Beef cattle selection and evolution

Abstract

There is an area of cow-calf production that is very important to the economic health of this industry, and also difficult to measure and document. The area I am referring to is the phenotypic expression of characteristics that affect production efficiency, the evolutionary forces that act on these phenotypes, and the significance of selection of genetic material.

We have many people in cow-calf production today who are advocating the selection of a few characteristics which they feel are highly heritable. They believe that to select for many things at once will slow down the improvement of the characteristics desired, as well as being of no real enonomic benefit. (1) The most economically important characteristic in a beef cow is her ability to breed and wean a relatively large amount of pounds consistently and with low imputs of energy from the herdsman. This is a problem of the animal’s fitness to its environment in all areas that affect its productive level and cost of production. The evolutionary process that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years is now being affected and directed by herdsmen’s ideas of their ideal.