A Universal Type
This chapter addresses the wholesale exportation of Hereford cattle to North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1870s as part of a concerted effort to feed Britons with “British” meat bred and raised abroad, and returned to the metropole as frozen meat. In their enthusiasm to profit from foreign demand for British stock, Hereford breeders allowed their (quasi-)colonial competitors to establish their own reservoirs of the breed’s genetic potential. After American breeders severed ties with their British counterparts over the lack of stringency in English pedigrees, these two branches of the bovine family tree developed in isolation. While English Herefords increasingly gained status as a national breed, shedding their regional association with the county of Hereford for a perceived Britishness, Herefords in America became a new, quasi-colonial “native” breed, much like New Zealand’s Corriedale breed of sheep.