Deerpark Leader 16th and D.Seamus 4th

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Cabanha Santa Isabel - BR

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Fellows...as a curiosity...why Deerpark Leader 16th is AR and D. Seamus 4th is also registered as 3/4 blood?
All other Deerparks - brothers, sisters, cousins...are appendix free!
Only for curiosity...why does happens?
Thank you.
 

Doc

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Seamus , I'm not sure about. Leader 16th was also called Stretch and I think the they never paid the money to bring him into the herdbook. JIT will know if that is correct or not.
 

justintime

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Doc..... that is correct. The American Shorthorn Association had fees to register imported Irish bulls and females. If I remember correctly, it was $2500 for a bull and $1500 for a female. I seem to remember sending the ASA a cheque for $7000 to register our first Irish bull and three Irish females. These two animals in this thread were two that their owners never paid the fees to register them. There were some others as well.

IMO, this is just another case that shows the " man made" breed registry we now have. In many cases the so called closed herd book has as many non pure animals  in it as the appendix herd book has. This is why I believe we should accept the good cattle for what they are, rather than just checking to see if they have an asterisk on their paper or not.
 

justintime

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Deerpark Leader 16th was one of the ugliest bulls I have ever seen. A group of 5 other breeders and myself, travelled to Kansas to see the newly imported Irish cattle at Beef Genetics Research, Inc, Mankato, KS. We got to see Dividend, Improver, Leader 16th, Tournant Sir Ivor, and probably 5 or 6 other full Irish bulls as well as a dozen or so Irish imported females. After we left the farm, one of our group said that he thought he had seen the best Shorthorn bull and the worst Shorthorn bull he had ever set eyes on, in the same day. We all agreed with him. We all agreed that Dividend was the best Shorthorn bull and Leader 16th was the worst.  That said, Leader 16th did sire some pretty good cattle. He definitely looked like he had been built by a committee, and when he walked his legs went in every direction possible. He was just plain UGLY! 
Tournant Sir Ivor was also a very good bull. BGR had just sold him to a commercial producer and we saw him on pasture there. This bull could have done the breed a lot of good as well. I had a son, Sandy Creek Ivor and I still am kicking myself for never collecting him, as I would still be using him some today. Sandy Creek Ivor was a white bull and out of a Deerpark Leader 4th  daughter ( Leader 4th was probably the very best Irish bull). We bought Ivor in Denver where he had won his class. In order to get him into Canada we had to find someplace to quarantine him and get him tested so I asked Martin Nold from SD if he would do this for us. He agreed and the next spring, he contacted me and asked me if I would sign some applications for registry as he had bred a few cows to him while he was at Weston. When I received the forms to sign, there was 21 of them so it was pretty obvious that Ivor had been quarantined in a pasture with a set of cows. Some of our best females for many years were daughters and grand daughters of Ivor. We sold Ivor to Dale Wernicke in Illinois and only was there a short time before he cast himself in the pasture and was found dead.
When Ivor was purchased we were a bit overloaded with herd sires so we never bothered collecting semen from him. Highfield Irish Mist, IDS Duke of Dublin, Waukaru Cinnabar, Ready Go, CCS Improver ( full Irish) Ellsway Chieftain 1H ( a very good son of Columbus), Four Point Major and a couple home raised bulls were all walking breeding pastures here along with Ivor.. but at that time we had about 350 cows.
 

justintime

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Duke was almost exactly like his picture. I took the picture you are referring to and it was used by the ASA for many years in breed promotion. I remember I had almost given up trying to get a picture of him as he would not stand still and kept running from one end of the small pasture to the other. I walked a few miles trying to get a picture. I was ready to quit and try again another day and I started to walk back to the yard. I turned and looked at Duke and he was standing near perfect with his head up. I held me breath and snapped a couple pics before he moved.
He was very long bodied, and had excellent muscling. He was very clean in his make-up and his biggest problem was his feet. Between when we purchased him in Ireland and when he came to Canada, he had been foundered. A few years after he arrived here, Kevin Culhane from Ireland, told me that he had foundered him. Despite this, he was able to breed many cows every year, Duke had one of the best dispositions I have ever seen. When I drove my truck into the pasture, Duke would walk towards the truck and I would roll the window down. He would put his big long head through the window and lay it in my lap. After I scratched his head for a few minutes, he would pull his head out of the truck and walk away.
 

GM

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I've never seen a pic of Leader 16 or Tournant Sir Ivor...does anyone have one they can post?  JIT, you mentioned Leader 16 looking like he was built by a committee and it makes me think of some of the Improver 2nd progeny i've seen.
 

justintime

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GM said:
I've never seen a pic of Leader 16 or Tournant Sir Ivor...does anyone have one they can post?  JIT, you mentioned Leader 16 looking like he was built by a committee and it makes me think of some of the Improver 2nd progeny i've seen.


I can't remember ever seeing a picture of Leader 16th ( probably for obvious reasons). He was a horrible looking beast, really!  I wish I could print the picture of him that is etched in my memory. As scary looking as this bull was, I do remember seeing some pretty decent daughters of him.
I think there was a picture of Tournant Sir Ivor, but I would not have any idea of where I would find it. As I mentioned, he was sold to a commercial  herd in Kansas and that is where we saw him. He was an even roan bull with more thickness and capacity than most of the other Irish sires that were imported. When we were at Beef Genetics Research, Dick Judy was pretty upset as to why he had imported all these Irish Shorthorns as the ASA had just rejected letting them in the Shorthorn herd book at any level... for the second time. That was why he had sold Sir Ivor to a commercial herd as he did not think any of these cattle would ever be allowed in the ASA herd book. The Irish Shorthorn cattle actually were accepted into the appendix herdbook in Canada before they were allowed into any herd book in the US. In my opinion, they should have remained in the Appendix herd book as I am pretty certain some of them were not even close to being pure Shorthorn genetics. Probably some were, but I don't know how you would ever figure out which ones were, as some of the pedigrees of these cattle seemed to be designed at a moments notice. As I have mentioned on here before, I remember talking with 3 Irish breeders on individual occasions about the pedigree of a particular animal and getting 3 totally different answers as to the sire and dam of the animal I asked about.
Don't take my opinions the wrong way, as I think these Irish Shorthorns helped the breed turn a very important corner in their history. At the time they were first imported, the breed was spirally downward in popularity, and the Irish influence helped immensely in recapturing breed acceptance.
At the time my partners and I decided to import some Irish Shorthorns to Canada, these cattle had no registration status in any country ( including Ireland). The Irish government was just developing their program to recapture many of cattle in Ireland that had no registration status. I have heard many stories of how political some of this process was, and many cattle were placed into the herd book if a good bottle of Irish whiskey was involved. One American told me about finding a few cattle in Ireland that had not been accepted into the Irish scheme, and he was told that the cattle would get registered. They met the government official at a pub and after a few glasses of whiskey, all the cattle were in the Coates herd book.
One of our group, Don Murphy, had just returned from Ireland and had invited my dad and I as well as Craig Andrew, to come into Regina and see some of his pictures of the Shorthorns he had found in Ireland. He had stumbled onto the Deerpark herd while travelling through Ireland to some of his ancestors farms. We sat in Don's hotel room and viewed slides on the wall for several hours that night and by the time we left, we had decided we would purchase and import some of these cattle regardless of them having no registration status.  We all agreed that from what we could see from the pictures these cattle offered a few things we could not find in our Shorthorns at the time. They had excellent testicles and they hung straight. At that time, most of the popular Shorthorn lines had poor formed testicles and also had an issue with one or both testicles being tipped. The Irish cattle appeared to have excellent udders. Don had pictured dozens of cows and we did not see a bad udder in any of these cows. They also appeared to have excellent thickness from hooks to pins which was also a trait we were having problems finding in many Shorthorns here at that time. We decided that these cattle might be an answer to us being able to design Shorthorn bulls that commercial producers would like so we felt it was a worthwhile venture. Besides this, the prices of these cattle were very minimal and if they didn't work, none of our group was going to be out much money. We purchased Highfield Irish Mist as a weaned bull calf for $300 and we also purchased 3 weaned heifers at $250-$500. The $500 heifer had been named the Champion female at several Shorhorn shows in Ireland and we felt she was worth the extra money. This female was Highfield Kate 3rd ( by Deerpark Leader 18th). After quarantine in Ireland for a month, shipping to Canada by boat, quarantine for 1 month on an island in the St Lawrence River, air travel to Edmonton, followed by another 1 month in quarantine at a government facility near the Edmonton airport, Highfield Irish Mist cost us under $2000. I can't even imagine what this would cost today!  I am in the process of sending a tank of semen and embryos to Ireland and the air freight for the tank ( one way) is $1200. This shipment will be the largest shipment of Shorthorn genetics to Ireland from North America in history and includes over 800 straws of semen and 50 embryos.

I will also say that I don't think the Shorthorn breed is alone in having history such as this. I am pretty certain that all breeds have some questionable history in their genetic make-up. When I was in Scotland, I had a privilege to visit with some older breeders who seems pretty certain that Shorthorn genetics were used in some Angus herds over there, as late as the 50s and 60s. They told some stories of red Shorthorn bulls being used on occasion in some well known herds of the time. There really is not breed that can claim absolute purity, but when one thinks about this, what does it really matter? The quality of the cattle and what they offer the industry should be one of the most important considerations. I think the industry would be in a much healthier position today, if everyone accepted quality when they find it.
 

RyanChandler

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At the same time, you have to think of quality in terms of outcross potential as well.  The more diluted that line is, the less outcross potential they will have. 
 

oakview

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There was a flyer put out in the 70's, I believe by BGR, that had a photo of Deerpark Leader 16th in it.  I think it was sort of reddish in color, about 5 X 7 in size, several pages, and had photos of Deerpark Leader, Deerpark Leader 13th, Deerpark Improver, and Deerpark Leader 16th.  It might have been included in one of the Herd Bull issues.  I'll try to dig through my old files for it.  Was there another Deerpark Leader bull imported, Deerpark Leader 20th maybe?

Ralph Hodson of Ackworth, Iowa, owned Deerpark Leader 16th at one time.  He said he was told "Stretch" had gotten hardware and that was why he looked poorly all the time.  Aldens showed a pretty good calf out of him years ago, maybe AF Triple Play?  We bought a daughter of Leader 16th from Ralph at the Iowa Beef Expo many years ago.  She was 3/4 Irish.  We bred her to Lazy D Ultimate Type, a full Irish son of Deerpark Leader X Highfield Una 3rd I had purchased from Lazy D Farms in Missouri.  Her first calf was the top selling female at the Iowa Beef Expo two years later.  Another heifer calf was sold to a breeder in Northeast Iowa.

The only photo of Deerpark Leader 18th I've ever seen isn't so impressive, either, but I don't know of a better female producer, at least among the Irish bulls, as him.  I was at Cagwin's sale the day they sold Highfield Rathcannon, "Mick", and was told that Highfield Leader was the best bull in ireland.  I was shown a picture of him and it was indeed impressive.  Maybe JIT or someone else saw him?  Intersting history.
 

justintime

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Lonny... I am glad you have such a great memory!  As soon as you mentioned the flyer, I do remember that there definitely was a picture of Leader 16th in it. I am going to look through some old magazines as well and see if I can locate it. You are also correct in that AF Triple Play was sired by Leader 16th.  I found it almost amazing how some of the Irish bulls were not very impressive to look at, yet sired some pretty impressive offspring. We bought another full Irish bull in that same sale you mentioned that was held at Cagwins, and while he looked good as a calf on his mother, he looked poorer every day we owned him. I was almost embarrassed to turn him out with a set of commercial Shorthorn cows we had at that time, but fortunately I did and he sired one of the best sets of calves we had in that era. I kept all the steers and finished them and picked out a carload of steers for the Toronto Royal show. These 20 steers were like peas in a pod, and came close to winning the Toronto show. They stood second to a set of black steers but many ( including me) felt that they should have won.
You also mentioned Highfield Una 3rd. There were actually two Highfield Una 3rd cows, and they were both maternal sisters to Irish Mist. The dam of Irish Mist and both Una 3rd cows was Highfield Una. There were actually 3 cows named Highfield Kate 3rd. We imported one, one was imported by Lazy D and another stayed in the Highfield herd in Ireland. It seems even the Irish breeders got confused about their breeding as they oftentimes named cattle by the same name.

I believe Highfield Leader was a yearling bull when we purchased Irish Mist, and he was being used in the Highfield herd at that time. We could have purchased Highfield Leader, as John Maloney offered him to us but we decided to buy Irish Mist because we were so impressed with his dam ( Highfield Una) and the Leader 18th females.  If my memory serves me right, Highfield Leader was only used for 1 or 2 years as he died at a young age, but his progeny sure did suggest he was one of the better bulls over there. I never saw him, but Don Murphy said he was a very good bull.
 

Doc

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Lonny , this is the flyer I think you were talking about.
 

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GM

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Thanks for posting those pics Doc.  JIT was right, Stretch looks bad even as a calf.  The scale and the measuring stick must have been the only reason he stuck around.  I thought Dividend would have been larger than 52 inches at a year.  The grass in ireland must be very lush because these bulls don't look like the kind that would wean at 800+ lbs in the plains or midwest states without a lot of grain.  I hadn't seen that pic of Improver w/ his head down...he's definitely different than the Leader bulls and he looks thick!  Who knew he'd be hiding so many secrets?!?!  It's kinda cool looking at these old pictures and hearing everyone's stories.  Thanks!
 

justintime

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That is a very poor picture of Dividend and a very good picture of Leader 16th ... haha!
  Dividend was super impressive when we saw him. He was at KABSU being collected when we saw him and he was massive. Tremendous thickness, extreme length and excellent muscling.  Leader 16th was about the opposite, as I expect he could split a raindrop behind his shoulders and I have seen humming birds with more butt. And as I mentioned earlier, his legs were something else. We really never did decide what was wrong with him as his back legs would cross when he walked and sometimes he would almost trip over his own legs. I doubt if his mother could even like his face!
 
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