In the last few months my ram has gotten a bit aggressive. I can smack him on the butt and he will go away and do his own thing. He is apx 2. I have had people tell me I need to get rid of him and start over. I believe he has many years of good breeding to do so why. He is a perfect specimen of a horned barbado. His horns curl back away from his face. He had great black points. He has good bone and build. He passes his good quality on to my ewes lambs and they are easy to handle. What is something that would make a breeder drop their ram and get another one. I had planned on keeping him 5 yrs or even longer as long as he stays fertile and takes care of his herd. He watches the dogs, gets along with the horses and cats, and is a very easy keeper. What does others do. oj
-----Original Message----- From: Barb Lee [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2004 2:49 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [blackbelly] Personal Standards I was perusing the William K. Kruesi book, "The Sheep Raiser's Manual" the other night and settled on the part about performance testing. This led me to an interesting idea. Performance testing appears to be done in a university setting and while I can see where obtaining performance tested rams might be of enormous value to commercial producers, it probably does little to reflect how a sire or dam will perform in the model in which we choose to raise our small farm flocks. A ram on a concentrate ration is not likely to perform the same if he is suddenly shifted to a forage-based model, and so forth. This is certainly true for cattle - a heavy grain-consuming sire may fall apart on grass. The average small-flock shepherd probably needs to look at the performance of animals raised under similar circumstances to his own to be able to determine how they will perform for him or her. All that aside, I got to thinking about the things that have become important to me over the last year, as my interest in producing high quality American Blackbellies for breeding increases. Things as recently covered as the thread on fragile legs. My vet says the only time he's ever seen blackbellies is for fatal parasite loads and broken legs. I've always regarded a good front end as a high priority item, but now "bone" has shifted into focus. "Bone," the circumference of the front cannon bone, has in recent years become a powerful focus of quality in the horse world. Many breeds, in the name of "refinement" have bred the bone out of horses' legs, predisposing them to all sorts of lamenesses. Sheep don't need to perform like horses, but it's a cinch that good, strong legbones are pretty important in highly active and acrobatic sheep! So what I've decided to do, is sit down with pencil and paper and create a chart for myself of all the characteristics that are becoming more and more important to me as I strive to improve the quality of my flock. I will assign a numeric value to each characteristic, based on my perception of its relative importance, and end up with my own "performance test" score. Rather than just concentrating on markings, horns, etc., I will have a very complete judging sheet of every one of my animals over time. Entries will be in pencil, as their history unfolds, particularly in the realm of productivity and the repetition of good or bad or mediocre traits in subsequent generations of offspring. I'll end up with a score that will really help me make those hard culling decisions, and it will be a bare faced exposure of my stock to potential buyers of future breeding sheep. This may sound nuts to some people. But I can assure you, as I search for my ideal stock, my perceptions of what is and is not important are gaining momentum, and once I have a solid base of breeding stock, I expect culling decisions made on gross insufficiencies at the beginning, leading to split-hair decisions in the future. I think a chart like this, where I can look back on all the offspring of a given line and the repetitive occurrence of desirable/undesirable traits, is going to give me a powerful tool for selection. At some point my eye will be well enough calibrated to select automatically, but that leaves me with no historic footprint of the performance of my animals, to present to future buyers. So I'm going to come up with this chart over this weekend, and my sheep are going to be seeing a lot of me. I'm not suggesting this idea for anyone else to adopt. It's just a ramble-on, something to share with the list while I'm in a writing mood. Take care everyone, Barb L. =============================================== This message is from the Blackbelly Sheep mailing list (http://www.awrittenword.com/listserv/index.html). To respond to this message, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe or change your membership options, go to http://lists.coyotenet.net/mailman/listinfo/blackbelly To search the archives, go to http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ =============================================== This message is from the Blackbelly Sheep mailing list (http://www.awrittenword.com/listserv/index.html). To respond to this message, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe or change your membership options, go to http://lists.coyotenet.net/mailman/listinfo/blackbelly To search the archives, go to http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
