Getting started in Highlands again – why pedigree and papers matter.

Can you believe I sold her mother to Flathead Farms for my college fund?  Well, sometimes kids make poor choices, I guess. 

I was lucky to visit Flatheads Ostag yesterday at Mike Mower’s ranch in Montana on my way home from an epic Canadian Highland look-about.  Maybe all those miles and days of driving and talking Pedigreed Highlands with brilliant people have made me a little crazier than usual, but I’m back home now, and I can’t stop thinking about our cows.  They are so AWESOME. 

With HHCA’s development of their new “registry” for unpedigreed Highland-type cattle (“Faux Highlands”) there have been some folksy quips being tossed around, like “you can’t eat the papers.”  Well, I’ve been chewing on this:

Almost 20 years ago I sold my original Highland Spice herd and left Wyoming for college.  About 15 years later, having returned home to cattle country, I wanted to start a new herd of the very best Highland Cattle I could breed.  Lucky for me, with a simple search in the AHCA Herdbook, I found two cows to start the new herd:  Trafalgar Diana and Flathead’s Bodach.  Both cows offered lines I knew (from my old herd) and the reliability of responsible breeding to improve those animals.

Having been away for so long, it is pretty awesome that I could come back and purchase cattle with the assurance that they only exist because of strategic breeding decisions made by some of the most reputable Highland breeders in the USA.  Really, how incredible is that? 

So is the value in a piece of paper?  Please, let’s be smarter than that.  The value is in knowing what’s on the paper – knowing the HISTORY of the animal you’re buying.  The value is in having the information (at your fingertips!) to become educated about “cow families” and trace the kinds of cattle produced from a line.  To be able to breed intentionally, build upon history, record history, and write “cow stories” for the next breeder — so they’re not making purchases based on just FLUFF. 

While papers aren’t enough to make a cow (or a bull!), this seems to me to be one of those “necessary v. sufficient” things.  Logic gets tricky for some of y’all.  And it’s not personal, but it is a matter of personal responsibility.  The buck stops with us.  Our predecessor breeders didn’t literally swim or row their cattle in boats between Scottish islands for breeding or bring Highland cattle across oceans and mountains and plains for us to disregard their work – the written history of their work – as “just a piece of paper.”  Our Highland cattle (our real Highland cattle) are different from Faux Highlands.  It’s not personal; that is a fact.  WE, the breeders of Highlands, get to celebrate our Highlands’ history, educate ourselves, and write a better history for the future of the breed.

So please, let’s not let them confuse our product with Faux Highlands.  They may be able to say, “Hey, lookee here, this one’s fluffy, Folks!”  But at the end of the day, who wants a knock-off Highland when you can have the real thing?  We need to do a better job of sharing just how awesome our cattle are.  They are royal, they are Scottish, they are the best. 

Let’s share the stories of our “cow families.”  Let’s celebrate Highlands.  Because Highlands have history.