FAT-STOCK SHOWS

Pahiatua Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12315, 7 April 1933, Page 2

FAT-STOCK SHOWS

Those who maintain that great fat stock shows should be run on such lines as to ignore the interests of the breeder cannot realise that breeding and management are solely responsible for providing butchers with the article they and their customers require, and, whatever the public taste has been, breeders have always been able to cater for it (states the London Live Stock Journal). There was a time when the public taste was all for well-matured beef, with a great proportion of fat, and the public got what they wanted, and then it turned to lean flesh and early maturity, and they obtained that, too Every observant farmer can be taugh#much at a fat stock show, for he sees animals there that at no period of their lives have ever known what it is to be short of food, and which have never been allowed to lose their calf flesh, and he can see what careful breeding and good management will do. The modern show will prove to him that a beast well bred and well fed can attain a greater weight at two years old than a beast badly bred and reared can at three years. At the first London Smithfield Show in 1799 a Hereford bullock, fed by Mr Grace, of Buckinghamshire, weighed upward of 260 st., and girth 12ft. 4in. Mr Wescars bullock (the Tully Ox) weighed nearly 300st. In 1880 the cattle were classed as vegetable fed and cake and corn fed, and the judges had power to inspect the killing so as to ascertain the weight of each animal. The winning animals in those days must assuredly have been the best butchers’ beasts, and not merely those which caught the judge’s eye by reason of their beautiful outline.