Hi all, first time poster. We have a realitvely small beef cattle holding. We have a largely limosin herd, but made the decision to move over to Hereford a few years ago to produce a smaller and easier finished animal. We bought a hereford pedigree bull which turned out to be a very unfortunate event. We approached a local hereford breeder who had 4 young bulls. We went to his farm and looked at the 4 bulls. We picked one out and decided to make the purchase. At this time, the farmer told us the pedigree cert was not available as this bull was registered in a show in a few weeks. He said he would post the cert on. We were fine with this as all our cows are limosin or lim/sim cross, so we had no concerns about close blood lines as we were introducing hereford for the first time. We brought the bull home and ran him with the cows. After a number of weeks the cert arrived in the post. We actually filed it away and didnt give it close attention. After approx 2 more months the intention was to purchase one or two pedigree hereford heifers to introduce to the herd. This is when we examined the cert for the first time closely, and found to our dismay, the breeder has produced this bull by breeding his own bull with its full daughter. This was extremely off putting and immediately, we contacted the breeder to raise our concerns. The breeder tried to brush if off as nothing and refused to take the bull back and give us a refund. But I find it to be appalling practice. Whats more, the hereford society confirmed there is no rule against this even though in their words 'it is not desirable practice and can effective fertility'. Long story short, it ended up in a court room, but was dismissed as there is no rule in law against the close breeding. We sold the bull in the beef ring at a loss of £1400 to put and end to the sorry story. There was of course a degree of naivity on our part to not scrutnise the breeding at the time of sale. But it has never ever been our experience that a bull you purchase would be a result of father and daughter breeding. Wonder what y'all think of this, and have you any advice? I really think the hereford society needs to amed their policy!!! I should say before we got rid of the bull, he did prove fruitful and we had a number of calves that are perfeclty good calves. We were of course not ever going to let this close bred line into our herd in terms of keeping on some of these heifers for cows. All his calves were/are to be sold for beef.