The stud bull who's losing the will to love

AS anyone who has ever dabbled in shares will testify, investments can go down as well as up. And so it has proved in the comfortable, individual, centrally-heated byre occupied by a one-ton beast named Picston Shottle.

The five-year-old Holstein Friesian is Britain's champion stud bull, so prolific that he helped raise the value of his owners' company, Genus, by around £50m last year.

Just lately, however, Picston Shottle, who is so valuable that the exact whereabouts of his farm near Ruthin, North Wales, is a closely guarded secret, has suffered a dip in performance.

Cosseted by his own staff on a special mattress and serenaded by Mozart to get him in the mood for love, he is currently providing samples for artificial insemination only twice a week rather than his customary five times. He is officially described as 'off colour'.

The Genus share price, which peaked at £3.31 earlier this year, has drooped apparently in sympathy to £2.95, wiping £13m off the company's £118m stock market value.

His owners reacted angrily to suggestions that their prized possession was damaging the company by not living up to claims that he could produce 200,000 samples of semen a year at £50 to £60 a time - nearly double the capacity of other bulls.

Spokesman Suzanne Brocks said: 'They have pushed him very hard and so he has not been producing to full capacity. The bull is certainly not ill. They are just resting him.'

Picston Shottle was born in Staffordshire in July 1999, and reached sexual maturity just over a year later, when the first samples were taken from him. His first offspring arrived nine months after that, and they took a further two years before they started producing milk. Tests show that it is of the highest quality and the cows produce more as they grow older.

Armed with those facts, Genus put him into full production in May last year and he has since produced more than 100,000 'units' of semen, which have been distributed around the world.

Sadly for Picston Shottle, he never gets to meet any of the ladies who receive the fruits of his labours. He produces the goods, as it were, after being lured on to what amounts to a huge steel cow covered in hide.

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