Tackling the fallout from Jaegerbomb
Some time has passed since The Scotsman ceased carrying commercial livestock sale reports. This was not because of the rivalry between auction companies although I have taken a phone call from one irate auctioneer who complained that his firm’s sale report had been trimmed back to two-and-a-half column inches while another company had been given three whole inches. The caller became even more animated when he said, “And they sold ten fewer beasts”.
To save space, market reports were often written in abbreviated form with breeds identified by a couple of letters such as AA for Aberdeen Angus. They also used a coded language. For example, when the report stated that “plainer sorts were hard to cash,” it meant the auctioneer struggled to get a bid, while “more could have been cleared to advantage” meant they were short of entries.
Market reports were and still are important as they give an idea of how the trade is going but that is not why today’s comment is based on a commercial cattle sale in Carlisle last week.
The sale was of unregistered Limousin cattle. That in itself is not unusual. All breeds have sales of stock which for one reason or another are not pedigreed. One example is the cost of registration and membership of the breed societies is a significant issue for some at the lower end of the breeding pyramid.
Breed societies have an obsession with peripheral matters such as permitted skin colour and any animal that is not properly colour coded finds itself outside the pedigree pen even if it has other characteristics like a tremendous growth rate which might actually provide more to the producers’ bottom line.
The Carlisle sale was different because most entries were from stock sired by a bull, Ballinloan Jaegerbomb, who had been thrown out of the breed society because of doubts over its parentage.
The belief is, and this has still to be verified by Her Majesty’s Constabulary, that the information on Jaegerbomb’s passport was incorrect and – shock horror! – his mother was of another breed.
In his pre-exclusion days, Jaegerbomb was something of a star, making almost £25,000 after a keen bidding battle at Carlisle when he was sold in 2012. After the sale, this bull with outstanding conformation – possibly from his dam – attracted lots of interest and thousands of straws of his semen were sold as buyers wanted some of his bloodlines.
Explusion from the breed society has done little to dampen the interest in Jaegerbomb and here I quote the auction company website report of the sale: “A massive crowd descended to the sale with the ring packed to the rafters, ensuring all classes met a phenomenal demand.”
The “phenomenal demand” included sales of Jaegerbomb bred bulls at 6,500 guineas (£6,825) and 5,000 guineas. At the end of the sale the average for these was just £13 shy of £5,000. Contrast this with the breed sale at Stirling in October when the pedigree Limousin bulls as reported by The Scotsman averaged £4,482.
This gives the breed a problem with non-pedigree stock being preferred to pedigree animals by commercial producers. Put another way, men and women with commercial cattle are only interested in the quantity and quality of the beef in the final product, not in the bits of paper affirming that it is a true specimen of the breed.
Because the problem was not picked up earlier, there are thousands of Jaegerbomb sons and grandsons all around the country as another 60-odd of his first born progeny have also been de-registered, growing up on farms all around Britain.
Every one of the progeny sold to a commercial producer will mean one fewer sold from the pedigree sector.
The question now for the breed society is: should it allow Jaegerbomb progeny back into the fold, possibly with a tag indicating they might not be true pure bred, or do they increase their efforts to keep the breed pure? This latter course of action will put pressure on a number of producers who have, again allegedly, been less than assiduous in recording dates of birth as delays in registration can improve estimated breeding values.
While the focus is on the Limousin breed, the question hangs over other pedigree outfits where unusual growth rates and confirmation have been noticed.
One issue is certain and that is the issues raised by Jaegerbomb have not gone away. If sales of commercial cattle become more important than pedigree events, The Scotsman may have to revert to reporting them.