Purchasing Strategically

Where it all comes together

When buying deer, what are the best ways to maximise your chances of “Buying the Best”?

Many buyers choose their purchases solely by looking for the stag with the biggest antlers in the sale. This is one technique - and it is certainly more likely to succeed than picking the poorest antlered animal!

However, there are other far more scientific approaches which will give better results.

To me, the first and most important criteria, is the pedigree. The pedigree must have a “hole-proof” list of ancestry. By this I mean that just having a strong sire and a good appearance will not guarantee that the stag will breed true to his appearance or your expectations. The animal you buy must have impeccable grandparents and great grand parents. Preferably you should be able to see a faultless line up of great-great grand parents as well (but this is still not often seen in a modern red deer pedigree tree).

One weak grand parent will greatly reduce the likelihood of breeding true in our experience. Genes seem to act like a leaky bucket, and any “hole” will allow rapid leakage and loss of all the goodies! One weak great-grand parent will have a similar (but less frequent) effect.
Another over expectation that we all have, is that if we buy a monster he will automatically produce monster sons. Not so!

Let’s imagine four different breeding scenarios:

Scenario 1 Farmer A buys a monster stag on his looks, (and maybe his sire’s performance). He mates the stag to commercial hinds, and breeds (say) 100 male calves. He will likely fluke a couple of excellent sons from this mating, depending entirely upon the quality of his hinds.

Scenario 2 Farmer B buys a stag on the basis of having a “hole-proof” pedigree, and he looks OK as well. He mates the stag to the same herd of commercial hinds and breeds 100 male calves. He is likely to get at least double the excellent sons, and might expect up to six or eight.

Scenario 3 Farmer C buys the monster stag and mates him to a herd of pedigree hinds with strength in every corner of their pedigrees. From 100 stag calves, up to about 40% will likely be of excellent quality

Scenario 4 Farmer D buys a stag on the basis of having a “hole-proof” pedigree and he looks OK as well. He mates the stag to a herd of pedigree hinds with strength in every corner of their pedigree. Farmer D can expect to get about 85 excellent progeny from this mating! Why? Because the progeny all have hole-proof pedigrees and there is little or no leakage of the goodies from the progeny.

How do I know this? Because I have been farmer A farmer B and farmer C, and only in recent times have reached farmer D’s happy station in breeding. Today, 85% of our stags are of excellent quality – good enough to go into our annual auction.

Our experience is that the female (dam), has a greater impact on the progeny than the male (sire). This adds a further complication because we cannot see the antlers on the hinds, and we tend to do our selections on the basis of the sires in the pedigree. One very useful trick to select good pedigrees is to look for females who are “dams of” outstanding progeny, or are “sisters to” outstanding sires.

To summarise all this – look for four excellent great grandsires and if possible, eight excellent great-great grand sires in the pedigree. Also look for dams in the pedigree with “sister to” or “dam of” etc. From our experience this will produce far more winners than breeding on looks alone.

AT PAMPAS HEIGHTS
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