A Christmas Conversation about Dexter History

On Christmas Day, 2005, my wife and I travelled by car for about 40 minutes to share Christmas breakfast with friends who lived in the town of Cambridge (New Zealand). Also invited were three other couples from Cambridge. After introductory drinks, Santa Claus made an appearance and presented all there with predictions that the New Year would bring them the fulfillment of their wildest dreams (all involving very large sums of money and positions of influence and power!). We then took a plate and selected from the abundance of great food on offer, and settled down at the table on the outside deck. Opposite me sat a gentleman who, like me, was called John. At some stage in the early rounds of conversation, I mentioned that I bred Dexter cattle. He said, "Aren't they related to the Kerry?" I was surprised that he knew this, and we talked a little about the the two breeds and other rare breeds of cattle.

John then mentioned that in the early 1950s he worked for a Cambridge artificial insemination service in England, and in 1954 had inseminated Dexters with Aberdeen Angus semen. He said that some UK Dexter breeders at the time experienced up to 20% of births in a herd in a year being bulldog calves. This had led them to consider outcrossing to try to get rid of the problem. A woman breeder from near Cambridge (in the UK) was involved in having Aberdeen Angus semen put into her Dexter cows. The semen was from an Angus bull called Black Joker of Tepworth (or something similar). John also mentioned that these Dexters were not as docile as the cattle from dairy herds he was more used to, although he was very impressed with the amount of milk they produced.    

I brought John up to date on what had happened to Dexters since then, including the recent development of a DNA test to identify the carriers of the bulldog calf gene. I speculated on whether it had been Mrs Tanner of the Atlantic herd who had been the Dexter breeder, but John was unable to recall enough to confirm this. I was aware that an Experimental Appendix had been added to the UK Herd Book in the 1950s to record the animals involved in these outcrossing experiments, but it was both fascinating and remarkable to have someone who had been involved directly in the process in this way, sitting opposite me so many years later, in New Zealand.

John had left England in 1955 to go to Africa where he worked as a vet in the Colonial Service until, upon independence, he moved to Australia and then, later, New Zealand. His stories of his life experiences were a pleasure to hear as our Christmas breakfast continued.

You never know what Christmas will bring you. 

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