by Mark Bowden
NEW TECHNIQUE
Artificial insemination has drastically inflated the value of popular bull sires, but a newer breeding technique—superovulation and embryo transfer—has injected a strain of female equality into today’s barnyard breeding labs.
In the past, cows were limited for breeding purposes by the pace of their reproductive cycle. Gestation takes an unalterable nine months. So a cow, no matter how superb, could only produce one calf a year (twins if the farmer was unusually lucky) for the six or seven years it was reproductively mature.
Superovulation and embryo transfer have changed that, like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Hormone injections produce dozens of eggs at one time. Once artificially inseminated, the tiny embryos are flushed out and surgically inserted in the wombs of separate recipient cows. Each operation takes about fifteen minutes.
Using this technique, a clever farmer can get twelve calves from his prize milker each year instead of only one. The New Bolton Center last year produced twenty-eight healthy calves in nine months from a cow named Miss Catalyst. The world record belongs to a seven-year-old Pierouge Simmental cow named Castile-156, which engendered eighty-five heifers in eleven months.
MAGIC COW
Wilmer Hostetter, Dale’s uncle, is a prosperous Oxford farmer who owes his success in large part to this technique. Fifteen years ago, he bought a magic cow. He paid $1,250 for the animal, a doleful Holstein named Millie, and drove her home in the back of his covered pickup.
These days, Hostetter drives a Cadillac. He had a hunch about Millie that paid off. She was a one-in-ten-million cow, a daughter, incidentally, of Osborndale Ivanhoe. When Hostetter bought Millie, he owned thirty-five head of cattle and was looking to expand.
“Millie had what you’d call good dairy character,” Hostetter recalls, “a well-formed and attached udder, good legs, and a nice general shape. I thought she might improve the quality of my herd.”
Millie proved to be the nucleus of a top-grade Holstein herd so valuable that it may end up supporting several generations of Hostetters. Her milk production put her in the top 0.1 percent of the country’s dairy cows. But, more important, she produced four daughters in the same category. Superovulation and embryo transfer did the rest.
Working with semen from top bulls, Hostetter has built a herd of more than thirty cattle directly related to Millie, carrying her valuable genetic traits. In her stall, Millie is surrounded by daughters who closely resemble her in size and coloration. Working with Millie and these daughters, Hostetter hopes to double the size of her immediate family in the next two years.
“We sold one of her bull calves for twenty thousand dollars,” Hostetter said.
$4 MILLION BUSINESS
Today his herd numbers two hundred and seventy, and he runs a $4 million grain and dairy business.
“I never planned on getting into the breeding business, but Millie just sort of led me there. If our plans for her work out in the next two years, we’ll sell most of her immediate family and just keep the offspring. I figure about three hundred thousand would be a good price.
“We’d keep the newer offspring and start over again from there, after taking a good long vacation and enjoying a nice slow year.”
Stories like that of Wilmer and his magic cow have dramatically increased the value of individual cows. At a recent auction in Kennett Square, a local breeding syndicate paid $71,000 for a cow, an amount that still baffles older dairy farmers, who are not attuned to the newest developments. But cows have a long way to go before they are worth what breeders will pay for a proven bull stud like Osborndale Ivanhoe. A bull like that is worth millions.
A DRAWBACK
All of which explains the sad story of Wayne Spring Fond Apollo, a prize Holstein stud whose semen was, two years ago, among the most sought after in the industry. His career collided with a simple genetic principle: the same breeding methods that have so improved milk production can also play havoc with the breed.
A normal, happy herd of Holsteins reproduces itself with an almost infinite variety of chromosome match-ups. But when all the cows in the same herd are bred with the same bull, and when many of the offspring issue from the same cow, there are fewer genetic combinations possible.
Although farmers select desirable traits to be multiplied by selective breeding, undesirable ones are sometimes magnified in the bargain. Several years ago breeders began noting significant increases in the rate of bovine birth defects.
“The numbers are by no means alarming, but the rates have gone up enough for the industry to begin watching it carefully,” said Roth of ABC, who sits on the executive board of the National Animal Breeders Association.
Roth chaired an association committee last year that studied a number of common Holstein birth defects. The study concluded with a recommendation that all defects be recorded, along with the pedigree that produced them.
Two years ago it was discovered that Wayne-Apollo, owned by Select Sires, a major bull semen–distributing cooperative based in Ohio, had sired calves with birth defects. Somehow the prize stud had made it through Select Sire’s elaborate screenings without displaying his birth defect potential.
“MULE-FOOT” ARISES
Wayne-Apollo’s unexpected gene produced calves with “mule-foot,” by far the most prevalent Holstein anomaly in recent years. Calves are born with a misshapen hoof, one that is more like a solid mule’s hoof than the normal bovine cloven foot. Mule-footed calves rarely live out their first year, and those that do are so hobbled that they are worthless to cattlemen.
The likelihood of any one farmer experiencing the problem in Wayne-Apollo offspring was very small, and the immediate advantages afforded by the bull’s superior traits were obvious. But the mule-foot trait could have been disastrous for the breed.
“Somewhere down the line, if a bull like that stays in service, you are going to have a serious and damaging rise in the number of mule-footed calves,” said Evans of the New Bolton Center. “His chances of siring a mule-foot calf are small, but if he has ten or twenty thousand daughters, you can see how fast the potential grows.
“But, as with most things, the almighty dollar has its own priorities. Scrapping a bull with the potential of Wayne-Apollo would be a serious financial blow.”
Select Sires opted to leave the bull in service. Wayne-Apollo is alive and well. Bernie Heisner, director of information for the co-op, estimates that Wayne-Apollo has so far produced enough semen to impregnate 140,000 cows artificially.
“There are two schools of thought among geneticists about that bull,” Heisner said. “One would scrap him right away. The other would leave him in service, because of his other exceptional traits. Select Sires thinks so highly of Wayne Spring Fond Apollo’s proven genetics that they have authorized bringing his sons into its program.
“We have a group of mule-foot-carrying females to test the sons on. Statistically, about half of them will be clean. He may go down as one of the great sires of the breed.”
Heisner insists that the mule-foot danger Wayne-Apollo poses is relatively minor. Fortunately, Roth says, knowledge of Wayne-Apollo’s mule-foot trait has kept “responsible breeders” from using the bull’s semen. A dose of Wayne-Apollo’s seed today sells for only $15 to $24.
LIMITS ON HORSES
Birth defects are only one of the less desirable consequences that could result from narrowing the genetic pool of a breed. Another is a phenomenon best illustrated by horses.
Ten years ago, standardbred horse associations permitted their animals to be artificially inseminated for the first time.
Before 1974, only 4,862 trotters and pacers had ever run a mile in less than two minutes, according to figures kept by the U.S. Trotting Association. In the first half of the ’70s, the total increased by almost half again—2,298 horses broke two minutes. In the last half of the ’70s, when the impact of artificial insemination would have been most fully evident, 10,572 horses broke two minutes.
Tho
se numbers are impressive, but despite the multiplication of speedy standardbred horses, breeders did not produce a trotter or pacer that could improve records set in 1969 by Study Star (1:52:00) for pacers and in 1971 by Nevelle Pride (1:54:04) for trotters.
By selecting only top animals for breeding, the industry got offspring equal to the best of the previous generation. But what breeders could not get from those select parents was a horse significantly better. A horse that shatters world records is, in a genetic sense, a mutant horse. It is, by some surprise combination of chromosomes, a strikingly better animal than those from which it issued.
This is the theoretical dead end for selective breeding. As the genetic pool narrows, the possible combinations of chromosomes decrease, and the animals are more and more alike. It is partly for this reason that thoroughbred horsemen have refused to permit artificial insemination of their animals.
“It would wreak havoc on the economics of our industry, for one thing,” explains a top official in the Jockey Club, the central governing power in thoroughbred horse racing.
“An example is Bold Forbes, a horse that won the Kentucky Derby and Belmont in 1975. Bold Forbes was sired by a horse named Irish Castle, a horse that was never outstanding in any way. If the standards of artificial breeding were applied to our industry, Irish Castle would never have had the chance to stud.
“What happens is that you reduce the possibility for surprises like Bold Forbes. Thoroughbreds are already pretty well inbred; most knowledgeable breeders shudder to think what would happen to the breed if artificial insemination was allowed.”
In the dairy industry, this genetic dead end means that there is only so much drastic improvement to be expected from artificial breeding methods. By selecting top bulls and top milk-producing cows, the industry should end up with a multitude of closely related, similar animals. All will produce miraculous quantities of milk, but the chances of any one coming along that significantly improves upon the standard will grow smaller and smaller.
“That is quite a long way off though,” Dr. Evans said. “Theoretically, it is possible that will happen. I’d say that the number of farmers like Wilmer Hostetter, farmers who selectively breed their animals intelligently, scientifically, are still comparatively small.
“Many farmers are still looking at the shape of the cow’s head for a clue to its productivity, instead of looking at its rear end. So the improvements we’ve seen are really just a beginning.”
LIMITED POTENTIAL
And the theory of the dead end discounts the potential for further advances in breeding techniques.
The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the use of a drug called Prostaglandin, which, when injected into a cow, brings her into heat. This capacity could enormously benefit beef cattlemen, who have so far only been able to use artificial insemination on a small scale because of the size of their herds.
“By using Prostaglandin, a rancher could put all the cows in his herd on the same schedule,” Evans said. “He could inject them, and they would all come into heat at the same time. He could then inseminate them, and all of them would calve at roughly the same time.”
Cloning and developing embryos in test tubes offer other bizarre possibilities for the future. Cloned embryos could duplicate prize cow after prize cow. Artificial wombs would conceivably enable scientist-farmers to grow herds of animals like tomatoes, reaping crops of newborn test-tube animals on a rigid laboratory schedule. Scientists such as Evans believe that such advances may be necessary to feed the world’s mushrooming population.
But for the cattle and chickens and pigs and horses of the future, life looks grim indeed. They have become cows like Dale Hostetter’s Alice, with udders so large that they need bras; they are little factories, four-legged crops. There is little room left in the barnyard for the kind of sentimentality that Atlantic Breeders showed when it buried Osborndale Ivanhoe.
When Wilmer Hostetter’s Millie reaches the end of her line any day now, when she stops producing fertile eggs and can no longer get pregnant, can no longer be milked, what will Hostetter do? How will he treat the magic cow, the cow he has parlayed into a small fortune?
“I’ve given that some thought, you know,” Hostetter said. “And I’ve decided to pack her off to the slaughterhouse for meat when she’s through. Yep, that’s what I’m going to do.”
BATTLING “THE BADDIES” IN FANTASYLAND
JULY 1982
This story still haunts me. It is one of the only ones I have ever written where I appear as a character, and the only one that featured any of my children. I was, at the time, a single father, and the ordeal Donna was going through with her little boy just broke my heart. Billy died some months after this story ran, and to this day I think about him whenever I see my strapping, grown son.
It was my son’s fifth birthday. Five. Five years since a nurse handed me a crying infant slick with afterbirth in a soiled white sheet and said, “Here is your son.”
We were in Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I had come to write a story about fourteen kids from St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children who were on a short holiday in this kiddie heaven. All fourteen had cancer. My son, Aaron, was along because the trip fell on his birthday and I didn’t have the heart not to take him.
I was eating a late dinner on the balcony of my hotel room with Donna Schanel, whose son, Billy, was asleep inside on a bed with Aaron. The two boys had become fast friends. Billy, a precocious child just a few months younger than Aaron, has leukemia. Donna was explaining how the desperate battle for Billy’s life demanded not only the latest drugs and medical procedures, but all of her hope and will and all of Billy’s strength. Left unsaid was that even all this might not be enough.
The conversation helped shake my paternal contentment as I stepped inside the room to check on the boys. They were asleep back-to-back, my blond son turned to the right and Donna’s brown-haired son to the left. There was only the sound of their breathing. Whatever pride I had taken in my own boy’s passage from infancy to boyhood seemed suddenly fatuous and vain. Here was one child with every prospect of a long life before him, and another, a boy just as bright and lovely, just as sweetly nurtured, just as open and simple and yet already so full of that mystery self, whose very childhood was being strangled from within. And here was this mother whose loving expectations for her son had turned so cruelly to grim statistical odds on survival. I felt frightened. I wanted to scoop Aaron up, remove him from the threat I could feel cold in the room. And though I knew that the causes of Billy’s disease were not contagious, I questioned in that moment my judgment as a parent, to have brought my boy so close to this.
This was no place for a child, I thought, but then watching Billy sleep, breathe, I shuddered at the absurdity of the thought and felt as powerless as a parent like Donna who must stand over her sleeping child at night and wonder if death would dare rob so much life.
The children from St. Christopher’s were off to Disney World because a wealthy young woman had decided to liquidate her family’s forty-year-old charitable foundation and set aside $10,000 to send them on a three-day wish trip. I went along to see how parents and children coped with it all: the grim battle with medical odds; the terrors of uncertainty, of having to rely on doctors who aren’t sure how to proceed; the dreary regimen of hospital and home, hospital and home.
But these were not families burdened with grief; these were people living intensely, each day, every hour. Facing a nightmare of protracted illness and painful treatments, these children and their parents were dealing with life, life at a high-voltage level—not death, though death was certainly waiting nearby. I learned soon that their daily struggle demanded bonds between parent and child that would put to shame the relationship between a father and his healthy son.
They had found, in the shadow of ultimate loss, ultimate gain.
A week before the trip, I visited the hematology clinic at St. Christopher’s. The clinic is on the second floor of
this small hospital complex, in a Hispanic neighborhood in North Philadelphia amid blocks and blocks of dilapidated and abandoned rowhouses. Glass and garbage litter the sidewalks, and the street life lasts all day and night.
Inside, the clinic is crowded with toys, children playing, and parents waiting. The mood is busy but somber, and while there is laughter and conversation in the waiting area, there are occasional cries and screams from the treatment rooms. Pain—children rarely take it in silence—is part of the furniture here.
On the morning I visited, Anthony Mancini was in pain. He is a robust, tawny boy of eleven whose natural garrulity has taken on sharpness during his two-year bout with leukemia. Anthony is old enough to know what’s going on in his body, even if he can’t understand why. He isn’t happy about it and he doesn’t pretend to be. After nearly a year in remission, the disease has returned, and so have Anthony’s treatments, brutal doses of cell-killing drugs. He had received his first injections just over a week ago, and already his thick brown hair was falling out in patches. But the pain resulted from a more insidious side effect: Anthony had been unable to move his bowels for six days. The pain had started Saturday and now it was Wednesday. The doctor asked Anthony if the pain was like a knife or more like somebody punching him in the stomach.
The boy groaned. “Like a punch,” he said.
It pressed especially hard every few minutes. Prone on an examining table, Anthony would rock to his right side when it happened, rest his fingers lightly over the pain, roll his eyes back, and loudly moan.
“Oooooh, Mommy, Mommy, make it stop, make it stop,” he pleaded, but whenever Mary Mancini moved to stroke his belly or back, the boy would complain harshly. “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it! It hurts, Mommy, it hurts.” His mother could do little but hover over the boy with futile concern.
