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Show Artificially Bred Stock Often Better Plan to Restore European Herds Postwar Europe's barnyard babies ba-bies may never get to sec their fathers. fa-thers. Test-tube livestock breeding may, in fact, solve the problem of quickly rebuilding depleted herds and flocks in the war-devastated regions, according ac-cording to a report issued this week by the American Foundation for Animal An-imal Health. This method of livestock live-stock breeding which was first developed de-veloped on a broad scale in Russia, has already been used extensively in this country. To Europe it offers the advantage of avoiding the delays de-lays and transportation difficulties which would be involved in shipping breeding animals from this country to the reclaimed battle areas. Instead, In-stead, male germ cells of various species of farm animals could be collected in this country, flown by fast planes to Europe, and used to ) fertilize cows, mares, and ewes of the devastated countries. ( Experiments by American veterinarians veteri-narians have shown that male germ cells for breeding purposes can be kept active and potent for as long as 130 hours in transit, at a temperature tempera-ture of 40 degrees. For such shipment, ship-ment, the semen is diluted with egg yolk and mineral salts. In this form enough for breeding thousands of farm animals could be flown to Europe Eu-rope in a single plane. Already Widely Used. This practice of artificial insemination insemi-nation is already widely used in the United States. In many areas, groups of dairy farmers have band cd together and formed cooperative organizations acquiring the use of high quality bulls and the services of trained veterinarians, the latter supervising su-pervising the breeding animals and doing the inseminating. In this way, hundreds of herds in an area are able to utilize a proven sire of a type which would be beyond the financial reach of the average farmer. farm-er. Carefully kept records of various artificial breeding associations show that this "test tube" method may be actually more efficient than natural methods, producing a higher percentage per-centage of conceptions. Also, it has been shown that some of the test-tube test-tube heifers become better milk producers pro-ducers than their mothers. Just how practical this application applica-tion may be to postwar Europe's needs is indicated by the fact that a cow in Argentina was recently bred to a bull in Maryland, by the test-tube test-tube method. |