Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 February 1919 — SOME OLD-TIME BIG CATTLE [ARTICLE]

SOME OLD-TIME BIG CATTLE

One English Ox, History Shows, Weighed 3,700 Pounds, Another 4,340 Pounds. —— —— With all the modern improvement in breeds of live stock—lt- may be doubted whether there Is living today n steer or ox equal in size, to _SQme_of„ the fat cattle of olden times. In 1845 there was disposed of by raffle at Pratt’s Old London inn, in Taunton, England, a giant ox of the Devon breed that stood 19 hands high and weighed 3,700 pounds. this one was npt in it with the Durham ox which earned a modest fortune for its owner, John Day, and brought the now famous Shorthorn cattle into high repute a little more than a century ago. A writer in the Mark Lane Express described this extraordinary animal as having weighed when two years old 3.520 pounds, and when slaughtered at eight years old his carcass dressed 2,478 pounds, while his live weight at that time was stated to have been 4,340 pounds. He girthed 11 feet 1 inch just behind the -shoulders. His owner exhibited him six years through England and Scotland, having a van for hls -conveyance about —the country. It was in 1807 that Day’s ox dislocated his hip and had to be killed. Favdrite, the sire of this bovine wonder, was made famous by the prodigious size and remarkably fine form of the steer. When Charles Colling of Darlington, who is regarded as the founder of the Shorthorn breed, sold all his cattle at auction in 1810, Comet, a six-year-old bull by Favorite, brought 85,000, and six cows by him, some of them eleven years old, made an average of $720, which was un-heard-of in those days and for many years afterward.