YOU may not be able to eat horns but they are an important part of an animal in the eye of farmers and livestock judges when they make their choice in the auction mart or show ring.

Just as scrawny animals are unlikely to win a championship or fetch record prices, those with misshapen horns are also spurned by those livestock breeders who make their selection based on type and breed character.

Fortunately the horns of young rams that are not growing in the desired direction can have sprung, metal braces attached to their tips to get them growing out or inwards to rectify the problem - just like braces on our teeth that reshape our mouth and jaw to make them more cosmetically appealing.

A ram's horn becomes malleable when heated, so a more drastic solution is to heat an errant one and hold it in the desired position until it cools and "sets" in place. Rams with both horns growing in a perfect, symmetrical spiral catch the eye of sheep farmers and shepherds alike.

It is much the same with cattle. A cow or bull with one horn growing upwards and the other pointing downwards would attract ridicule rather than admiring glances.

I remember as a boy how breeders of Ayrshire cattle used to tie them by neck-chains in stalls in a byre and attach the tips of their horns to weights that worked through pulleys to maintain a constant pressure on those horns as the head moved up and down, training them to grow in the desired direction. After a few weeks the angle of a horn's growth started to change.

Cows were expected to have horns that grew up in a curve, while bulls' horns were trained to grow downwards.

All that changed in the 1950s and 1960s when it became fashionable to dehorn cattle and have polled herds.

My father was a vet before he became a farmer, and as a young man he dehorned a lot of large herds of mature Ayrshire cows in the 1950s.

He would start in the byre early in the morning at milking time and inject local anaesthetic into the base of the horns before the dairyman milked the cows. Then he sawed off the horns after the cows were milked. He used an incredibly sharp surgical saw. After removing each horn, he cauterised the wound by pulling out the arteries with a pair of forceps.

I have seen many mature cattle being dehorned in such a manner. Although it looks barbaric, I have to say the cattle appeared to feel little or no pain and soon recovered.

Nowadays farmers remove the tiny horn buds from young calves by either a hot iron that is held in place for ten seconds after injecting the calf with local anaesthetic, or by applying caustic-soda paste to the bud before the calf is ten days old. The horn buds do not begin to grow and attach themselves to the skull until the calves are about two months old, so removing them at that early stage is more akin to removing warts.

Horns were an important defence mechanism that allowed primitive cattle to ward off predators and defend their calves. The Texas Longhorn is the breed most associated with massive horns, which can extend to 2.1m tip to tip.

Most breeds have horns which are more modest in sizes. But horns are generally a hazard to other cattle and their handlers.

Because cattle herds are hierarchical, individuals often jostle for position with their heads. Those with horns injure udders, flanks and eyes, as well as posing a hazard to the cattlemen working with them. Cattle without horns can be fed more conveniently and easily with less interference from dominant cattle. As a result, cattle without horns require less trough space than horned ones.

The occurrence of damaged hides and severe bruising is much lower in dehorned than in horned cattle. That is important because bruised meat on carcasses as a result of horn blows during transport is condemned for human consumption at abattoirs and can lead to considerable financial loss.

A more humane solution to the problem of horns is to breed polled cattle. The poll trait is dominant, and offspring of a polled bull will also be polled even though their dams have horns.

Unfortunately, not all breeds are polled or are likely to be in my lifetime.