Texas Electric Cooperatives, Inc.

January 2004 issue

By Wayne Epperson, Photos by Glen Ellman

It was 1867 when cowboys began driving Texas longhorns up the Chisholm Trail through the gentle rolling hills and grasslands of North Texas. The hardy, naturalized cattle, descendants of the Spanish breed first brought to the New World by Christopher Columbus, were delivered to railheads in Kansas for shipment to markets in the East for only a few years. But by the time the great trail drives ended in 1884, more than five million longhorns had moseyed up the trail and into Southwest history and myth.

Today, longhorns are still making history on Clear Creek Pecan Plantation, a 700-acre ranch outside Forestburg, a hamlet in Montague County 65 miles north of Fort Worth and 15 miles west the old Chisholm Trail. The ranch is home to the world's first three cloned longhorns. They turned a year old in June 2003.

Their route into this world was as exotic as that of their distinguished ancestors. The young longhorns were bred from Starlight, who for five consecutive years was judged the world's longest-horned cow. Horn size is what bragging rights are all about these days. After all, longhorns were never renowned for the quality of their meat or their conformation. The scrappy Spanish runaways lived wild in Mexico and Texas for centuries, developing into the optimal breed to flourish in the harsh brush country. In the Old West, they were rounded up and driven north simply because they were tough enough to survive the journey. They could go incredible distances without water, rustle their own food, fend for themselves, swim rivers, survive the desert sun and winter snow.

Starlight's trip east was far less strenuous, involving only a bit of her ear shipped via FedEx up the modern cattle trail to Cyagra, a Worcester, Massachusetts, company that clones dairy cattle.

Starlight and her cell line belong to Dr. Zech Dameron III, who has been raising longhorns on the ranch for seven years. His 100 head of registered cattle is a big herd for an urban rancher with a medical practice near Dallas.

Starlight's tip-to-tip horn span measures 78 1/8 inches, and in the cattle circles that Dameron travels, it's all about horn--long horn. He wanted to reproduce Starlight and mix her genes with other genes to produce "an even better cow, a bigger-horned cow with color, size and conformation--just to try to breed a better animal."

Breeding for horn is a high-dollar Texas pursuit, and the addition of cloning has raised the stakes. Dameron, following the procedure that scientists at Cyagra developed, took a biopsy the size of a pencil eraser from Starlight's ear and shipped it to Worchester. It took two tries before Cyagra developed a cell line containing the complete DNA of Starlight.

Steve Mower, director of marketing at Cyagra, says various lab procedures are required over a three-week period to develop a cell line. In one complex process, unfertilized eggs harvested from a Nebraska slaughterhouse are essentially fused with the DNA of the original animal in Cyagra's lab. "What you have done basically is trick the embryo into thinking it has been fertilized, because you don't use any semen in the process," Mower said.

A week later, the embryos are shipped to Cyagra's facility in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, where they are transplanted into recipient cows. After a nine-month gestation period, a cloned calf is born. The entire process from biopsy to birth takes about 10 months.

Dameron purchased Starlight for $24,000. He paid Cyagra $31,000 to get five clones of Starlight. One of the clones didn't survive, and another was sold for nearly $20,000.

Some ranchers oppose cloning, but that doesn't concern Dameron.

"There's a cloning controversy to some, but I just look at it as an advance in science. Knowledge is a continuum; what we know now will pale in comparison to what we will know in 50 years," says Dameron, a native of Pecos who got his medical training at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

"You are just trying to breed the best that you can. Longhorn clones are just an additional breeding tool. It takes effort. If you can breed to a better animal, you are going to get something better," he says.

It takes more than four years (or longer) for longhorns to completely grow the coveted set of horns. Starlight's horns measured 69 inches at age four.

"I feed all of my longhorns all the time--they grow faster that way," Dameron says. "If you want to make money on them, it's all about horn, and when they are young, that's when you grow horn. If you feed them well in winter, you are going to get horn."

Rex Mosser, a longhorn rancher in Midway, north of Houston, is a cloning convert. He bought one of Starlight's four clones at the breeders association showcase sale in November 2002.

The day after his clone turned a year old, Mosser measured her tip-to-tip horn span. "It measured 30 1/2 inches tip to tip, and that's real good," he said. "Most people want to have at least 24 inches when they are a year old. I have a funny feeling that the clones will outdo the mothers."

Mosser decided to have Cyagra clone his prized cow, Feisty Fannie, purchased for $59,000 at a 2002 sale in Johnson City. Cyagra developed a cell line of Feisty Fannie and delivered nine healthy cloned calves in the fall of 2003. Mosser and his wife, Vicki, have accumulated 116 longhorns on their 165-acre ranch since 1999, when he retired from his structural steel fabrication company in Houston.

Mosser has no immediate plans to sell any of his nine clones. "I'd like to keep them until they are three or four years old, just to see what they do. After two years, I plan to breed them all to different bulls and see how the calves come out," Mosser says.

He can envision the day when choice clones will be a part of prized longhorn herds. Economics plays a part in his vision. Mosser's original investment in Feisty Fannie was $59,000. He got nine clones with her exact award-winning DNA for $79,000, or less than $8,800 each.

"The cloning operation of Feisty Fannie is the one from which we have gotten the most calves of any farm animal yet cloned--it is exciting and makes us think our system is improving," says Cyagra's Mower. "As we improve the technology and find its application in all breeds of livestock, it allows us to preserve these superior genetics and keep them going so that they will have greater influence on the cattle population out there today."

The 5,000-member Fort Worth-based Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America has acknowledged the emergence of cloning technology and approved rules for cloned longhorns to be registered.

There are more than 250,000 registered longhorns and not all of them are expensive. "You can purchase a registered heifer for $450, so they are affordable," says Larry Barker, director of promotions and events for the association. At the association's 2003 Horn Showcase Sale in Fort Worth November 16, Feisty Fannie, who had been ranked second in tip-to-tip hornspan, overtook Starlight for first place with a measurement of 78 5/8 inches.

On the sprawling El Coyote Ranch near Kingsville in South Texas, cowboys on horseback still care for longhorns as they have for decades, without cloning.

"Our main industry is the seed stock business, the replacement cattle for the longhorn industry, so we run some bulls and grow some young bulls, hopefully to put back into the industry," says herdsman Mel Raley, who oversees an elite herd of more than 200 cows. "We want to sell animals that others want to clone."

Raley, who has worked with longhorns for 22 years, says cloning may be a viable option for some ranchers as long as the animals being cloned are strong and healthy. But he is concerned about what might happen if cloned animals have genetic faults or structural weaknesses.

"When you take people like Rex and Zech, they are cloning some great animals. But if you get people who have the passion, the power and some of the resources to do that, and you get four or five animals that are inferior, they could dominate the industry pretty quick. That's a little scary," he says.

El Coyote uses traditional breeding methods and modern technology to produce functional cattle that enjoy widespread popularity.

There is a historic attraction to the longhorns dating back to the massive trail drives of the late 1800s, says Raley. "That 10-year period made the cowboy famous forever. Some of the things we do and practice can be the first captivation of people for these cattle, to have a piece of that mystery, that myth and that heritage."

Cooke County EC serves the ranch where Starlight lives.

Wayne Epperson is a freelance writer with more than 25 years of writing and editing experience. He is a partner in E.B. Writers of Dallas.

The origin of longhorns has been traced to Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the New World in 1493, when Spanish settlers brought long-horned cattle from Spain to Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Over the next 200 years, residents of those islands imported cattle to Mexico during their search for gold and other riches.

The earliest record of longhorns in what later would become Texas has been traced to 1690 when a herd of 200 was driven from Mexico to a mission near the Sabine River. The hardy breed survived the harshness of that time--bad weather, Indian raids, abandoned ranches--and multiplied. So much so, that by the end of the Civil War in 1865, millions of wild, unclaimed longhorns could be found in Texas.

It was longhorns from these herds that Texas men, who had returned from the war broke and jobless, rounded up and herded north to sell in Kansas and Missouri. The legend of the longhorn and the American Cowboy grew out of this era.

Those plentiful herds dwindled rapidly and in the early 20th century, the Texas longhorn was near extinction. A congressional appropriation of $3,000 in 1927 helped save the breed.

Through the determination and perseverance of a few ranchers and benefactors, the number of longhorns had grown to about 1,500 when the Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America was founded in 1964. Today, there are 260,000 longhorns registered with the association.

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