The rules by which the book argues with a record

The record has no date of birth.

Without it there is no age, no age at first calving and no herdbook certificate.

The date of birth is later than today.

Usually the day and the month have been swapped, or the year is wrong.

No breed is selected on the record.

The breed determines the comparison base the index is computed against.

The breed percentage is below zero or above one hundred per cent.

A share of blood is a part of a whole and cannot go beyond one hundred per cent.

One tag number stands on several animals in the batch.

Tags are replaced and moved between animals, so a tag is not treated as unique. But two live animals under one tag on one farm are almost always a typing error.

Walking up the pedigree leads back to this same animal.

Traversal of the pedigree loops at that point. The inbreeding computation survives it — there is a guard in place — but at the cost that the true coefficient cannot be computed either for this animal or for any of its descendants.

At the birth of the offspring the parent was younger than 19 months or older than 20 years. Animals produced by embryo transfer are left out of this rule entirely.

Younger than nineteen months is physically impossible: gestation lasts about 279 days. Older than twenty years is almost always a link to the wrong animal — to a namesake, for instance. With an embryo transfer the age of the donor has to be counted at the day the embryo was collected, not at the birth of the calf: the herdbook has no such field yet, so the rule stays silent and the report says on how many records.

One dam has two offspring less than 270 days apart, and it is not a twin birth. Offspring produced by embryo transfer are not counted.

A cow cannot carry two calves faster than gestation lasts. Either one of the offspring is recorded under the wrong dam, or it is a twin birth entered as two separate calvings. An embryo donor is under no such constraint: she carried none of her offspring — different recipients did — and the gap between their births can be anything.

The number of litters recorded for one dam exceeds what she could have produced between her earliest possible calving and the birth of her last recorded offspring. Twins count as one litter; offspring produced by embryo transfer are not counted at all.

This is what a merge looks like: two or three different animals with similar numbers collapsed into one record, with all their offspring recorded under a single cow. Per-record rules cannot see such a merge — each link is plausible on its own, and it is their sum that is impossible. Nor is the error a single one: the pedigree of every one of those offspring is wrong, and with it their blood share, inbreeding and evaluation.

The sire was disposed of before the offspring could have been conceived: more than a gestation period lies between the disposal and the birth.

Not an error in itself: frozen semen keeps for decades, and this is an ordinary case. But if the farm stores no semen, the link points to the wrong bull.

The sire or dam field holds this same animal.

Traversal of the pedigree loops on such a record, and the inbreeding coefficient cannot be computed.

A female is recorded as the sire, or a male as the dam.

Most often the sire and dam fields were swapped during entry.

The parent was born after the offspring, or on the same day.

A direct contradiction: usually the link points to the wrong animal — to a namesake, for instance.

There are neither links to parents nor their identifiers from the documents.

A record without parentage takes no part in pedigree evaluation and will not carry a herdbook certificate.

The parent identifier copied from the certificate differs from the identifier of the animal the link points to.

The pedigree is stored twice: as a link and as text from the document. While the two agree it is a safeguard; once they diverge, one of the two is wrong, and only the farm knows which.

The breed percentage differs from the mean of the parental values by more than the tolerance.

The breed percentage of the offspring is the mean of the parental ones. A divergence means an error either in the percentage or in the parent itself; the second is far worse, because it spoils every other offspring of that parent as well. This is the only check whose severity depends on the size of the divergence: the marker on the left names the common case, while a large divergence arrives as one to be fixed.

The inbreeding coefficient entered on the record differs from the one computed from the pedigree.

A divergence is not always an error: our computation runs on the pedigree held in the book, while the farm may have computed on a fuller one. But it is always a question — on which pedigree.

The inbreeding coefficient exceeds the limit that has been set.

A value like this comes from close mating and calls for parentage confirmed by documents.

The test did not confirm the parentage, yet the parents are still on the record.

A direct contradiction between the document and the record — and the only case in which the system knows for certain that the pedigree is wrong.

The animal came from another country, and the herdbook holds fewer than two parents, four grandparents or eight great-grandparents — counting only those entered as records.

Imported semen spreads across herds years before a certificate is ever issued for the bull, and by then it is his daughters whose pedigree is asked for — and it stops at him. Three rows of ancestors on import are required by both EHRC and WHFF rules: without them there is nothing to confirm the parentage with.

The age at first calving is under nineteen months.

Gestation lasts about 279 days, so such a calving would have required conception before puberty. This is an error in the date; there is no other explanation.

The age at first calving is over forty-eight months.

Calving at four years is possible, merely expensive. More often it means that the earlier calvings were simply never recorded — and then what is wrong is not the age but the completeness of the data.

Number 1 stands on several calvings of one cow.

The calving number runs through the whole life of a cow; there is only one first.

A calving with a higher number carries an earlier date than the one before it.

Every value on its own is plausible; only their order is impossible. Usually the numbering was mixed up when the data was carried over from the previous recording system.

The interval between neighbouring calvings is shorter than two hundred and seventy days.

A cow cannot calve twice faster than gestation lasts. Either the date is wrong, or the second entry records an abortion.

One or more numbers are missing from the run of calving numbers.

Either a calving was never recorded — and then every lifetime figure is incomplete — or the numbers were entered wrongly.

One animal has two identical events on one date: two calvings, two inseminations or two test-day recordings.

Usually the same file was uploaded twice. Until the duplicate is removed, every average for the animal is computed on doubled data and the calving numbers run ahead.

Fewer than twenty days between the calving and the insemination.

Before the twentieth day the uterus has not recovered, and there is physically nothing to inseminate. This is not bold management but an error in the date.

The date of the pregnancy check falls before the date of the insemination itself.

The order of events is reversed: there is nothing to check before the insemination.

The service sire recorded on the insemination was born after its date.

The link points to the wrong animal — as a rule to a namesake, or to a match on a short identifier.

The date of birth of the animal recorded as the calf does not match the date of the calving.

A calving and the birth of a calf are one fact recorded twice. A divergence means that either the wrong animal is marked as the calf, or one of the two dates has a typing error.

The birth type, the counts of live heifer calves, bull calves and stillborn, and the calf records themselves state different numbers.

How many were born, the book knows three times over, and the three sources appeared at different times: the birth type was carried over from the previous system, the counts are entered by hand, and records are not created for every calf. A divergence means that one of the three is wrong, and which one is visible from the finding itself.

A test-day recording is dated before the first calving of the cow or after the dry-off date.

There is nothing to milk before the first calving or after dry-off. Usually the wrong animal was picked, or the year in the date slipped.

An animal has several calvings with the same number — two third calvings, for instance.

The calving number runs through the life of a cow and cannot repeat. A repeat means either a doubled upload or a slipped link: the calving was recorded against the wrong animal. The second is the more dangerous — the event disappears from one cow and appears on another, and the number of calvings, from which the lactation number and the age group are derived, lies for both.

The interval between calvings neighbouring in number exceeds nine hundred days.

Almost always this is a calving that was never recorded rather than a cow that stood barren for two and a half years: the calving numbers run consecutively while one of them is missing. The gap shifts the numbering of the lactations and the age group on every later record of the animal.

More than two hundred and fifty days passed from the calving to the first insemination.

A gap like this means either lost records of inseminations or a cow that went half a year without being inseminated and was kept in the herd all the same. Both cases are worth a question, and both spoil the days open — the quantity by which the reproduction of the whole herd is judged.

Fewer than 265 or more than 295 days lie between the fruitful service and the calving. With an embryo transfer the count starts at the day of transfer, and both bounds are a week lower.

Gestation in Holsteins lasts about 279 days and varies within a week. Shorter than 265 days is usually a slip in the calving date, or an abortion entered as a calving. Longer than 295 usually means the wrong service is marked as the fruitful one, or a later service never reached the herdbook.

The offspring of a calving is held by a different farm or herd than the dam was on the day of that calving.

A calf is born where its dam stands. A divergence means one of two things: either the calving is recorded under the wrong cow, or the calf was moved and the movement never reached the herdbook. Location is an independent witness: a date in a record is changed with one keystroke, while a move leaves a trace with the other party.

The mating is recorded with a bull who on that day was held by a different farm — or on a different site of the same farm — than the cow. Artificial inseminations are outside this rule.

Natural service requires the bull and the cow to stand together. A bull from another farm means either a link to the wrong animal — usually a namesake — or an unrecorded lease of the bull.

The mating is recorded with a bull who has no DNA test with the verdict “parentage confirmed”.

An AI bull is vetted by the stud; a natural-service bull is vetted by nobody, while his offspring enter the herdbook alongside the rest. Until the parentage is confirmed by a test, the pedigree of all his descendants rests on the farm’s word — and collapses all at once if that word turns out to be wrong.

Lactation yield below five hundred or above twenty-five thousand kilograms.

Twenty-five thousand occurs in world record holders, forty thousand in no one. Limits drawn this wide catch an error in the unit of measurement without touching a good animal.

Fat content outside the range from two to six and a half per cent.

Beyond these limits it is usually not fat content but swapped columns.

Protein content outside the range from two to five per cent.

The same again: beyond the limits lie swapped columns, not a record.

The record of a bull carries milk yield, fat, protein or lactations, as a cow record would.

A bull has no production of his own: there is nothing to milk. The figure got there from someone else’s spreadsheet or from a wrongly entered sex, and it spoils any herd average the bull enters alongside the cows.

The rank of the animal by the imported evaluation and by the computation of the book differs by more than forty percentiles.

Evaluations on different bases need not agree, but they must be about the same animal. A divergence of forty percentiles means one of them is about something else: a swapped column, the evaluation of another animal, an index of another breed or of another scale. Percentiles are what gets compared because they are the only common measure: index points from different evaluation centres are incomparable, whereas a rank within one’s own population is not.

The record carries an imported evaluation, and at least one of the two beside it is not filled in: whose evaluation centre it is, or which comparison base it was computed against.

An unnamed evaluation cannot be read: a TPI figure from an American catalogue and an index from a regional centre are different quantities, and without the name of the source there is nothing to compare them against. The same field is what makes a divergence from our own computation meaningful: without it, any divergence is explained away as “different bases” and therefore explained by nothing.

The record carries an imported evaluation, but the method of its computation is not filled in: from markers, from daughters, or from the pedigree.

A genomic evaluation is read off the animal itself; a pedigree evaluation is the average of its parents — and for a semen buyer these are claims of different value. In the book they sit as identical numbers, and this field is the only thing that tells them apart. An evaluation that arrives unlabelled stays unidentified forever: there is nowhere to recover the method from afterwards, and with it goes the ability to choose which of an animal’s several evaluations is the current one.

The evaluation is marked as based on daughters, but the number of daughters or the number of herds they stand in is missing.

A daughter count without a herd count means nothing: two hundred daughters in a single herd is an evaluation of the herd, not of the bull, because feeding, technician and climate cannot be separated from him in such a sample. What separates them is the bull being used under different conditions, and conditions are herds. A progeny evaluation missing either number cannot be verified: it says nothing about how reliable it is, nor whether it can be compared with an evaluation from elsewhere.

The breeding value for fat in kilograms differs by more than one standard deviation from what follows from the evaluations for yield and fat percentage.

Kilograms in an evaluation are not an independent figure: they follow from the yield and the percentage. A divergence means the figures were assembled from different sources — and what goes into the index is something the animal does not have. Each figure on its own is plausible, which is why the plausibility limits do not see this error.

The breeding value for protein in kilograms differs by more than one standard deviation from what follows from the evaluations for yield and protein percentage.

The same as with fat, and more dangerous: protein carries fourteen per cent of the weight in the Association profile, and its spread is three times narrower than that of fat. Forty extra kilograms of protein pull an animal into the top one per cent of the book.

Milk fat in kilograms differs from the yield multiplied by the fat percentage by more than a tenth.

A divergence larger than rounding means the figures were taken from different sources, and only the farm knows which of them is right.

A male animal carries a cow age group — first-lactation cow, cow in second lactation or cow in third and later.

One of the two fields is wrong, and from outside it is not visible which. If the sex is wrong, the animal counts as a cow in every report by group and can be given a calving. If the group is wrong, a bull falls into selections of cows and spoils their averages. The system does not choose on behalf of the person: all it knows by itself is that these two values cannot exist together.

An animal in the calf or heifer group has milk yield, fat, protein or lactations filled in.

There is no lactation before the first calving — there is nothing to milk. Either the age group is out of date and the animal calved long ago, or the production row arrived from another animal. The first spoils reports by group, the second the evaluation of a bull on his daughters.

In the run of test-day recordings of one lactation there is a gap longer than seventy-five days.

The 305-day yield is computed from the stretches between measurements, and the book fills the gaps in itself. Beyond seventy-five days the curve between two points is restored no longer from data but from an assumption: the peak of the lactation can fit entirely inside the gap. This is the very ground on which the book requires no fewer than six test days — declared in the glossary until now and never checked.

Within one lactation part of the measurements were taken by a recording organisation and part by the farm, or the recording methods differ in some other way.

The 305-day yield is assembled from the points of one series, and the series must be homogeneous: a measurement by a recording organisation and a measurement by the farm are figures of different evidential weight. The herd check already sees this, but there it speaks of the herd in general; here it is about the particular lactation from which a particular figure in the document of the animal is computed.

The animal is older than the age limit and is still listed as alive.

Almost always it means that a disposal was never recorded, not that the cow lived to a record age.

A disposal reason is filled in while the status has stayed as in the herd.

The animal keeps appearing in herd lists and counts, having left the herd everywhere except on paper.

The status is not in the herd, and no disposal reason is stated.

The reason for disposal is part of breeding records: it is what shows why a herd loses animals.

The status is not in the herd, and no disposal date is entered.

Disposal reports count by the date, not by the status: without it the animal appears in none of them, and the herd disposal rate comes out lower than the real one.

The animal has a test-day recording, an insemination, a calving or a weighing dated later than the day of disposal.

A cow that has left is neither milked nor calving in this herd. Usually it means one of two things: the disposal date is entered wrongly, or the event was recorded against the wrong animal. The second is the more dangerous — the event has disappeared from one cow and appeared on another, and both of them lie.

The herd holds records where the yield differs from the rest by two orders of magnitude: some in kilograms, some apparently in tonnes or centners.

One by one such records are caught by the plausibility check, and the farm sees fifty identical warnings instead of one cause. While the units differ, any herd average and any comparison between animals is meaningless.

Within a single test day the fat, protein, somatic cells or daily yield are written down in a way a measurement cannot look: one value on too many animals, or a spread close to zero, or a last digit of zero on most of the records.

Each such figure on its own is plausible, and record-by-record checks let every one of them through. Together they mean that no samples were taken and the column was simply filled in. Lactation, breeding value and the comparison with contemporaries are all computed from such records — that is, the error spreads through the whole book while staying invisible.

The test-day recordings of the herd come partly from a laboratory, partly from the owner or from an import.

A laboratory measurement and a farm measurement are figures of different accuracy, and they cannot be added into one average. This is not a prohibition: the warning says that part of the data is not independently confirmed, and the herd cannot be judged from it as a whole.

Within one profile the evaluations of the animals of the herd refer to different versions of the comparison base.

An index is a deviation from a base. Two animals computed from different bases can neither be compared nor put in one list: part of the difference between them reflects the difference between the bases, not between the animals.

In the run of years between the first and the last calving of the herd there is a year with none recorded. Looked at only in herds that calve regularly: where calvings are rare, an empty year means nothing.

A herd that calved before and after cannot have stopped calving in between. Almost always it is a report that was never submitted for that year rather than an idle spell: lifetime figures and age at first calving are computed wrongly for those years.

A noticeable share of the herd is listed as born on the first of January or on the first day of a month.

This is what a transfer from paper records looks like, where only the year or the month was known: the missing part was filled in with the start of the period. Age at first calving on such records is shifted by months, and the farm looks worse or better than it is.

A noticeable share of the yields in the herd is a multiple of five hundred kilograms.

A measured yield is rarely round. Roundness across the board means an estimate by eye or a transfer from a report where the figures had already been rounded — and such data cannot be used for breeding value evaluation.

The yield of individual animals differs from the median of their own herd by more than threefold in either direction.

The plausibility limits are the same for the whole book and deliberately wide. The herd is a far more precise yardstick: on a farm averaging 7,000 kg a record of 22,000 is formally plausible, while in practice it is almost always an extra zero or someone else’s row.

For part of the live females no measurement has been recorded over the last twelve months. Computed over all live females, heifers included: by the same condition that produces this figure in the task strip of the farm account.

Production in the book is computed from test-day recordings. A cow without measurements takes part neither in the evaluation of a bull on his daughters nor in the herd averages — she is on the list and absent from the computations. The farm sees this same figure in the task strip of its account: there it names the work, here the reason for it.

Two or more records of the herd share the numeric part of their identifiers — although those identifiers are held in different fields or in different numbering systems.

Cattle in Russia have no single identifier: one animal goes under a national number, under XXRUS…, under an inventory number and under an ear tag. A match in the digits means one of two things — either it is one cow entered twice, or two different numbers that happen to coincide in digits. Only the farm can tell them apart, and the warning asks the question rather than answering it.

Across every calving recorded for the herd not one stillborn calf is marked.

Stillbirths happen everywhere: worldwide they are five to eight per cent of calvings, and zero across a hundred calvings means not good fortune but that the losses are not being recorded. The share of stillbirths is the figure by which work with the dry period and the calving is judged; a herd without it looks better than it is, and cannot be compared with one that keeps its records honestly.

Over the last twelve months not one case of illness or treatment has been recorded in the herd.

Cows fall ill, and a dairy herd without a single case of mastitis in a year does not exist. An empty log means not health but the absence of recording — and everything the book computes on health is silently wrong for such a herd. Worse: a herd like this looks exemplary beside one where the events are honestly recorded.

Over the last three years neither a culling, nor a death, nor a sale away from the farm has been marked in the herd.

A herd without disposals does not exist: cows leave by age, by illness, by infertility. Zero means that disposals are handled past the book, and then the denominator of every share is wrong — from the percentage of cows with a recorded yield to the mean age of the herd. This is an error that is visible in no single record.

On an animal carrying the mark of the Association, fields were changed after the mark had been put on.

The confirmation refers to the state of the record the expert saw. An edit after it is legitimate — data gets refined — but the mark keeps standing all the while and no longer means what it meant. The book has been writing this into the edit log from the first day and has until now shown it to no one.

The same field of one record was edited three times or more within a week.

This is what fitting a value looks like: the figure is changed, the result is looked at, it is changed again. It is also what an honest search for an error in the transfer looks like — the log cannot tell the two apart, and the rule does not undertake to. It names the place where it is worth asking what went on there.

A noticeable share of the events of the herd was written into the book much later than the day they are dated by.

A test-day recording for March uploaded in December was restored from memory or from paper — and it holds an order of magnitude more errors than one recorded at once. In itself this is no offence: a farm has every right to bring in data for the past year. But material of such an origin cannot be silently added into one average with current recording, and it has to be known about before the computation, not after.

Records of one animal of one kind — production, for instance — were sent by two or more different senders.

With the arrival of upload mandates this became possible: the recording organisation and the laboratory are appointed by the farm, and both send test-day recordings. Which of them is right the book does not decide — the one that sent last wins, and it happens silently. Until the conflict is named, the owner of the data does not know whose figures are lying in it.