Breed Standards

[Duncan MacIntyre]

I don't think the history of the breed is as simple as Ian suggests. The long legged Dexter of today and the Kerry are not really very similar, other than being mostly black, horned and comparatively small. I think it is doubful that the original Dexter, long before records, was universally a bulldog carrier.
If the two breeds had a common ancestry then the modern DNA studies would support that - they do not.
I prefer to think, and of course I have no proof, that originally there were Dexter like cattle and Kerry like cattle, which were separate groups. When breeds as such began to emerge the Dexter and Kerry are known to have shared a common herd book, but there may not have been so much genetic mixing as might be supposed, as breeders of each type would tend to breed to type. When we take the modern non carrier dexter and avoid recent increases in size, which have partly come from introduction of grading up cattle and partly be selection, we can produce a beast very much of the size and weight of the original Dexter type, ie females of 250 to 300kg and bulls 400kg. The modern Dexter is becoming far too large, and this should not be encouraged, the small size is the most outstanding feature of the breed.

Duncan

Duncan

[wagra dexters]

The non-short Dexter bears little resemblance to the Kerry now, a hundred or so years on, any more than a chihuahua is anything like a wolf. There are far too many generations of selection for dual-purposeness in between, and in many cases, too many non-Dexter genes have been introduced, either by Experimental or Appendix, or mistake.

Selection has been shown that it is possible to result in a short legged chunky animal without the mutated gene to have to bother about.

I imagine that there are some stunningly superb larger cows whose ancestral height has been masked by chondrodysplasia, but whose other genetics it would be unwise to lose, from a national herd aspect, so it would seem to make sense, to me anyway, to use non-carrier genetically smaller bulls for a few generations, to bring the height of the offspring down to within the breed standard, rather than fake it by dwarfing half the calves.

Margaret

[Duncan MacIntyre]

I think that the genetics project shows that the Dexter and the Kerry are nowhere near as closely interlinked as has been supposed, and also that there is not as much introduced genetic material from other breeds as had been suspected. I think that the genetics project, though not able to prove my point, would lend weight to it.

Duncan

[Rutherford]

Many recent historians have put the cart before the horse. When I was first in Wales I found two types of Welsh Black, in the northern mountains a beef type, in the southern dairying country a milkier type. The same thing patently was similar in Ireland with their cousins. The following bears this out:

"Cattle: Their breeds, management, diseases &c."
William and Hugh Raynbird
Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1857
The Breeds of Cattle - The Pembroke Ox

In Carmarthenshire, Brecknockshire, Cardiganshire, and Pembrokeshire, an old and useful breed of black cattle still prevails.
The Pembroke ox is short in the limb, with moderately small bone; deep and round in the carcass, with rough short hair; and a hide of moderate thickness, and pleasant to the touch. The head is moderately small, the aspect animated, and the horns are white. Some individuals have white about the face and under parts, and some are of a dark brown.
These cattle are small but hardy, and the oxen fatten well on indifferent land. The character of the meat is first-rate; the grain is fine, and beautifully marbled, and its flavour excellent. The cows are fair milkers, and, from their hardiness, are very profitable to the small farmer or cottager. The oxen are as profitable to the grazier; they are good workers, strong and active, and are ready at the age of four or five years for the market, arriving early at maturity. Great numbers of these cattle are sent to the London market.
Irish cattle

A native middle-horned race of cattle exists everywhere in Ireland, and particularly in the hilly and mountain districts, where, from its hardiness, it thrives on indifferent pasturage, and contrives unshielded, during the winter months, to find support.
There are several varieties of this stock, varying in minor details of size and contour; but all are of small size, active, and vigorous. Some are of a black colour, with rough curly hair; others are brindled; others are mottled red and white; some, again, are black or brown, with white faces. All fatten rapidly when removed from a moorland pasturage to good feeding lands; and the cows often prove excellent milkers. Among these the Kerry breed is much esteemed; it yields, in proportion to its size, a fair quantity of excellent milk; and, when dried, it quickly fattens, even upon inferior fare
.
The Victorians not surprisingly confused the two, but the Kerry in my experience is quite unlike the Dexter although they obviously came from a common ancestor. It had been bred for years for milk, the most obvious feature being the pure dairy carcass and skeleton, although I believe some attempt has been made recently to put some beef into them. When faced with the long and short the Victorians having no genetics would obviously confuse the long with the Kerry, which were similar. The animals in Kerry were never introduced to the cross used to bring in the extra beef and unfortunately the bulldog along with it.
Beryl (Woodmagic)

[Louisa Gidney]

I do like a good devil's advocate discussion. I'm going to go way back into prehistory here. The ancestor of all domestic cattle was the aurochs, a massive beast with bulls c.2m shoulder height. This is the basic genome that all breeds will revert to if human control of breeding is removed. Proven by Berlin & Munich zoos between the wars with descendants of the Munich population now used for conservation grazing in Europe & research now led by Cologne zoo.
Dwarfism or miniaturisation occurs in the wild in specific circumstances, mostly on island populations where the breeding pool becomes both isolated and restricted.
Humans can produce a similar result in wild animals by a hunting strategy targetting breeding males for trophy heads, as happened 12,000 B.P. with gazelles in the Levant. The size reduction DOES NOT affect all the bones of the skeleton, usually only the extremities become reduced in length. This is particularly pertinent to the Dexter, where MOST of the bones of a short-leg skeleton are not immediately obvious as being from a "dwarf" rather than merely a small "normal".
The concept that short leg Dexters appear more beefy because they have the same amount of muscle as non shorts but on much shorter bones is a proposition that I hope to test shortly.

[Anna]

The true non-short Dexter is the Kerry!

As I never ever have seen a Kerry cow I would like to ask; would a Kerry equal my Dexter?

My Dexter is a small cow (41-42 inches tall), she is an excellent mother, she is black, she has plenty of milk, she is very intelligent and is normally easy to train, she is occasionally rather stubborn, the Dexter meat has an extraordinary taste and quality.

Would I get this if I traded her for a Kerry? If yes, a Kerry would suit me well.

Would the Kerry have considerably longer legs? No problem. All qualities listed above is very important to me (except the stubbornness maybe) and I simply didn´t choose to be a Dexter owner to have a cow with short legs. (Ok she is a non-short girl, you would maybe find her leggy but compared to my neighbours cows she sure is short.)

[Sylvia]

If you Google Kerry cattle, Anna, you will find quite a lot of pictures. I can't recall seeing one in the flesh either but being black and not very big I suppose they could be mistaken for a non-short Dexter or a fairly lightweight Welsh Black.

[Rutherford]

Fifty years ago the Kerry was considerably bigger than a Dexter, it was pure dairy not dual purpose, and its head and horns were different, it was longer on the leg than the long leg Dexter. No experienced Dexter breeder could mistake them. They were from the same rootstock but had been bred away from the animal we know as a Dexter for a long time.
I confess I am an amateur when it comes to the prehistory and aurochs but I understand there is still a lot of debate as to the origins and reduction of size. We are still in early days of DNA dating. I expect we shall find further recapulations, and I can only really discuss my own experience.
Beryl (Woodmagic)

[wagra dexters]

Louisa, do you mean dwarfism and miniaturisation, rather than 'or', because the two conditions are not the same, are they?
Margaret.

[Rutherford]

Louise, I have to take issue on the structure of the short leg Dexter, I am usually able to identify them by the heavy shoulders or fore-end compared with a normal animal. Something I had to do regularly when I was eliminating them from my own herd before we had a DNA test Moreover the bone structure is abnormal. The head is usually full size, but concave. They certainly have the characteristics of the normal dwarf, and this is often commented on by farming friends who are not Dexter breeders, they talk about them as looking abnormal.
Beryl (Woodmagic)

[Broomcroft]

I've got a few cows that look very much like the pictures of Kerry's that I can find on the web, but with not such a stretched out face and they are 100% jet black.



Edited By Broomcroft on 1219598719

[monica waltho]

There were two kerrys at Chelford that were either very under fed or just extremely dairy in type, there is someone in Derbyshire who milks them. But if you look on the web as Clive says some do look more like non short dexters

[Rutherford]

There was undoubtedly an infusion of Kerry at the turn of the last century when the Victorians first imported, but it was only a brief period. The Cardiff work concluded that the DNA is very different in the two breeds. The Kerry may be a little more beefy today, but that has been introduced since the separation. The short leg breeding system meant that any non-shorts of Kerry type would be culled, but when it came in the dwarf version it would not be recognised and was retained, hence it is still possible to find animals with a certain amount of Kerry blood
Beryl (Woodmagic)

[Saffy]

I can remember seeing a herd of Kerry cattle in Southern Ireland in either 1971 or 1972. It was a reasonable sized herd of about 30 or so animals all very much alike in size and shape, they were very dairy like, much smaller than my fathers Friesians and extremely pretty.

Stephanie

[Anna]

Hm, maybe a Kerry would be kind of equal by the looks. But what about the taste? The dual purpose qualitys, and the small size, is what Dexter is all about to me and the looks is very much of minor interest.



Edited By Anna on 1219647966