How to Select Cows / or, The Guenon system simplified, explained, and practically applied

by Willis P. Hazard

I was better prepared thus for my work of classifying the bovine race, a work which no one had ever tried, either theoretically or practically.

My classification of the characteristic signs, embraces all the races of France and other countries, without distinction of sex or age.

Unknown, up to this day, although they have always existed, these signs have escaped all the world, even the sagacity of the most celebrated painters, as well as that of veterinary doctors of the highest reputations of all times.

The appearance of my method should mark an era, for it opposes and overturns all the prejudiced routines according to which people have practiced up to this time.

It opens a new era in an art in its infancy, in a science whose first principles even were unknown. I should then expound it with the greatest detail.

This method is of the greatest simplicity, whatever has been possible to be said of it, and whoever will become thoroughly familiar with the escutcheon of the first order of each class, will be able to judge of all.

Escutcheons are ten in number. They extend, according to their class, from the centre of the four teats to the level of the upper extremity of the vulva, and may extend in breadth from the middle of the hinder surface of one leg, to the middle of the hinder surface of the other. By their form or configuration, escutcheons characterize and distinguish the ten families which together constitute my classification. Behold, then, to what is reduced, in reality, this pretended immense complication.

A special figure, placed at the end of each class, serves to indicate mongrel animals.

Each of the classes or families is characterized by an escutcheon of fixed form, always similar to itself, while one does not get out of that class or that family, but variable in the dimensions of its surface. That dimension or that surface should be estimated by square centimeters, but that would be too complicated for the practical man; since it depends on the size of the individual, it is estimated by the limits of the escutcheon placed on the hinder part of the animal. The extreme limits are the hams, the interior surface of the legs and vulva. The surface of the escutcheon, of which the extent varies, has permitted me to divide each class or family into six orders, for each one of which I assign, in taking account of the shape, the quantity, the continuation, and the quality of the milk.