Genetics of crossing one breed with another

[astrocow]

I'm going to have a hard time putting my question into words. So bear with me.
Lets say you have two calves.
Each was a product of two breeds.
Calf "A" 's mother was of breed X and its' father is of breed Y
Calf "B" 's mother was of breed Y and its' father is of breed X

Would the calves appear similar to each other?
Leigh

[agmantoo]

yes

[Celtic Herritag]

Yes they would but they could still have some differences because they are a hybrid and not an established mix, breeding branguses though they are crosses will give you similar looking calves. But breeding an angus to a bhraman could give you a cow that looks different from the first. So they may have a few differences but overall they should look similar to each other.

[james dilley]

It looks like it might would be A decent way to do Genetics recovery.If you have limited resources and just A few head to work with..

[astrocow]

Thank you for your answers. It was just something I had always wondered about.
Leigh

[DaleK]

No. With some breeds, X x Y looks like Y x X, but with many they look completely different. Even X x Y and X x Y can look completely different with different parents or even the same parents. Best example I can give you is two calves I've had from the same Holstein cow bred to the same Jersey bull, one looks like a dark Jersey while the other one looks like a purebred Holstein. I've even had twins from crossbreeding that looked like different breeds from each other.

[Oxankle]

Depends;

Some crosses are uniform, some are not. For example, crossing an Angus bull on a Hereford cow will give you a uniform set of black calves with white faces, called Black Baldies. Crossing a Hereford bull on an Angus cow will not give you anything like this.

Consider the horse and the jackass. Crossing a jack on a mare gives you a mule. Crossing a stud on a jenny gives you a hinney, more horselike than the mule but definitely not a horse.
Ox

[astrocow]

This is interesting. So woud it be safe to assume that most of the time a broken colored animal bred to a solid color would produce a white faced offspring? Or am I oversimplyfying and it is more of a game of roulette?
How about matings involving a Holstein? Can anyone tell me about what they've seen produced when one parent is a Holstein?
Leigh

[DaleK]

We started with purebred Ayrshires and bred them all Holstein. All ended up black and white except offspring of R&W Holstein bulls. We bred the HolsteinXAyrshire mostly to Holstein bulls but also some Jersey, Guernsey and Brown Swiss bulls. The Jersey crosses all have Jersey markings, but darker colourings than most Jerseys. Same with the Brown Swiss so far. The Guernsey crosses vary from a typical Guernsey look to some that look like purebred Holsteins.

[Jennifer L.]

I've bred a lot of Holstein to black Angus, and the F1 are always black and quite beefy looking. You get several generations back to Holstein and you still get mainly black animals. I've had calves born this summrer that are 1/16 Angus, still are all black with maybe a foot or tail end are white, but I am sure they will be like the Holstein for dairy character. Sure do look alike in the pasture, though.

Jennifer

[JulieLou42]

I bred a Saler bull to 3/4 Guernsey X Red Angus [she's red, with some white hairs in her tail and a one-inch spot on her udder!] and the calf was colored like her but darker, except for below his ribs on his belly, he had a big, white spot.

This cow bred to Jersey bull gave me a reddish brown calf with half a dozen white spots on it, looking very Jersey everywhere else, a really pretty bull. She's bred back to this same Jersey bull this time.

Back when I had a Brown Swiss cow, I bred her to a Holstein, and the calf looked more Holstein, but for the brown underbelly.

Interesting what can show up, huh?

[Cat]

Several years ago I had a Holstein heifer that was bred to a Charlais bull and the calf was a hereford patterned calf with a very light blue (grey) in place of the red you'd see on a hereford.