you wondered about the "reasons" why we're all born equal from ashes with that original "red sin" within and return to ashes from energy that cannot be destroyed but only transformed from one form to another according to the doctrine of "TR".....or wondered who or what created the jobs of each red and white corpuscle in our "TR" battles for survival.

So Mike, I realize that it is difficult for you to comprehend but I believe any happiness or sadness in life is all about COLOR.    I don't suppose you ever reasoned why smileys,  sunflowers, ribbons around oak trees and sanctioned areas, roses in Texas, school buses, chirping canaries and cowards are yellow and peaceful doves, godly angels & spirits, sterile lab coats and snow are white......or why I raise white sugarbeets to make sweet things rather than red ones to eat....arrggghh, I hate the taste of red beets.   And I'll bet you didn't even know the real reason why we turn red when we get mad or embarressed from something bad we've done, or get pale when we get scared or sick,  it's all explained by the innate natural reaction from "TR".....surely it cannot possibly be the red devil coming out from inside us or the fear of that white god's wrath.  

Mythical theological common connectionsa, I always wondered why black representing doom and gloom, is the proper traditional attire for denominational ministers or priests, or to wear at funerals representing doom and gloom like those black clouds portrayed hanging over us,  yet Christ is portrayed as wearing white robes is often a rejection of perfection by those seeking to find imperfections.   Oh my gosh (God), I finally realized that color explains the reason the black American Angus Association forbids the registration of red animals on the outside, or restricts the purity of white to be expressed.....and absolutely forbids the outside expression of devilish horns or even scurs....good Lord, they want every "sin" covered up in black.    

And holy cow, color explains why other breeds are now turning black    Geez Louise, color explains why my cattle are turning brown from black, they'll probably be even yellower in a coupla hundred years.   Holy smokey, color explains why DV has seen the light at the end of the tunnel and chose mean spirit's whites to improve his blacks by turning them grey as quickly as humanly possible.

Upsetting our  applecart,  color explains why an apple a day with white insides has been proven to keep the doctor away.....and since we are what we eat, I must quit eating hot red peppers, tomatoes, watermelon, red beets and eat more white sugar, eggs, chicken breasts, raw fish, coconuts, white flour, rice and milk along with onions and garlic to keep harmful  stuff away.  I can't be pure white inside and out, so maybe I'll turn yellow.  Color explains why man cooks red meat to turn it  brown,  but I don't think it is wise for me to mention what color in the human race has a common connection with watermelon....and its not Indians.    

Oh dear mother of a  pure white god, how will cattle breeders ever accept the notion that color is the most important economic trait.   Failing to accept the fundamentals of "TR", I decided that the mythical theologian way might be a better approach to explaining to MKeeney why Shorthorns won over Longhorns in their continuous battle over more or less of a red and white outside....or how Longhorns can be deceitful by choosing any color they want to be.   Holy mother of roses, I wonder if Mike noticed that grassfarmer's favorite cow was turning oranger.....or even why his whole herd is getting yellower.      MK just doesn't happen to have Iain's innate patience which recognizes that this "TR" evolutionary stuff is a mighty mighty slow selection process........and why Iain accepts the range from  polar whites to crimson reds since he directly markets red meat from green grass for humans to turn brown.....starting the recycling process all over again.  



.....and a "TR" life isn't just a bowl of red cherries picked from virgins.....nor an after life filled with many of them.....we are free to choose whatever we want to believe.     I doubt if MK even noticed that the surviving Line One cows were much yellower than their high powered dark crimson horned more pigmented sires, or why those Hereford guys who focused on only beefiness discriminated against any mellow yellows, or why they put weights on their horns to bend them "down" when they want to naturally grow "up".    "TR" sure causes us alot of headaches in our ongoing battles with "it".

Jumpin johosephats Mike, I'll bet you didn't know the real reason why Herefords lost favor....was it because they selected for more red and discriminated against white while still trying to deceive us with the sanctity of their white face.....which further explains the deceitful improvement of the impure  black/white face's temporary removal of those devilish horns and a dilutive effect on that pure white face...could you please let us on KC  know what you decide.   I prefer not to get into the black and white color struggles of the Holstein breed nor the maternal dominance of yellow in the Jerseys.  My best guess is that the Jersey bulls pissed off  temperment against humans was a consequence of man's selection  causing their loss of muscular "masculinity"..... wouldn't you be?    

And Mike, we just can't fool mother nature, we should'a  expected a bad disposition from the new "red" maternal breed at Fort Keogh after they were robbed of their former identity and just turned loose in an adulterous mix....when will we ever learn that "hell" hath no fury like a women scorned.  Mike, with your skills on the internet, look up how many mammals are born red in the wild, 'cept of course those wiley red foxes .... there are exceptions to every rule.

So Mike, in your search for black and white colorless answers, did you ever wonder why rare Albinos have pink eyes, or why red is hot and blue is cool, or why a prism of light is a rainbow of color.   I hope "TR" will help you understand that TruLine is neither black nor white, but an enlightened rainbow of color created from the rules of its' origin and those are unchangeable.  From all the confusin' different interpretations of words Mike, it is clearly evident to me without a shadow of doubt that for entertainment purposes for all those on KC, it is absolutely imperative that we get Dennis back on this TruLine thread with all his rare,  innovative, and especially his free artistic talents to transform our words into vivid illustrations .... which are much more lasting than "sexying up" the message.....otherwise, I fear this thread will fade off into the sunset like an ending to an old western movie.    

Wouldn't KC be better if we quit attacking the messengers and debate the messages.   In the meantime for our interim amusement, let's see how many different interpretations of KC posters invisible imaginations can be reflected from the following picture.

     

LL with a "TR" view of only room for one at the top,  I am sick and tired of my wife trying to help me....I am what I am....the king of the mountain   ...well, the whole truth is I am more like DV's one word portrayal of me or KC  

Larry posted...
My mother is the best

Here ya go Mike, how many "red" ones are there in the natural inheritance of the surviving species  

Larry wrote...
Well Mike, I wasn't going to answer your question but since its too damn cold outside, I thought I would offer you this for posting

MKeeney wrote:
Dear LL,
could you just please tell me which bull {full closebred brothers} to use...bull A has no "conformation flaws", but lacks the growth performance I want...bull B has structural flaws in travel, is sway backed, but is the size I prefer...
which is more easily restored...growth or structure?
Like Meatloaf`s GF, I wanna know right now, and I wanna know for sure...


Tom D wrote:
Is it tongue in cheek ?
Let me sleep on it, I'll give you an answer in the morning.
v

larkota wrote:
Larkota always wondered what IT is? and if I did sleep on IT..... why would I need IT in the morning if I had IT all nite? back to wondering what IT is.


-------------------------------------
Well Mike, your question kinda alludes me....restored or corrected....why would you want to restore bull "A" to his previous state? Since you wanna know for sure right now, the easiest answer is to not use either bull A or B lest you regenerate degeneration.....presuming of course, that those two full closebred brothers are a phenotypic degeneration or decline of the nature, character, structure or function from a more preferred ancestral or former state....so "pick your poison"

For example, during Tom's recent visit, his interest in Balboa stimulated a discussion of the nature, character, structure or function of this former closebred ancestor whom we might perceive as being phenotypically degenerated. This particular ancestor, born 30 years ago, might be described as being similar to your bull "A" lacking the growth performance you want Mike. On the other hand, Tom is formulating plans to produce and directly market a more consistent quality beef product more EFFICIENTLY. Ironically, God must've been directing traffic the other day, cause when Tom, Craig and I drove into the beet top pasture containing about 400 cows, the very first cow we came upon was the 19-yr old #749, a rather moderate sized cow still structurally and functionally sound who has always had an angelic disposition.

Shoshone Ester 749Reg: AAA 12221414
Cow
Birth Date: 04/24/1994 Tattoo: 749
Breeder: 512971 - Shoshone Angus, Cowley WY
Owner(s): 512971 - Shoshone Angus, Cowley WY

.............................................................. Shoshone Balboa N1702 AAA 10223395
..................................... Shoshone Echo 1702 AAA 10900300
............................................................. Shoshone Erica LJFC17A AAA 9772037
...............Shoshone Ben 99-1012 AAA 11459822
............................................................. Shoshone Pied Piper K F D 20 AAA #9563705
.................................... Shoshone Barbara L 1012 AAA #10223403
............................................................ Shoshone Barbara P S V Y 10 AAA 9254040

Shoshone Ester 749

........................................................... Shoshone Balboa N1702 AAA 10223395
................................... Shoshone 64-3905 AAA 11154987
........................................................... Shoshone Eriskay MKHF39-5 AAA 10017560
................Shoshone Ester 711 AAA 11459959
.......................................................... Shoshone Merit 7108 AAA 10836978
.................................. Shoshone Ester 706 AAA #11155090
.......................................................... Shoshone Ester 767 AAA 10707295
# Pathfinder


The traditional industry would consider this ole cow a degeneration from her maternal grandmothers who were pathfinder cows regularly producing 105% or more compared to the average of the herd's contemporaries. Heaven forbid, this ole cow only produces about "average" progeny with the regular tick of a clock in her Lazier Longer Lifetime. So I looked at the AAA genotype numbers to see how this ole cow degenerated from her two maternal grandmothers.

Cow 749
Production Maternal
................CED..... BW...... WW.....YW... RADG......YH... SC.... Doc..... CEM..... Milk.... MkH...... MW.... MH....$EN
........749... 0... .....2.5.. ....16..... 23...... .01...... -.2.. ..11...... 5......... 5......... 5......... 2....... -30.... -.3.... 45.29
...... 1012...-1...... 3.2 ...... 13..... 20...... .01....... .1... .03...... 8......... 3..........4......... 3........ 21..... .2..... 41.17
....... 706....3........ 1.1...... 20...... 27..................-.1.... -.02................ 5....... 8........... 2........ -3....... 0.... 38.45


Aha, sure enough, science has numerically identified #749's genotypic average as being smaller in both height and weight, a no, no degeneracy from her former maternal ancestral state.....the traditional mainstream would've culled #749 a long time ago, in fact, they would've never used that degenerated Balboa bull in the first place......and close breeding him for further degeneration would've been a ridiculous connotation. But then again, that deliberate selection degeneration down to "quantum sufficit" allowed Tom to generate his plans for more profitable consistency, lower cost, higher quality beef production which is expected to be enhanced further by technological advances in sexed semen.  


So I guess I would simply call this degenerated cow a regenerator. Tom has figured all kinds of hypothetical spread sheets.....clearly, any degree of Tom's success is dependent on the reliability of his genetics. So, I ordered a 54 degree balmy sunny day for the sorting process of 20 heifer calves, Ben Loyning and Craig were the reluctant consultants......I got a bag full of worthless dollars and a slightly used cigarette lighter, Tom got his shirt back but didn't get any sleep that night with visions of regenerated sugar plums dancing in his head, while Craig was forced to spend another day with me since I blocked off all the roads going back to Canada....but I did hear him say as he drove out of sight, damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.  

LL in the land of Oz called weird wyoming

P.S. Oh Mike, I almost forgot, if you wanna know right now for sure, you might want to know that selection for maternal longevity plays some unexpected tricks on us.....remember that yearling bull you saw breeding my yearling heifers a couple of years ago, the one you didn't like very well, the one who wasn't any bigger than the heifers he was breeding, the one who was the last calf I had from the A426 cow 'before you purchased her, the cow who is the paternal half sister to the cow Craig picked.....you remember, sired by that bull I didn't use until he was two years old......well, I just wanted you to know that Tom unknowly picked several heifer calves that were sired by that undesireable yearling bull out of those first calf heifers and this is the picture Tom took of him last week, a bull who has spent his entire 3 years of life still living with females....so please know I don't wish you the best with bull A, rather I just hope he leaves you a bunch of cows that you can successfully "cross" breed more profitably   . .....and grazing dirt sure makes them weigh up good  

but Bob,
had we been still, there would be no breeds...no Tru-Line, no X-strain...should we not always be about our Father`s business??...isn`t that far better than being about our neighbors business?    
now to the business{pleasure?} at hand   which is, everyone wants to know right now, and they want to know for sure; even Luke of KC, not the disciple Luke, is patiently wanting to know more...yes Bob, I think you nailed it, human nature overpowering natrural law... ???

by coincidence, the bull, pictured above taken by TomD last week in the beet field, so happens to be the maternal  brother of the bull I described in my question to Larry...

[u][u]Dear LL,
could you just please tell me which bull {full closebred brothers} to use...bull A has no "conformation flaws", but lacks the growth performance I want...bull B has structural flaws in travel, is sway backed, but is the size I prefer...
which is more easily restored...growth or structure?

except for a little poetic license I used...bull B has structural flaws in travel, is sway backed, but is actually the size{small} his maternal brother was at the same stage...nonetheless, being 4 legs, nuts and a stick as a yearling, I turned him out with another older bull with some cows...lithe and sneaky, he bred some cows without getting hurt, for he always landed light and on his feet
the two bulls discussed are out of this cow...


now I`m thinking of sending this bull to a customer who I feel sure would like cows like the above...but is he ready, have we Bob , prepared the way?

Mark 1-3 "a voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him"

I`m soooo
afraid we are still on the long and winding road...    

Anyway you'll never know
the many ways I've tried
And still they lead me back
to the long and winding road
Lennon/McCartney

Larry wrote 1-18-2013

Well Mike, I guess I am the one who needs some clarification regarding bulls A & B.   How now brown cow, here you are #A426,  a cow who can only transmit a randomized half of your genome to your progeny, that progeny also inheriting a random half of whomever is their sire, and then that progeny can only transmit that quarter of your randomized genome to its progeny..... and then we expect that progeny to regenerate the nature, character. structure and function of you, you adulterated brown cow......oh my, what tangled webs individual pedigrees can weave when at first we use them to deceive, passing on our own naiveties.

Yesiree Bob, individuals are isolated populations of genetic material derived from a greater diversity of populations.   The registered mainstream plots its course of where it's been, wandering in time and space without a destination while searching for the promised land.    And Mike, the only time I have ever seen a straight cow path is alongside a straight fenceline, often a beaten path first formed from cows identifying their boundaries.

The boundaries of flesh and blood in natural law are quite different than advancing from typewriters to I-phones.  I guess I pose the same questions Eddie M asked over on the topic of "AAA genomic enhanced epd's", and I couldn't have said it any better than when Outsidethebox said "...... if your breeding system is not holistic in its approach, it is an utter waste of time and effort-you will absolutely not save any time...you will always be chasing your tail and opening another can of worms".....or in regards to GMO's when Mike says "the commercial producer payyyyyyyysssssssss...does he get return?"  

Well Mike, cattle breeding has always been about genetically modifying organisms to get a better return.  For example, my next door neighbor the large Crosby Ranch, who's been buying his bulls from me for over 30 years at "half the price", just recently informed me his straightbred "Shoshone steers" finished in a Colorado feedlot with 70% High Choice, 25% Prime with no yield grade 4's, earning him $6.00 a hundredweight premium.....and the same feeder wants his steers again this year.   I thought that was pretty good considering my modified lower maintenance cattle rank in the bottom percentile of $F.....that feeder must need some tax write offs.    

But of course, we must consider that scientific EPD model and data is put together on a piecemeal basis rather than a holistic approach, gathered from data in the looney bin submitted by raving lunatics surrounded by their ringmasters.       So if anyone is waiting for or thinks AAA sponsored technological advances are going to improve the ease or profitability of beef production, they definitely couldn't have studied the lessons of history very well.    Only "you" can improve your own profitability and ease of production....either honestly realistic or dishonestly in fantasy land.

I do wish I could take you all back up my long winding road, to show you how this "brown cow" became a replication of her ancestral nature, character, structure and function which was first exhibited by a cow in her direct lineage born six generations ago back on March 7th, 1991.....born from winding cow paths coming from all over congregating around a refreshingly clear central watering hole.

LL, just quenching my thirst at an oasis somewhere in a desert.

Mk wrote 1-21-2013

I promised BobH I would show him mine, if he would show us his...I`ll go first...I had once thought, that you showed no picture of a bull until his time was right...definition of right:"when the bulls look more acceptable to the mainstream"...that I now believe is baloney; these bulls are different, bred for different purposes, why the hell would you want or expect them to be the same type as an SAV  bull or the Pharo mini version of the same SAV type?
Imitation of the mainstream is the greatest form of folly...





the above bulls, Pete and Re-Pete,@ 24 months, are carriers Pat...of the genes of these two cows...1/2 of this cow



1/4 of this cow



now the problem is...which 1/2, and which 1/4 of the genes did the bulls inherit? what is the solution to being more sure what they inherit?

Balboa lives...

2944 X 1711

14.5% ibc ET sisters @ 15 months




We know genes are immortal; can Tru-line create immortal gene combinations?

Larry wrote...

Jon T, thanks for your suggestion to offer ancestral ladders or picture pedigrees of my cattle.    Since I no longer provide individual public pedigrees,  I still provide my direct customers with private ancestral ladders whenever requested .  Mike handles the picture thing pretty well with his pictures of selected individuals, it works better for me to provide private numerically coded ancestral ladders with the results of the "whole" openly displayed by my entire closed herd.

Since Mike persists in publicizing his private work, as per your suggestion Jon, I am offering a single example of a private numerical ancestral ladder diagrammed for public display on KC as it would relate to Mike's recent public pictures of Eos and Epione.    To diagram a formulated plan to achieve a stabilized sustainable type, I went back through the Birth Certificates of the ancestral archives in the TruLine Court House and after 35 years and 5 generations of isolated selection, it looks like two full sisters of Mike's KMA Strain are coming along and stabilizing nicely with Eos and Epione at 14.5% IBC....being a picture man I am sure Mike recognizes the genuine significance of that numerical IBC..... after coming so far over hills and valleys, I would hate to see Mike deliberately change the IBC very much trying to make it "better".    
   
............................................................. SX 64-1702 (BC 1982)
........................................... SX 99-1702 (BC 1987)
............................................................  SX 36-1702 (BC 1980)
............................ SX 99-1012 (BC l990)
............................................................. SX 47-2003 (BC 1979)
.......................................... SX 47-1012 (BC 1982)
............................................................. SX 26-1009 (BC1978)
................ SX 121-2944 (BC 1993)
............................................................. SX 36-2702 (BC 1978)
.......................................... SX 64-1702 (BC 1982)
............................................................. SX 36-1702 (BC 1980)
........................... SX 64-2944 (BC 1988)
.............................................................. SX 67-2712 (BC 1983)
.......................................... SX 67-2937 (BC 1986)
.............................................................. SX 47-2910 (BC 1981)
KMA Eos (BC 2011)
KMA Epione (BC 2011)
............................................................... SX 36-2702 (BC 1978)
....................................................... SX 72-1701 (BC 1983)
..............................................................  SX 23-1701 (BC 1978)
....................................... KMA Felix-6310 (BC 1993)
..............................................................  SX 43-1708 (BC 1978)
..................................................... SX 43-6310 (BC 1981)
..............................................................  SX 14-6302 (BC  1977)
...................KMA Felix-1711 (BC 2008); KMA Felix-1710 (BC 2007); KMA Felix-1709 (BC 2006)
...............................................................  SX 36-2702 (BC 1978)
..................................................... SX 72-1701 (BC 1983)
...............................................................  SX23-1701 (BC 1978)
....................................... SX 72-1705 (BC 1994)
...............................................................  SX 36-2702 (BC 1978)
...................................................... SX 36-1702 (BC 1980)
...............................................................  SX 23-1701 (BC 1978)
Tommy D has a picture of Mike's "1711" cow he might want to post on KC.   And Mike, I sure do like your modern KMA venusian names representing love, beauty and natural productivity, however, I still question the wisdom of your KMA martian first names....with names like Unwanted, Rocketman, Re-Pete etc., I wonder what in the world your method behind your male naming madness really is, what on earth can you be thinking ?  

LL resurrecting the selecting of holistic numerical values rather than individual EPD numbers.

LL wrote
after coming so far over hills and valleys, I would hate to see Mike deliberately change the IBC very much trying to make it "better".  

Larry,
I tried to go the top of Mt. Prepotent, to see the other side; the promised land; but I never got all the way up there...the higher I climbed; though the thinner the air,  the higher and hotter burned the flames of hell...
 I was ill-prepared; I didn`t have enough experience; enough  supplies; and too small a support team...but I didn`t come all the way back down to join the valley people that want  tons of gold and would seemingly kill for it...
 what I want is up  higher on that mountain; I`m not willing to kill or die for it, but I`ll gladly sacrifice for it and share it with the few that would appreciate it for it`s true value if we might be so fortunate to find something up there...
so there will be another ascent; this time, better prepared; more supply; and  with sherpas

why?

For pleasure alone he climbed Mount Ventoux, which rises to more than six thousand feet, beyond Vaucluse. It was no great feat, of course; but he was the first recorded Alpinist of modern times{1336} , the first to climb a mountain merely for the delight of looking from its top. (Or almost the first; for in a high pasture he met an old shepherd, who said that fifty years before he had attained the summit, and had got nothing from it save toil and repentance and torn clothing.) Petrarch was dazed and stirred by the view of the Alps, the mountains around Lyons, the Rhone, the Bay of Marseilles. He took St. Augustine's Confessions from his pocket and reflected that his climb was merely an allegory of aspiration towards a better life".

As the book fell open, Petrarch's eyes were immediately drawn to the following words: And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

Petrarch's response was to turn from the outer world of nature to the inner world of "soul": I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again....We look about us for what is to be found only within.  How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation

mk, in the vicinity of base camp

moving on up the mountain...son-dam mating-26% IBC...did she lose her tail climbing the mountain; I don`t think so, but just to be safe, let`s use the standard SE alibi...FESCUE    



HER SIRE


same bull below; You know the one with the cob up his ass;a near  compliment from the big jimmer  
[/img]

The dam of the heifer and of the bull...



mating the family to her son, KMA Mountain Climber, will be the next step...

climbing up rings superior in our imaginations, rather than  sinking down....so this dang chart has been upside down all these years  



don`t you dare suggest sliding down into the depths of despair might be a better analogy, LL    

LL wrote 2-10-2013

Mike, I enjoyed your quote:

one of the failures of "scientific approximation" in the nonlinear domain comes from the inconvenient fact that the average of expectations is different from the expectation of averages...

eg...don`t cross a river because it is on average four feet deep {jensen`s inequality}
MK wrote:

.........KMA Mountain Climber, will be the next step...
climbing up rings superior in our imaginations, rather than sinking down....so this dang chart has been upside down all these years



don`t you dare suggest sliding down into the depths of despair might be a better analogy, LL  

"....sliding down into the depths of despair....." eh, OK Mr. Mountain Climber,  the reality is that if you used the "- - - - - - line" now upside down to also represent today's registered dollar values, that "might be a better analogy" representing that the highest IBC's would produce the lowest monetary rewards.    

I do feel somewhat remorseful for unknowingly contributing to Mike's current obsession with climbing IBC mountains by turning the chart upside down.    I'm a little worried that in his haste, Mike may forget to fasten his safety harness properly.  So Mike, if we want to combat all the upside down silliness in the registered business with crazy, frivolous silliness publicly here on KC......remember when I asked you why you were adamantly promoting higher IBC numbers and you said ".I do like to know IBC; AAA figures the matings free".    
With humans having a passion for silly number games, I said IBC is merely a theoretical number
determined from only a pedigree,
inquiring minds would like to see,
why you think that the IBC
is so necessaree,
to determine the prepotencee
for the repeatabilitee
of an ideal form of functionalitee
as established by either me or thee ????    

Because of your competitive nature, to outdo my poetic silliness, you responded with:

for the same reasons breeders like to seeeeeeee;
what are the likely possibilitieeeesss
for the range of epddddddddeeesss
just the same as using pedigreeees
to AVOID homozygousitieeeeeeeeeeesssss
that brings them to their kneeeeessssss
if type to type builds prepotencieeeeees
then might as well use black/white facesssss

So true Mike, the perception of the registered number game has become an exciting competitive game of "purity deception" rather than papers representing breed purity of functional characters.    Because I abandoned the "zero-sum" performance races, I have been labeled an "anti-performance" crusader by those with brainwashed registered minds chasing registered numerical dollar values. To help perpetuate the monetary value of public pedigree,  the general academia promote
the use of the "F1" cow and higher EPD,  
just to increase productivitee......
while the disparitee is the lack of prepotencee,
to assure continual profitabilitee.  

I have long questioned the need for "crossed up" cows
derived from increased heterozygositee,
just to improve her temporary functionalitee,
selected from all the distribution ranges of variabilitee,
which often reduces any future profitabilitee,
at the expense of the commercial beef industry's economee,
from all the promotions of higher EPD,
and temporary benefits from variation in numbered pedigree......
It took me an hour to put all that in one sentence for brevitee.  

Over the years while walking through my pastures to see what nature is giving me, from SELECTION to improve maternal functionality, not worried about the degree of  IBC purity, or EPD,  or pedigree, or registered monetary value return to me, or environmental adaptability, or how big or little they might be......I decided that any of the industry's measured numbers would follow this primary selection to improve the stability, their renewability, all that can be summed up in two words.......OVERALL EFFICIENCY.    Now all this poetic silliness may be interpreted to be,  many different things for many different people who have priority values different than me.  Another hour gone by preparing this paragraph of  rythmic liturgy.  

My ideal for structural characters denoting maternal efficiency,  wherever they might adapt environmentally,  are portrayed below by a picture of an "SX sixty three",  ranked in the top 1% for $ENergy....and as you can plainly see, she is virtually problem free, and along side her is the renewability, for practical common, unattentive lazy people like me, who just let them be,  whatever nature provided for me,  not exactly literally free, but without any anxieties, over pedigree IBC's.   Only a half hour spent backgrounding her story.  



Different strokes for different folks, certainly not a super cow, but her endurance and "profitable performance" for me, is the heifer calf you all can see, born 4/20/09, calving 4/2/11 & 4/21/12 regularly.   And here is the cow's pedigree offered for free,  so Mike can figure out what her IBC might be, to improve his confidence in her prepotency........ I know her true IBC,  is only expressed  by her progeny,  which is all that matters to me,  regardless of her pedigree, yet she was selected from reduced variability, in order to improve her functional purity......about 35 years plus a couple of hours to put this pedigree all together just so you can calculate her theoretical IBC's Mike,  so please don't just skim it, it took alot of blood, sweat and tears,  and failures over the years,  just to create it. .  

...................................................... ..................................................Shoshone SX 99-1702 (1987)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 121-1012 (1990)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 47-1012 (1982)
.....................................................   Shoshone SX 144-3116 (1993)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 73-7103 (1983)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 73-3116 (1986)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 64-3111 (1984)
....................................Shoshone SX 164-6159 (1996)
.........................................................................................................Shoshone SX 64-1702 (1982)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 99-1702 (1987)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 23-1701 (1978)
.......................................................Shoshone SX 99-6159 (1991)
....................................................................................................... Shoshone SX 88-6310 (1985)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 88-6144 (19
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 75-6123 (1986)
..........Shoshone SX 164-6336 (2002)
....................................................................................................... Shoshone  SX 99-1702 (1987)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 121-1012 (1990)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 47-1012 (1982)
.....................................................   Shoshone SX 144-3116 (1993)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 73-7103 (1983)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 73-3116 (1986)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 64-3111 (1984)
.....................................Shoshone SX 144-6373 (1996)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 36-2702 (1978)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 64-1702 (1980)
.......................................................................................................  Shoshone SX 36-1702 (1980)
.........................................................Shoshone SX 64-6357 (1988)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 67-2712 (1983)
............................................................................Shoshone SX 67-6333 (1985)
........................................................................................................ Shoshone SX 62-6320 (1983)

By looking at this closebred 5-generation "numbered" pedigree, no one can profess to know all the finite variability, or the patient selection of certain structural characters more than me,  portrayed by nature from all of what I could see, wherein nature became the unalterable governor of IBC purity.   To improve overall maternal efficiency, it has been slowly revealed so my eyes could see, that any further profitability, would be up to the commercial industry, to help them improve their own economy.....so I sure as hell wouldn't want any genetic order I've tried to formulate, to be disassembled by an unknown fate, from some registered breeder's preference for a paternal trait.

I've prepared this post while having fun pointing the theoretical IBC gun at Mike, and for those outside the registered mainstream whom I really like.   I'd be the first to admit it wasn't very smart of me,  to withdraw my cattle from the public registration tree, which thrives on BS and hypocrisy, promoting  cattle only for their own profitability, approved only by their own bureaucracy..... but fortunately for me, today there is no registered monetary reward for  prepotent functional purity, and therefore not much competitive competency.    

So, all is well that ends well, such are the benefits to enjoy the freedom of our inalienable rights, but there will always be these competitive evolutionary fights.    The aim of my game here is not to gain fame, but to demonstrate how I've maintained my own private pedigrees....and just as I've survived, surely anyone can   by following Tom Lasater's philosophy.... "breeding cattle is a simple endeavor, the only difficulty is in keeping it simple" ....I would add "and affordable".

LL always looking for a little more poetic justice.    

LL wrote 2-18-2013

Mike,
I decided to put this under what Truline means to me, as it seems to roll with the flow here...

Mikejd4020 started a topic "Question for Mr. Leonhardt" :

I have been watching and learning here for over a year now. My question has to do with your breeding philosophy with cattle and how much of an impact raising sugar beets had upon it.

When you look at a good beet field every plant looks nearly the same, perfectly straight rows, all the same height, hopefully a stand like a picket fence. All beets about the same size. Did the quest for good beets have an impact on how you looked at breeding cattle?

Mike

Thanks for your willingness to watch and learn here with an open mind Mike, we'll try not to let MK lead you too far astray.    Although there are many parallel principles between raising beets and beef, my breeding philosophy didn't evolve from just raising sugar beets, but from a lifetime of farming in general from the horse and buggy days to space flights and I-phones....which means I must be over a 100 years old.  

To elaborate on your specific questions, first let me say I suppose the sugarbeets in a beet field look nearly the same to an "outsider",  similar to the way a herd of cows might look to someone when driving by on the highway seeing them grazing in a pasture.....they are all just cows.   But to the "insider", not all beets (or cows) are about the same size....there are hundreds of different varieties, types and sizes.  

Like cattle, beets range from large, high tonnage "stock" beets used for feedstuffs to smaller "high sugar" varieties with less volume or mass tonnage, like Holsteins & Jerseys, one is unlike another.   While uniformity is preferred, even within each hybrid variety, there are bigger and smaller roots.depending on the available space, soil fertility and seasonal time they have to grow..... with different maturity ranges as the tops shrink back and the roots begin to store sugar for overwintering dormancy.  All is not so sweet in the sugar business as it might appear, and the beta plant breeders also face many challenges which can be correlated to cattle breeding.....we just can't establish prepotency in all the traits of economic importance.

For those who may not be familiar with the sugarbeet industry, over the last 60 years well  over half of the privately owned sugarbeet processing factories have closed.   Most of them were built in the early 1900's and no new sugar factories have been built for decades.  Over time there hasn't been  enough profit in the sugar business to support both the grower/producer and the corporate processor/refiner's expected return on investment.   Today's old surviving but renovated/remodeled factories have been purchased by the growers who now operate them as "farmer owned cooperatives".....like the one adjacent to my farm here in Lovell or in your area of Sidney, MT......following the vertical integration footsteps of the largest sugar producing area in the USA, the Red River Valley, who's growers puchased the Sidney facility and sugar allotment from Holly Sugar.    

Much of the demand for sucrose was replaced with high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners, natural sugar is often proclaimed to be bad for our health.   Our government abandoned acreage allotments in the 70's, and developed import quotas on the world's cheap dumping ground prices of sugar in order to preserve what's left of our domestic sugar industry.      These legislative results have been a continual battle between the domestic sugar producer/refiners and the large domestic bulk users like General Mills, the candy and bakery businesses, etc.   These remaining competitive refiners bag their generic, natural, pure sugar under many different brands or marketing labels.  Our local factory just finished processing the 2012 crop after operating 5 1/2 months....some of the beets werre stored in piles longer than it took to grow them.   So today's acreage & sugar quotas are limited to the regional factory's ability to process the beets in a timely fashion before the beets deteriorate while the molasses desugarization facility may operate all year long.

And so here I am, stuck in this rut of raising products that are proclaimed by many to be "bad" for our well-being...... beef, sugar and beer barley.    Too old now to change my ways, one would think that I should'a changed my occupation to something else that I would not really want to do, so I didn't.   In 1983, I vowed to do everything I could do to improve the efficiency of beef production beginning with the "seed".   Whether the quest is to raise good beets,  or beef, I was recently sent a book entitled "Since Nobody's perfect, How Good is good enough?"    In any competitive business, I'm sure we must be "good enough" to survive, and beyond that, it all depends on our personal ambitions.

As you know, farmers/ranchers are seldom satisfied with "good enough", always looking for ways to improve their production....and of course, improving our own profit seems to be everyone's bottom line or motive which can be difficult.    We are continually bombarded with a vast array of new ideas and "products" offering hopeful promises to help us improve our production.   The ongoing problem is that when competitive increases in production outstrip demands in the marketplace, narrower profit margins tend to result in expansion in order to improve efficiencies/profit......swallowing up the so called "family farms".   Like it or not, change is inevitable, disrupting any complacency.....if there is a dollar to be made somewhere, someone will figure out a way to make it.  

For exampe, in the earlier years, sugar processors bred their own seed with emphasis on those characteristics which favored the processor with higher degrees of purity and fewer adulterants.....salts which when combined on a molecular level do reduce the sucrose extraction rates below the then commonly acceptable rate of at least 85%..    Back then, the growers were paid on a per ton basis times a sliding scale based on the collective average cossette sugar content of the ENTIRE factory district's sliced beets during the campaign.    Of course each grower's self-interest emphasized "tonnage over quality" which resulted in an increase in the use  of nitrogen which produced more tonnage but too much also increased the "impurities" which reduced the extraction rates effecting the processor's profitability.    It was about like the cattle business where we sell our cattle based on an average market price so we tend to want to sell more weaned pounds, and let the feeder and packer speculate about the quality as determined by the USDA's grading standards.

Consequently, with the government being involved with sugar programs, this "conflict of interest" was resolved during the 70's in Washington when the growers, processors and USDA met to determine a "fair" distribution of the sugar dollar.   Technically very detailed, but essentially a sliding scale of a 60/40 split of the wholesale sugar dollar was developed based on each INDIVIDUAL growers sugar content or extractable sugar produced per acre.  Finallly, each grower would get paid in accordance with what he individually produced.  The growers and processors formed joint research committees to evaluate the available hybrid seed varieties in side by side comparison trials under each factory district's environment to optimize both parties economic interests.    

Of course intitally each processors own plant breeders were competitively biased against any other processors varieties....about like our cattle breeds competing against each other.    But over time a private beet seed industry has evolved into non-affiliated highly competitive groups of about a half dozen major worldwide sugarbeet seedstock suppliers.   I remember during the 70's when all the newly imported breeds of cattle were being introduced, how the experts in the beef industry were predicting that only a few of the breeds would emerge successfully in the US beef industry as it clamored for more leaner beef.    Many thought the English beef  breeds would be the big losers.

Of course, back in the sugarbeet business, all this activity  resulted in genetically improved specific, renewable hybrid varieties of sugarbeets......not so in the cattle businesss.    In my own earlier years, beet growers argued over the price the processors were charging for their seed, about $5.00 per acre.    Now that we are also the processor and no longer producing our own seed, as growers we are paying upwards to $300.00 per acre for  approved varieties of seed for our specific regions due to tech fees, research & development, etc.....a pricing structure similar to the way the seed to produce $7.00 corn costs upwards to $300 a bag.   Some days I wonder if growers are losing or gaining, however, modern beet seed was developed from multi-germed segmented seed to a mutated monogerm seed which allowed space planting.....and intensive hand labor is no longer required.   The crop is now grown completely mechanized, going from single row mechanical harvesters in the late 40's to up to 12- row self-propelled harvesters today that cost as much as a "family farm".    

Progress is a demanding and expensive tyrant.   The only reason the beef business hasn't gone the way of the dairy, pig or poultry industries is because of the very nature of the beast.   Instead, the concentration to a few major packers, large feedlots, registered societies, academia, etc. are all exercising their power to force commercial producers to breed cattle to meet their specifications or be discounted in the marketplace.   The registered beef cattle industry is the only one I know of that isn't concerned about measuring "inputs".    There is some talk about cow efficiency, the backbone of the commercial producer, but all the other segments actually don't care one whit about cow efficiency....cow herds are basically the sorted by-product of all these other self-interests.   It isn't any wonder beef cow numbers are reported to be the lowest in 50 years.....and yet producers are required to pay a beef check-off to promote the consumption of beef while paying dearly for phenotypic illusions as "seed" in the cattle industry.

So I had to laugh when DV named a bull "beetseed", thinking that could be a synonymous beginning of an expanding movement whereby commercial cowmen would learn how to better control their own economic destiny by selectively choosing the proper genetics to raising their own "seed" to produce more efficient "cow factories" in order to be a survivor.  That was optimistic thinking.     It still sickens me to witness all the stupid things the mainstream registered cattle industry continues to do that is actually counter-productive to improving beef production efficiency...... yet they continue to be supported by too many commercial producers.....but alas, that is the nature of the beast and it is one hell[ve job to tame it.    Thus it is that I admire the Dylans, the Grassfarmers, the Hillys and all those others that are taking economic control over their own production.....and why I have been promoting the tedious and slow process of developing more pure and affordable strains for the past 30 years, eliminating all the traditional superfluous costs.

And so Mike, these are just a few of the reasons for the evolving formation of my breeding philosophy.....just a common farmer's reaction to all the wasted actions.  

LL in the vicinity of profitable imperfection, finally free of the ambitious rat races for monetary gain,  where "good enough"  leads to a less stressful, more affordable quality of life ...... and genuine genetic progress.

LL 2-24-2013

Quote :

MKeeney wrote:
".....as to peas in a pod, the functional TRULINE is the stablized center line, and the outlier above and below the line are close enough to center so that they are useful at least commercially , rather than culled...different than Falloon , using the outlier to move the center line up, and it would appear to me, different than Elimast, used to move the center line down... "

By now, my posts on KC must be getting about as redundant as Gavins monthly newsletters, but like a Timex watch we just keep on ticking giving the same time twice a day.   Most of you here on KC know that I have long been a proponent of improving the "functional purity" of the parent stock in the beef industry..... the primary purpose of breed formation.....but I am generally ignored.   I should have given up years ago.    

We've always known that stabilizing "center lines" have always been contrary to the mainstream registered directions,  who have always been focused on changing that "center line" as an indicator of progress.....usng the top outliers that deviate the most from the bottom.  

Quote :

MK recently posted " I`ve long contended a closed herd reaches a point where it must use the "biggest and best" just to maintain the phenotypic average".    

I disagree simply because the phenotype is the true result of the genotypes.    However, I do agree with MK's posted clarification -

Quote :

"The Pinebank herd is one of my "proofs" that a closed herd reaches a point where it must use the outlier just to maintain the "average" performance...what is "cowherd performance"? After you have consumed all the feed {grass/hay} you grew on a given alotment, isn`t it the pounds of calf you produced from that grass, not how many lbs you produced per cow?"  

Every individual animal is a "closed population". of traits.    We all know beef production income minus costs = profit or loss, and yet the mainstream directions are full steam ahead to increase production ignoring the costs.

When I was younger and more ambitious, still an active participant working with the AAA's AHIR department, back when John Crouch was in charge of the Angus Herd Improvement Records, I was only successful on two fronts.   I managed to persuade the AAA to identify those cows as well as the sires who were carriers of the monitored simple genetic defects....and with my interest focused on maternal values,  the annual Sire Pathfinder Report was important to me.   Since pathfinder cows are deemed to be the superior outliers, I also persuaded the AAA to list the number of pathfinder dams produced by a sire from the total number of known registered daughters a sire produced.  

Chasing outliers, clearly my motives were to identify the percentage of pathfinder dams a sire produced from his overall production.  There is a significant difference.   In admiration of pathfinder status, I had overlooked the fact that herds with a large number of higher producing pathfinder cows also had an equal number of lower  producing cows.....also overlooking the reality that this "pathfinder data" was accumulated from registered herd's "environments", not necessarily under lesser commercial environments.    Theoretically, individual sire data is presumed to be derived from randomized populations, but of course it isn't so it is skewed from the very beginning.  Although the data may be skewed, the bottom line was that  I did learn that there were distinct phenotypic commonalities among pathfinder cows wherever or however they were produced.

To my disappointment,  I was never successful in my attempts to encourage the AHIR department to measure the distributions of a sire's measured traits that comprised an average.   I was told that there was just too much variation in the breed to measure distributions effectively, yet we still measure all the other traits without any concerns at all about "too much variation"......wow, I'm still perplexed by all that....garbage in, garbage out.    

During the beginning of the "performance era", initiated  by PRI (performance registry international) and BIF (beef improvement federation), some of you might not know that structured sire evaluation under commercial environments was abandoned during the late 70's because of the difficulties, time and cost, but mostly because of self-conflicting registered breed interests.  Most of you know that within herd ratios and EBV's were replaced with national sire evaluation reports based on registered field data,  that CAB was an outgrowth of the PRI certified meat sire program and that MARC has spent decades comparing breed differences and has developed across breed EPD's which can be utilized to change cattle populations with specific individuals.    

By lumping all this measured data,  cattle breeds and actual production together on a national level, I had to laugh when Kent recently posted - "It has been reported that the national WW has not increased in 10 years. Comparing the 90's to the 2000's levels shows a decrease in WW of 36 pounds, a decline in calving rate by 1.3% and an average loss of $47.76 per head. How much more improvement can we take?"

As the cattle industry evolves, there is one thing I am sure of, and that is - if improving functional purity has no place in beef production, there is absolutely no genetic reason to measure distributions of a trait average nor to maintain breed identity.   During the past 50 years, the industry has spent a monumental amount of money collecting data.   Contrary to improving functional purity, the industry and the AAA in particular has developed 24 individual average EPD values compared to the overall "average of the breed" trait by trait with numbers and ranking by trait.   Recapturing some of my prior investments in the collection of this data, today my own primary use of all these measures is to analyze the trends of the industry's changing selecton directions and their consequential economic values.....doing this only in order to reaffirm the validity of my breeding philosophy.  

With hindsight being 20/20, it may be worthwhile to take a half hour and travel back in time with me  beginning 50 years ago to review the immense variation in the Angus breed.....by following a few of the more popular bulls during their sequential reigning eras.  The presumption is that variation is "good", that these following percentile graphs and pertinent EPD numbers are relatively accurate in the identification of traits contributing to measured beef values.   So I am using them to provide me with a means to determine my own number for a MVIB$ (maternal values influencing  beef dollars).   The 2012 breed average EPD  center lines for these specific traits are:  CED +5; BW +1.8; CEM +7;  $W +26.24;  SC +.49; ($EN +0.12 plus  $B +52.56) = MVIB$ 52.68....the traits in RED are current and are below today's breed average:

Born in 1950, OB2, "the king of sires" in the 50's & 60's, CED +8;  BW -6.3;  CEM -18;  $W -4.19; SC +.12;  ($EN +73.99 plus $B +18.23) = MVIB$ 92.22




Born in 1960, Rito N Bar, base of leading peformance Rito's, CED 0; BW +1.2; CEM -16; $W +8.79; SC -.14; ($EN 56.85 plus $B 18.81) = MVIB$ 75.66




Born 1962, "Canadian Colossal" a "million $" erratic big bull popular in the 70's, CED -2; BW +.6; CEM -18; $W +1.31; SC -.18; ($EN +53.63 plus $B +15.19) = MVIB$ 68.82




Born 1963, Lodge of Wye,  a $250,000 bull, reaching fame in the 70's,  CED +1; BW +.5; CEM +8; $W +8.16; SC +.23;  ($EN 65.07 plus  $B -20.07) = MVIB$ 45.00




Born 1967, RR Rito 707, leading popular performance sire , CED +5; BW +2.1; CEM -12; $W +18.18; SC +.42;  ($EN 38.06 plus  $B 10.21) = MVIB$ 48.27




Born 1976, Sayre Patriot, a twice Denver Champion "emulous" bred bul, CED +2; BW +1.0; CEM O; $W +12.04; SC +.70; ($EN +33.74 plus  $B +33.34) = MVIB$ 67.08



Born 1979, Shoshone Shanigan, top growth sire in the breed's NSE Report, CED -12; BW +8.0; CEM +8; $W -18.12; SC +.56;  ($EN +45.39 plus $B +43.08) = MVIB$ 88.47



Born 1987, Grubbs MacKenzie, Denver Champion at the peak of the frame craze, CED -5; BW +7.9; CEM +9; $W -20.01; SC -.14; ($EN -11.52 plus  $B +78.43) = MVIB$ 66.91



Born 1978, QAS Traveler, the reg. industry's most widely used bull to fix the 80's "red" traits in the early 90's, CED +7; BW -.4; CEM +7; $W 21.14; SC +.06; ($EN 20.07 plus  $B 32.94) = MVIB$ 53.01



Born 1986, EXT the most widely used bull in history for 5 years, 1996 thru 2000. CED +5; BW +1.7, CEM +13;  $W 28.67; SC -.26; ($EN 19.53 plus $B 55.53) = MVIB$ 75.06



Born 2000, SAV Final Answer, by the numbers may be near the final answer, CED +13; BW -1.1; CEM +14;  $W 60.14; SC +1.21;  ($EN +7.44 plus $B +56.19) = MVIB$ 63.63



Any of us can interpret these dozen graphs any way we want to.   MK, in my search of the sire summaries, I couldn't find any breed average animals ... nor any stationary center lined  herds that might be considered "good enough" for you.....other than the Shoshone herd of course.     As the industry mainstream goes through these correctional cycles, I did find what  appears to be a prominent new winner, considered by many to be a contender for the 8th Wonder of the World.    By the breed center line of numbers, Final Answer is certainly a remarkable achievement, a new "king of sires", an ultimate registered production machine with no"red" measured traits left to improve..... except perhaps to bring up the last two bars, $YG and $B.... to at least match the old 1950's "king of sires" MVIB$ of  92.22....and of course $EN are plummeting due to the demand for more maternal productivity.

I was thinkin' how useful it would be to know the distributions of those new finally answered "centered lines" just so we could improve their "functional purity".... so they could again rightfully be called "purebreds".....with the expectation that all the daughters could be pathfinder cows who would be significantly smaller than breed average, structurally sound for the unmeasured traits of endurance, stayability, mothering ability and longevity under commercial nvironments.....and all their progeny could make ranchers $33.90 more per calf weaned over today's breed average....so every segment could finally all live happily together....that is, of course, provided those commercial ranchers wouldn't  spend more than all their calf profits buying "finally answered cattle".    

I don't know if the final answers will solve Kent's reported national loss of $47.76 per head or not, remembering that the more we produce, the narrower the profit margins get.   And remembering that for every outlier on one side of the center line, there are an equal number on the other side.   It's just too bad that one man's gain is at another's loss, but I guess that's  the way of the world we live in....I suppose .so we won't run out of things to do.   That must be the reason God made pragmatics.

Meanwhile, back at the ole pragmatic Shoshone ranch contrary to chasing increased volume, handicapped by my phobia to inprove functional purity to achieve more similar "peas in a pod", while trying to improve the "red" traits for the commercial cowman, resolved that form follows functional selection......I proceeded with emphasis on functional maternal efficiency and identified inherent carcass quality.   So, the "new Shoshones" began with a 28% IBC functionally pure bull born in 1982......#64, a hardy individual who later earned these EPD numbers and ranking:

CED +10;  BW -2.2; CEM +11; $W 20.62; SC +.24; ($EN +45.29 plus  $B 17.43) = MVIB$ 62.72



Definitely destined never to be acceptable by the registered mainstream....but holy smoley, the numbers say this functionally purebred bull, the core of the X-strain's own stabilized center line focusing on QUALITY over QUANTITY, commercial PROFIT over INCREASED PERFORMANCE....it is hard for me to actually believe that the MVIB$ match those of Final Answer's......and yet, commercial cowmen can buy dozens of these nearly "peas in a pod" purebred bulls who can produce cattle that can take care of their functional chores all by themselves in lesser environments.....and yes, there is more than one way to skin a cat..... finally a place where cowmen can buy dozens of more predictable purebred bulls for the unbelievable price of one Final Answer.  I just hope my prized more prepotent cattle, systematically producing more from a whole lot less,  and low prices don't put the "SAV type of cattle"  out of the commercial cattle business ....      

Alas, without promotional BS, that feat in itself would  be the 9th Wonder of the World    ....and who knows, my cattle may even have more diversified genetic usefulness than a Longhorn, Wagyu, Chianina, Simmental, Limo, Charolais, Belgian Blue, Herefords & Angus too.    The bad part about all this is that I am starting to get smug as hell about my cattle ever since I discovered my MVIB$ numbers are as good as SAV's.... and now I'm beginning to worry that people won't root for me any more since my status has jumped from being an underdawg to being among the topdawgs again......I hope I don't have another genetic wreck to humble me a little more.

Speaking of wonders, diversity and humility, I still wonder why MK hasn't also raised a bunch of black/baldy cows after trying about everything else.....in a humble way he recently confided to me that the real reason he was a "baldy" at a young age was from his early frustrations trying to breed super cattle like PCC & LCC.....I would've guessed it was from too much testosterone in his "genes"...

 

LL, just wiling away another wintery day stirring  the  KC pot to prevent the porridge from burning

Dylan Biggs posted 3-24-2013

THE ESSAY Hugh Mackay


                                   
       

           
               Illustration: Kerrie Leishman

       



           
       The desire to be taken seriously is perhaps the deepest and
therefore the most easily frustrated of the many desires that drive us.
We all need to be recognised, acknowledged, valued. We like to think
we'll be remembered after we're gone.


       So it's no wonder we take the question of personal identity
so seriously. We want to ''find ourselves''; we want to give our
children names that will distinguish them from the mob; we want to be
treated as the unique individuals we know ourselves to be. We hate being
the victims of racism or sexism, or any other prejudice that lumps us
in with a category, as if to say your uniqueness doesn't count; you're
just a ''typical'' single mother, Jew, Presbyterian, baby boomer,
homosexual, person of Middle-Eastern appearance.


       We're affronted when a waiter avoids eye contact, a doctor
keeps us waiting too long without explanation or apology, or people
don't make room for us on the footpath. ''Hey, this is me,'' we want to
say. ''I want some respect.''


       But our desire to be taken seriously, like all the desires
that drive us, can get out of hand. When we won't make a charitable gift
without a plaque to acknowledge it; when we start using Facebook as if
it's a marketing tool for the promotion of Brand Me rather than a medium
for connecting  with  friends; when we find ourselves doing something
primarily for a tangible reward … these are signs that we've become
victims of the cult of self-promotion, fuelled by our greed for
recognition.


           
Advertisement  
       In the Age of Promotion, everything's a brand. Sydney is a
brand. Political parties, and politicians themselves, are brands,
increasingly marketed in the same sloganistic way as commercial products
and services. Media personalities are brands. Celebrities are brands
(need I say more than ''Kardashian''?). Perhaps it was inevitable that
some families would start promoting themselves like brands by posting
their pictures on the rear windows of their cars.


       There's nothing new in the pre-occupation with self. It's
natural; it's inherent; it's even necessary, up to a point, for our
physical and emotional survival. In a capitalist society, we're told,
our economic survival depends on everyone being driven by self-interest.
But the process of socialisation - of becoming sufficiently civilised
to live harmoniously in social groups - is designed to restrain our
preoccupation with personal identity.


       Eventually, we're supposed to realise that we're in this
thing together and that it is our sense of belonging, of connectedness,
rather than our unique sense of identity, that preserves society from
descending into the chaos of anarchical self-interest.


       To hear the merchants of self-esteem, though, you wouldn't
think so. From an early age, we're training our children to expect
recognition and rewards way beyond what seems reasonable. A gold star
for breathing. A certificate for turning up. Lavish praise for
functioning like a reasonable kid. This is dangerous stuff, because it
creates an expectation that we will be taken more seriously than is
healthy for us.


       It takes some of us a very long time to realise that we can
be punished by rewards. Rewards can too easily become an end in
themselves, distracting us from the intrinsic value of worthwhile
activity. Rewards actually diminish the satisfaction we might obtain
from a job well done, or the performance of a virtuous act, by putting
the focus on ''me'' - the actor rather than the action. The worst effect
of the reward mentality is that we may eventually lose interest in
doing things for which there is no reward-based incentive - no
recognition - and thus develop an ugly sense of entitlement.


       Virtue is indeed its own reward, but that wisdom can easily
be swamped by the suggestion that any good thing we do should bring
extrinsic rewards as well.


       It's not just the influence of Facebook, nor reality TV
shows, nor the cult of celebrity, nor the insidious effects of marketing
and PR machines that promote hollow values and promise more glitz and
joy than they can ever deliver. This is about an entire culture that
runs on rewards and self-promotion … all the way up to our honours
system (itself an anachronistic echo of royal courts and aristocracies).


       A legal case is looming, it is rumoured, involving someone
nominated for an award in the Order of Australia who, having been
knocked back, is now looking to sue. There's also a government tribunal
examining cases of old diggers whose families think they should have
received some military honour and are now agitating for posthumous
awards.


       It's not enough, apparently, to have lived well, to have
served others, to have died gloriously: formal recognition is the thing.


       This is not a universal trend, of course. Many people would
cringe at the very thought of some kind of public recognition of their
service to their community or profession or nation. There are those who
accept that they have been paid well for the work they did or, in the
case of voluntary work, been appreciated for their contribution, and
that is reward enough. There are others who would regard it as
undignified and embarrassing to be set apart from the thousands of
people they know to have given service as selfless as theirs.


       You have to wonder what was going through the mind of Angus
Houston, one of our most distinguished military figures, as he stood on
that dais in Canberra with the other ''finalists'' for Australian of the
Year, looking rather like a bunch of hopefuls at a school speech day.


       And you have to wonder what Geoffrey Rush must have thought
when the award came to him rather than any of the other equally worthy
citizens lined up in such an unseemly contest. He made a heroic effort
to sound as if this was an award for the creative arts, but we all knew
it was actually a valiant attempt to add a bit of oomph to Australia Day
by cashing in on the considerable value of Brand Rush.


       ''Man of the Match'' is a particularly unfortunate sign of
the times - already, inevitably, winding its way into children's games.
The whole idea of a team, like the idea of a community, is that we pool
our various talents for the common good. How can anyone be ''man of the
match'' when the very essence of teams is that they are about Us, not
Me?


       Brand Me has infected the work of writers, many of whom are
rather introverted, reclusive types who recoil from the very idea of
celebrity and wish their work could speak for itself. But, no: you'll
have to promote it, and if you can't be a celebrity, then at least try
to be a ''personality''.


       Celebrity chefs, celebrity bishops, celebrity doctors … even
celebrity ''intellectuals''. You might think intellectuals would be free
of this sort of thing, given that we once demanded of them that they
should be dispassionate, sceptical, rigorous and, above all,
uninterested in personal popularity. But there are now polls to choose
Australia's most popular public intellectuals: this has become just
another product category in the media marketplace, ripe for branding.
Far from being intellectuals in the classical sense, people so branded
are likely to be passionate advocates or, like Alain de Botton,
shameless entertainers.


       How did Brand Me become a mass market phenomenon?


       Perhaps it began in the 1960s. Baby boomers, as they entered
adolescence and young adulthood, were dubbed the Me Generation by
parents and employers gobsmacked by what they perceived as an
exaggeration of the desire to be taken seriously. But the boomers had
good reason: they'd grown up in the heat of the Cold War, with the
expectation that we could all be blown up at any moment.


       ''We're not here for a long time; we're here for a good
time'' became their generational catch-cry, and they acted accordingly,
becoming revolutionaries and social pioneers in the process. As it's
turned out, they are here for a long time (and many of them haven't been
having a particularly good time, given economic upheavals, their record
divorce rate and offspring who don't want to know what their parents
did in the war against gender inequality). But perhaps that heightened
sense of impermanence spawned the general eagerness for self-promotion.


       This is not to decry the baby boomers, but simply to
acknowledge that when the world moved into the thermonuclear age, the
survival stakes rose and the need to assert who we are and what we want
became more urgent.


       Now the threat is more from climate change, or terrorism, or
economic chaos than from any immediate fear of a nuclear holocaust. But
the edginess is still with us; the anxiety; an underlying sense of
insecurity that seems to have sapped our confidence.


       The Brand Me phenomenon may well be an expression of the
desire to find something to control in a world that seems increasingly
beyond our - or anyone's - control.


       We may not be able to control the climate, the exchange rate,
the European debt crisis, the worrying rate of youth unemployment, or
the mad ambition of politicians, but we can control Me - or, at least,
the public persona we choose to project as Brand Me.


       Some of us compensate for our apparent powerlessness by
becoming obsessed with our personal appearance - witness the rash of
breast implants, Botox injections and tattoos - or with our houses and
gardens, our food, or the number of Facebook ''friends'' we've
accumulated, all in the quest for recognition.


       In the rush of awards, prizes and tawdry self-promotions
designed to pump up our self-esteem, an important idea is in danger of
being overlooked. The evidence from research - and from commonsense - is
that self-respect, not self-esteem, is the key to a satisfying and
productive life and the keys to self-respect are humility and restraint,
not self-promotion.


       Self-respect is a very private concept, easily overlooked in
the noisy contest to construct and promote an ''image''. It's a thing we
earn by the way we handle disappointment, tedium and loss, as well as
those fleeting moments of happiness. There is no short-cut, and no
amount of self-promotion will get us there.