There was a time when breeding took a lot more personal contact, a lot more luck, and had fewer success stories. Now, miracles of modern science have taken over and things have changed. Take a bull, a cow, and their calf. It's quite likely that the bull has never seen the cow, much less mated with her. It's possible that the cow has never met the calf. It's possible that the calf's father has contributed his DNA from beyond the grave. It's a high tech world full of terms like "flushing," and "collecting," and "straws" (of semen) stored in high-tech, sub-zero containers. This has created a new level of bucking bull, and it makes for some pretty amazing specimens.These days there are rock star bulls, and the sons and daughters of rock star bulls, and all of them have sought-after DNA. But all of this is relatively new, and if you follow a popular bull's bloodline back through a couple of generations, you will sooner or later arrive at an anonymous bull and cow who found each other the old-fashioned way and by a stroke of random genetic luck produced a bucking bull who is now one of the greats. It won't be true for long, but for now, the great-grand-sires of our rock star bulls were bulls whose names nobody knows.
