Sarcastic Lad’s progeny today — a reconsideration

In my article about Belle Sarcastic and Sarcastic Lad, reprinted in the Summer 2022 issue of the Spartan Dairy Newsletter, I wrote, “Today it is estimated that thousands of registered Holsteins worldwide can trace their bloodlines to Sarcastic Lad.”

This bold claim was plausible given the available evidence, and I still believe it to be true. But a couple of studies in recent years have indirectly brought to light a fresh look at Sarcastic Lad’s progeny—and an intriguing result.

There is no doubt that Sarcastic Lad was a wildly famous and popular bull. After his win at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the use of “Sarcastic” in the names of registered Holsteins surged, in order to highlight their descent from the great Sarcastic Lad 23971.^† The Secretary of the Holstein-Friesian Association of America, F. L. Houghton,^†† spoke at the association’s annual meeting at Grand Rapids in June 1925, reminded his audience that Belle Sarcastic was in her day “regarded as representing the true type of the breed,” and said of her famous son:

He was the sire of many sons at the head of leading herds in this country, and their progeny brought fame and fortune to their owners. One of [his] sons sold at the most remarkable price of the time of $8,000 cash.

Holstein-Fresian Association of America. Holstein-Friesian Herd-Book, vol. 55 (1926), p. 99.

At least one recent article, published before I wrote about Sarcastic Lad, made a similar statement to mine:

“Offspring of […] Sarcastic Lad […] can be found in top Holstein herds all over the country.”^†††

Wisconsin Holstein News, May 2015, p. 19.

My own research resulted in overwhelming numbers and a clear indication that the Lad’s progeny were widespread and plentiful. Compiling data from digitized volumes of the Holstein-Friesian Herd-Book, I found 131 direct offspring of Sarcastic Lad and traced thousands more in subsequent generations. The newest herd-books available in the public domain only go to the late 1920s, yet in a cursory search of those I still found dozens of eighth- and ninth-generation descendants, making it clear that his lineage kept going through that decade. Brief excerpts of books not yet in the public domain revealed hints of many more descendants throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

So my statement was reasonable, if not readily proven. But it did not take into account a significant change in the technology of breeding dairy cattle: artificial insemination (AI) and, more recently, genomic selection.

Modern AI was established in the late 1940s “and it soon became routine practice to replace the natural mating system, which allowed the use of superior, proven bulls by Holstein breeders across the country in the late 1960s.” This led to “a half-century of intensive selection” that yielded tremendous improvement in milk production, but at the cost of reduced genetic diversity in Holsteins, particularly among the bulls.¹

As an aside, I find it interesting just how ironic and unintuitive this transformation was. In the days of “the natural mating system,” dairy farmers would mate their cows with their best bull, or the neighbor’s bull, or perhaps a regional champion touring the farms in that area. The difficulty and risk of transporting a bull over long distances kept the available breeding stock in any particular place fairly limited. When AI came along, that limitation ceased, and the number of available choices was exponentially increased. Yet instead of exploiting that newfound bounty of diversity, due to selective breeding the number of bulls that were actually selected was drastically reduced.

In 2015 a research team from the Department of Animal Science at Penn State University published its study of Y-chromosome lineages in North American Holsteins. Their results were astounding even to many within the industry:

• Of 62,897 bulls born between 1950 and 2013, all were descendants of only four ancestors.^††††
• The vast majority of the bulls (99.74%) came from just two of those ancestors.
• The other two ancestors’ lines had tapered to nothing by 2013; they “do not have any living descendants.”
• In short, the team’s “analyses suggest that, most likely, all of today’s Holstein bulls across the world are descendants of these two ancestors: 886HHB (Hulleman, calved 27 March 1881) and 711HHB (Neptune, calved 23 March 1880).”²

Sarcastic Lad was not descended from either of those bulls. And therefore, if I am reading the Penn State study correctly, his Y chromosome was not represented in any live animals at the time of the study.

That said, the study was about the Y chromosome—bulls descended from bulls. A news article about the study points out, “While these bulls were responsible for many offspring in the country, they were not the only bulls used for breeding during that era. In fact, thousands of sires from that era have descendants through female lineages.”³ So there is still a good chance that many animals today are descended from Sarcastic Lad. Just not his Y chromosome.

Until now.

As a follow-on to the 2015 study, co-author Dr. Chad Dechow, Associate Professor of Dairy Cattle Genetics at Penn State, launched a project to reconstitute two lost Holstein male lineages, with the criteria that they were “separate from modern lineages before 1890, were present at the start of the AI era, and had semen available from the USDA National Animal Germplasm Program.”⁴ (Obviously, that last criterion was essential to the project.)

One of the lineages chosen by the research team was 716HHB (Netherland Prince, calved 1 April 1880), who happened to be one of the two ancestors mentioned in the 2015 study whose line had tapered out by 2013. Netherland Prince’s Y chromosome was found to be carried by a bull calved in 1954 named Zimmerman Alstar Pilot 1261857, aptly known as “Pilot.”

Pilot is an example of a bull with a favorable combination of genetic potential for yield and daughter fertility; however, his influence on the current Holstein population is negligible because fertility was not a selection aim during his era. This raises the possibility that the Pilot lineage could have genetic material that is useful for today’s population.

Dechow, p. 4514.

In the first year of the project, Pilot’s cache was used to sire four males and five females, calved in 2017, and three of the bulls were of sufficient quality to be selected for semen collection. While this is “a long-term prospect with no guarantee of success,”⁵ the initial results are promising: “the daughter progeny produced milk yields above the expected level and equal to their counterparts from the current Holstein genetic base born in the same year.”⁶

And as it turns out, Pilot’s lineage of sires, going back to his no-longer-lost ancestor Netherland Prince, contains a familiar name:

Zimmerman Alstar Pilot 1261857 (28 Dec 1954)
Zimmerman Royal Star Alan 1080016 (11 Aug 1949)
Zimmerman Prince Star Royalist 1009372 (27 Apr 1947)
Sheshequin Star Prince Piebe 834148 (2 Apr 1941)
Sheshequin Star Piebe 731075 (28 Dec 1935)
Lathrop Star Homestead 535117 (12 Jun 1925)
King Valdessa Pontiac Homestead 284536 (12 Oct 1919)
King Valdessa Pontiac 189344 (10 Jun 1916)
King Valdessa 137495 (12 May 1914)
Spring Farm Pontiac Cornucopia 77172 (8 Feb 1910)
Sir Korndyke Cornucopia 43769 (7 May 1906)
Aaggie Cornucopia Johanna Lad 32554 (14 Feb 1903)
Johanna Aaggie’s Sarcastic Lad 26935 (1 Mar 1900)
Sarcastic Lad 23971 (18 Oct 1897)
Maurice Bonheur 22394 (22 Mar 1895)
Maurice Clothilde 17638 (21 May 1891)
Clothilde 3d’s Netherland 10156 (20 May 1888)
Netherland Statesman HHB3280 (15 Aug 1884)
Netherland Prince HHB716 (1 Apr 1880)

HolsteinUSA.com database, accessed 6 Nov 2023.
Holstein-Friesian Herd-Book, vols. 4, 10, 14, 16, 18, 22, 25, 29, 33.
Holstein Herd-Book, vols. 5, 8.

In short, it is a direct line of bulls from Netherland Prince to Sarcastic Lad, and thirteen generations later to Zimmerman Alstar Pilot. (Pilot also happened to be ninth generation on his dam’s side, a hint at the potential for many living descendants of Sarcastic Lad through female lineages.) These new youngsters are the fourteenth generation of Sarcastic Lad descendants.

Belle Sarcastic’s famous son lives on.

 

1. Xiang-Peng Yue, Chad Dechow, and Wan-Sheng Liu. “A limited number of Y chromosome lineages is present in North American Holsteins.” 2015. J. Dairy Sci. 98:2738–2745, p. 2739. ↩︎
2. Yue, pp. 2740–2742. ↩︎
3. PSU News, 8 May 2017: Recovering lost genetic diversity in Holsteins is focus of professors’ research. ↩︎
4. C.D. Dechow, W.S. Liu, L.W. Specht, and H. Blackburn. “Reconstitution and modernization of lost Holstein male lineages using samples from a gene bank.” 2020. J. Dairy Sci. 103:4510–4516, p. 4510. ↩︎
5. Dechow, p. 4515. ↩︎
6. USDA, 26 Jun 2023: Old Bulls Bring New Genetic Benefits To Light. ↩︎

1. † A handful of exceptions were descended from his maternal grandsire, the original Sarcastic 4729, via Lad’s half-sisters—a valid use of the “Sarcastic” name, if perhaps a tad disingenuous.↩︎
2. †† Fred Houghton himself owned at least one Sarcastic Lad descendant: a second-generation cow named Winsome De Kol A 3d 99184.↩︎
3. ††† Ellipses remove the name of another bull for clarity, and also delete an incorrect implication that Sarcastic Lad was bred by W. J. Gillett of Wisconsin.↩︎
4. †††† “Ancestors” defined as “those sires that were born in the Netherlands and were imported to the United States before the 1900s, or sires that were traced back to 1880 based on the available HHB [Holstein Herd Book] records.”↩︎