E.B. Writers of Dallas

Texas ranchers pay to reproduce winners.

Wayne Epperson, correspondent | Boston Globe 7/14/2003

FORESTBURG, Texas -- The longhorn is an icon of all things Texas, bred more for show than for beef nowadays. In elite ranching circles, where bragging rights go to the rancher who raises the cattle with the longest horns, science is upping the stakes.
Dr. Zech Dameron III, who raises longhorns on a 700-acre ranch 65 miles north of Fort Worth, has the world's first cloned longhorns in his herd of 100.
Dameron's pride is Starlight, who for five consecutive years has been judged the world's longest-horned cow. Her tip-to-tip horn span measures 77 3/8 inches, and in the cattle circles that Dameron travels, it's all about horn.
When Dameron learned of a new cloning process three years ago, his vision was clear: ''To reproduce Starlight and mix it with other genes to produce an even better cow, a bigger horned cow, with color, size, and confirmation -- just to try to breed a better animal.''
Dameron turned to Cyagra, a Worcester, Mass.-based company that had successfully cloned dairy cattle. It required two biopsies the size of a pencil eraser from Starlight's ear to establish a cell line of Starlight that worked, Dameron said.
Steve Mower, director of marketing at Cyagra, said the cloning process develops a cell line containing the complete DNA of the original animal. The embryos are kept in incubators for six days before being shipped to Cyagra's facility in Elizabethtown, Pa., to be transplanted into recipient cows. Nine months later, a calf is born.
''To do the whole process, start to finish, you should have a calf on the ground in 10 to 10 1/2 months,'' Mower said.
Raising longhorns is a costly business, and so is cloning them. It cost Dameron $31,000 to get five clones of Starlight. She cost $24,000. One of the clones didn't survive.
Cloning might be controversial, but ''I just look at it as an advance in science,'' said Dameron, who trained at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. ''Knowledge is a continuum, and what we know now will pale in comparison to what we will know in 50 years. You are just trying to breed the best that you can. . . . Longhorn clones are just an additional breeding tool.'' Rex Mosser of Midway, Texas, apparently feels the same way. He bought one of Dameron's clones for $19,500 at an auction last November. Mosser also bought the cow with the second-longest horns, Feisty Fannie (77 inches tip to tip), at a Johnson City, Texas, sale hosted by longhorn rancher Red McCombs, owner of the Minnesota Vikings pro football team.
Mosser paid $59,000 for Feisty Fannie and a male calf. Mosser contacted Cyagra to have Feisty Fannie cloned. ''If things go right, I'll soon have 11 small Feisty Fannie cows, all with the same DNA, all looking exactly alike, everything,'' Mosser said.
Longhorn herds might some day comprise choice clones because of the economics, Mosser predicted. ''I can't buy a Feisty Fannie for the amount of money that I can get them cloned for. If I get all 11 of them, I'm going to have $79,000 in them. Divide 11 into that.
''If you really want to get the longest horns, I have a funny feeling that the clones will outdo the mothers,'' he said. ''I measured my clone's horns on June 23, the day after she was a year old, and I measured 30 1/4 inches tip to tip, and that's real good. Most people want to have at least 24 inches when they are a year old.''
Mosser and his wife, Vicki, have accumulated 107 longhorns on their ranch since he retired in 1999 from the structural steel fabrication company he owns in Houston.
Don King, president and chief executive of the Fort Worth-based Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America, said Mosser ''has reached out and bought the very top end of cattle available the last two years, and I look for him to have the top herd in the industry within the next two or three years at the rate he is going.''
Dameron and Mosser were recognized by the longhorn breeders association in November, Dameron as the rising star and Mosser as the newcomer.
More than 5,000 people belong to the association, and member profiles range from retirees with a couple of head to high-profile businessmen like Ross Perot Jr., who owns a herd. The common denominator is the longhorn.
''They are a unique animal, they are a part of our history, and nothing says Texas or the Old West like a Texas longhorn does,'' said Larry Barker, the breeders association's director of promotions and events.
This story ran on page A3 of the Boston Globe on 7/14/2003.
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