4 min read
Our herd bull Lil Roanmaker is scurred. People ask all the time what that means — here's the simple version.
Cattle horns sit on a different gene than coat color. An animal can be horned, polled (no horns at all), or scurred. Scurs are small, loose horn growths — they aren't attached to the skull the way full horns are.
Scurred = heterozygous polled
A scurred animal carries one polled gene and one horned gene. They're not fully smooth-polled, and they're not fully horned either. The visible result is those small, sometimes wobbly scur growths.
Polled genetics are completely separate from roan genetics. A bull can be homozygous roan and scurred at the same time — like our Lil Roanmaker.