Wolf Willow Major Leroy 1M calves

Medium Rare said:

The hand on hip image has really helped me "picture" Leroy in my mind. I assumed he was larger framed than he appears to be.

I see he is carrying some fairly high accuracies in the database. How do you feel the current epd system's figures compare to his real world performance?

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I am far from being an expert on the current EPD figures as I usually struggle with some of the numbers especially with Canadian cattle in the system. With that said, I do think his current EPD numbers are probably close to representing his real world performance. As I said in a previous post, his calves were not small at birth but we had few problems with them at calving time. They grew very well and their performance after weaning was always the best we had.
When I look at this picture I do not see a 2700 lb bull but all I know is that he did weigh over 2700 on two occasions. The first time we weighed him, we let him off the scale and rebalanced it as we thought something was wrong with the scale. He weighed the same on the second weighing.
When he was 10 years old Leroy developed a very bad abscess in a front hoof after a very wet summer here. After several weeks of treatment, we finally got the abscess cured however he started to lose the entire shell of his hoof from both claws on the infected hoof. Loading him to take him to town was one of the hardest things I have done in a lifetime in this business, as he was almost part of the family. Even after weeks of pain and hardly being able to get around, he still weighed 2540 lbs as a 10 year old bull. He wasn't very tall however he was long bodied, thick and had lots of muscle and that made up his weight. His mother, our original Sparkle cow, was here until she was 18 years old and she was still so fat she could hardly walk down the chute. She stayed in this condition year round and only had hay for a feed source. She is gone now but her daughters and grand daughters in the herd have all processed the same easy fleshing trait. I have posted another picture of Leroy taken as a 7 year old at the end of the breeding season. It shows the added length he had.

GM said:

JIT, He doesn't look very tall.  Can you attach a pic of you standing next to Glenford Curt or one of the other Ayatollah sons for some frame score perspective?  Lol!

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haha!  I am trying to forget about those bulls. I purchased Curt for the simple reason, that I thought he would be the US National Champion bull as he was 1.5 inches taller than any bull being shown in the US at the time. That happened the next year in Fort Worth but I was able to triple my investment and only owned him a few months. ( I bought him for $15,500 and sold him for $45,000 and kept the Canadian semen rights and 700 straws of semen ( for some reason that I am not sure of). I never used a single dose of this semen and it was all dumped a few years later. ( oh! the good old days when you could still make some quick money in this business!)

The only other Ayatollah that was ever on our farm was a bull named Prairie Lane Expert. He was a full brother to Prairie Lane Metric Marvel, that sold to Krebs at a then record price of $18750 at Agribition. Expert was the fastest growing bull I ever owned and his actual weight on his second birthday was 2620 lbs and he was still gaining 5 lbs/ day at that time. My plan was to show the heaviest two year old bull ever shown at Agribition and I was pretty sure he would have weighed over 3000 by that fall. He was a very quiet bull ( I thought) and we had several breeders from the US wanting semen from him. We were unable to get freezable semen from him. One morning, he snapped and he turned on me and put me through the wall of a shed. He then got on me and I was finally able to get two fingers in his nose ring. I have often thought that he would have killed me if he had not had a ring. I still have lots of aches and pains that started with this happening to me, and that was almost 30 years ago now.
We showed Expert all over Canada and the US. He won his class in Louisville and Denver, and won several Championships in Canada. I never bred a single female to him. He was so quiet that you could halter him out in a pen or pasture and he never moved. Once he snapped he was one of the most dangerous bulls I ever saw. He went to the sale barn the same morning he attacked me, as I knew I would never be able to trust him again. The auction mart owner still says he was probably the worst bull he ever had go through the sale barn as he tried to get everyone who went near his pen and they were never able to get him through the sale ring. A kill buyer bought him out of the pen he was in, and I think he regretted doing this as he was very hard to load onto the pot. Sorry, I probably have a picture somewhere of both these bulls but they are not hanging on my walls and I am not going to go searching for them!  It is better for us all to forget they ever existed!
I have had a much improved respect for all bulls no matter how quiet they are.

Now you did it!  Somebody just had to bring up Ayatollah.  I saw him when he was on display in Denver, I think as a long yearling.  Probably the ugliest bull I've ever seen.  Rich Studer later told me the best thing about him was there was absolutely not one ounce of muscle on him.  Of course, "best" was used in jest.  I got some Ayatollah semen from Grahams when I purchased a Columbus son later on, but fortunately never used it.  I did have a few calves sired by Glenford Ayatollah 2nd that were very good, though.  We sold one of the heifers to the Traynhams in California and she did very well for them.  I'm not sure which was worse.  The belt buckle bulls of the 50's and 60's or the meatless, tube shaped bulls of the 80's.  Evidently the belt buckle bulls are still held in high esteem by some.  I read that Prince Eric of Sunbeam is buried at the Angus Association's headquarters.  He must have been close to 48 inches tall.