Santa Gertrudis cattle
cattle breed
The Santa Gertrudis is an American breed of beef cattle. It is a taurine-indicine hybrid breed, descended from both zebu and European cattle. It was bred in the early twentieth century in Texas, and received official recognition in 1940. It has been exported to many countries including Australia, Brazil and South Africa, and has contributed to the development of a number of modern breeds, among them the Barzona and the Droughtmaster.
History
The Santa Gertrudis was developed on the King Ranch in southern Texas. The name derives from that of the Spanish-owned estate of Los Cerros de Santa Gertrudis, where in 1851 the King Ranch was established.
The ranch was initially stocked with Texas Longhorn cattle. From about 1880 bulls of the British Hereford and Beef Shorthorn breeds were used to improve them; substantial separate Shorthorn and Hereford herds were kept to supply the bulls. In 1910 a part-zebuine bull, descended from an Ongole bull imported in 1906 directly from India, was acquired and was cross-bred with cows of the Shorthorn stock. The results were promising, and in 1918 the ranch bought fifty-two taurindicine bulls with no less than 75% zebuine parentage, in the hope of creating a composite breed of about 37% zebuine and 62% taurine ancestry.
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This entry incorporates text from “Santa Gertrudis cattle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.