Balance of the Sexes

How many baby boys have been born in your family? More than girls? Do you think that some families are more prone to having boys rather than girls?

It may or may mot happen like that in human families, but it certainly seems to with cows. As you know Cows have family trees just like us. Pedigree cows take their name from their dam (mother) - ie if a cow called (for instance) Buttercup had a heifer calf it would be called Buttercup 2. And if Buttercup had another heifer calf it would be called Buttercup 3 - unless Buttercup 2 had already calved a heifer, in which case it would be the next number up. Quite simple really. The more heifers there are in a particular family, the quicker the numbers after the names increase. As only the heifer calves are registered in this way it's quite obvious that some families have more bulls than heifers.

This weekend demonstrated this. Two Starlet cows calved heifers - and these will be registered as Strickley Starlet 98 and Strickley Starlet 99. The first Starlet was only registered in the 1970's and the numbers are rising fast. On the other hand the first Strickley Janet was registered in the 1920's and we've just registered Janet 50.

So Janet's are more prone to having bulls, but Starlets have lots of heifers.

Now we have two sons and one daughter; four grandsons and one granddaughter - so I suppose I'm more of a Janet than a Starlet.