Ontario's Cattle Kingdom: Purebred Breeders and Their World, 1870-1920

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College o

Ontario has long been the country’s largest agricultural producer.
Despite the importance of livestock raising in the province, the subject
is known only by narrowly focused volumes produced by specialist
agrarian organizations. Canadians were pioneers in artificial
insemination and today enjoy a substantial share in the international
trade in bull semen. Just go to Cuba to see familiar black-and-white
Holsteins whose ancestors came from Canada after the Cuban revolution in
1959.

Ontario’s Cattle Kingdom is the first important historical study of
purebred breeding in Canada. The author examines cattle breeding across
a broad spectrum of topics for the half-century after 1870. As an artist
as well as a historian, Derry analyses representations of pure breeds in
pictures and paintings to show how visualized ideals of true
types—images sponsored by breeders’ organizations—influenced the
characteristics of the cattle born. Conversely, she also shows that the
rediscovery of Mendelian genetics around 1900 played a less influential
role in breeding choices than older principles dating back to the 18th
century. In separate chapters, the author discusses the roles of
government in regulating the cattle trade and the relations between
Ontario’s livestock industry and cattle production elsewhere in the
country and the Atlantic world. Although the book is less successful in
analyzing breeding for dairying because it skirts historical debates in
that area, Derry also provides the first worthwhile historical account
of the relationship between beef farming and the meat industry in
Canada.

Since Margaret Derry is as interested in the animals as in the humans
who facilitated their reproduction, her book should attract a larger
audience than scholarly historians alone. One of the prime virtues of
Ontario’s Cattle Kingdom rests in demonstrating how ideas influence
the characteristics of those beasts that we have long assumed to be
eternal. This book helps in understanding that the cattle you remember
from the 20th century were as unlike their 19th-century progenitors as
those in our own century are likely to be.