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

by Willis P. Hazard

When I shall have described the different families of true cows, as well as their division into orders, the yield or the quantity of milk, their butyraceous qualities, and the greater or less period of its duration of yield during gestation, I will pass to the bastard cows, which, though perfectly similar in form and color to others, differ essentially from them, for they lose their milk as soon as they are pregnant.

This close resemblance is a source of errors to the most practiced judges.

Thus have I wished in the description of classification, to point out precisely the distinctive signs by the aid of which one can easily recognize them. After the study of bastard cows, comes the chapter of bull re-productors. I have made plain, that in the classifications of bulls, I have reduced to three the numbers of orders of each class, in order to bring the application of the method to the most simple expression. The first will comprehend all the bulls, the good re-producers; the second, the re-producers of middling quality; the third, the bad re-producers. I mean by bad, those in which fails the ability for the transmission of the lactiferous qualities. As one sees, the characteristic signs with the males, as with the females, have a significant value of the highest importance. With the bull, they portray the re-productive qualities, and with the cows the lactiferous qualities. The observers who will apply my system of one kind, as rigorously for the males as for the females, will observe in the passage of one order to the other, the same scale of proportion that this established in the classification of the cows. Although the classification bears more on the lactiferous or re-productive properties than on the others, it is important to take in consideration all the other qualities that the individuals can and ought to possess to be of an irreproachable organization.

The cows of the first and second order of each class, in all the races, will always give in the same country, a greater abundance of milk than those of inferior orders. To recognize the lactiferous produce of cows, whatever may be their class or the locality that they inhabit, it suffices simply to know the quality of the food which makes the habitual nourishment of the cows in the place where they are kept.

In following in his appreciation, the degree of superiority or of inferiority of the escutcheon, one will judge close upon the daily quantity of milk that all the cows of the same country are apt to give, for one will know then in what proportion all the figures of the classification should be modified. A milk cow ought to be neither too fat nor too lean, to give her maximum of milk. All confinements in a period of thinness is prejudicial to the habitual produce. Even when the animal would have recovered her strength, she will not recuperate so as to restore the quantity of her milk; that can take place only after a year, and by means of a new calf. A great milk cow, whatever may be her aptness for fattening, and her condition of fat at the time of calving, becomes thin about fifteen or twenty days after calving; the time of her rut is therefore less near than that of a poor milk cow, because her vital forces are weaker. Witness the quantity of her yield, which is only that of a cow of medium product.

One can compare a milch cow to a fruit tree, which gives more fruit this year than the next. When the sap of the tree carries vigor to the development of the fruit, the growth of the wood remains nearly stationary. When, on the contrary, the tree gives but little fruit, the sap turns to the profit of the wood, to give, after a repose of several years, a greater quantity of fruit, and to continue thus by alternative successions.

It is the same with the cow, for it is seldom that her produce keeps the same during three consecutive years, for the reason that, when the nourishment absorbed by her turns to the profit of the milk, the milk is more abundant; when, on the contrary, the nourishment goes to fat, the milk diminishes.

The variations in the milk quantity should be justly attributed to the influence of atmospheric circumstances of the seasons, which react on the quality of hay and fodder in augmenting or diminishing the nutritive juices of the food.

Cows which are fed in good pastures surpass the product which I have assigned to their class and their order, while those which are in poor and wet pastures have necessarily inferior produce, unless the latter have in the stable nourishing food, more abundant and more succulent than they are able to get for themselves out of doors.

If, for example, the well-fed cows, or those grazing on rich pasture lands, should give as much as twenty to twenty-five quarts of milk per day; these same cows, taken and fed on poor pasture, will give only about ten or twelve quarts.