A storey is that HOPs with dark coat round their eyes are less prone to eye cancer. Makes sense to me, since cattle with white round their eyes are generally more prone to eye cancer. I favour that trait, as do some other HOP owners.

An interesting lecture by Dr. William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton University, summarizes his arguments about the myth of carbon pollution. It's that myth that underlies global warming alarmists' key arguments. Also touches on methane emissions from cattle, a subect being used to shut down cattle farming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8iEEO2UIbA

Lower Eaton Eclipse is in an otherwise non asterisked horned herd. Good for them. Not many doing this though, as you say.

The social overhead of making regulation, monitoring compliance, is collosal and inflexible to the needs of the farmer and his stock; e.g. Won't adjust contiguous TB test to avoid calving.

Such a penetrating observation. One wonders how cattle managed to survive until the mid 20th century without a massive programme of bTB testing, culling and movement restrictions. Farmers bearing the brunt, but a positive consequence is the employment of large numbers of bureaucrats to manage these policies.

Traditional herefords are a small breed, but not yet as small as the Suffolk horse; breeders are pushed very hard to find diversly related sires, and not to overuse the best stallions. They use a system called SPARKS (https://www.rbst.org.uk/blog/sparks-a-toolbox-for-breeding) to encourage more diverse selection. One hears of small wolf populations becomming infertile, and being revived by less related introductions. I am wary because of my experience with Whitebred Shorthorn cattle, a very small breed suffering from so called White Heifer syndrome. I was struggling to breed fertile females.

Thanks, I must get a copy

I suppose if your stock has no recessive defects, that works, stamping your perceived effective type. However, surely you won't be getting the hybrid vigour?

I have not kept the breed very long, about 4/5 years, and have not seen cancer eye amongst them, although I have seen that in my Whitebred Shorthorns (more typical in white cattle I believe). Do you know if it is prevalent amongst OP Herefords in the UK?

I'm posting here response from Dr. Matt Hegarty of IBERS, University of Aberystwyth, to the above post of 4th Dec.2021on dam of lines:- "I've attached a couple of PowerPoint figures showing how matrilines could be disproportionately represented over time within populations - especially with the heavy use of bull lines and line breeding: - "Dam lines are of importance in animal breeding as much of the selection is performed on the sires, which only carry a single copy of the X chromosome inherited from their mother. A bull's sons will not inherit his X chromosome, so any contribution it makes to the bull's EBV will not be passed to his male offspring (whereas his daughters will have 50% of his EBV and 50% of the dam's, as for all the other chromosomes). Over time, this can lead to predominance of certain matrilines if a limited number of sires is used within a population (or line breeding occurs). "Many important traits to do with sexual development are carried by genes present on the X chromosome, particularly to do with fertility in both males (sperm motility and scrotal circumference, for example) and females (eg: age at first calving, ovulation rate, incidence of endometriosis). "These factors also apply to the mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited solely from the dam in both male and female offspring (whereas daughters will inherit their sire's X-chromosome). There is evidence that production traits (i.e. weight, marbling) in cattle are affected by variation in mtDNA sequence, which is expected given the role of the mitochondria in energy metabolism. "Monitoring of dam lines via pedigree evaluation and genetic testing is valuable to breeders, therefore. SNP chip testing incorporates both X-chromosome and mtDNA markers which can be employed for this purpose."