Not going backwards! If you lose something in the pairing of two sheep, two sheep that have nice characteristics, you've not accomplished good breeding. This is time to analyze your program. So if you lose strong backs, or proper expressions or correct hind quarters or even bone density or size of sheep, you've lost something. You've gone backwards. Good breeding will keep the features of the parents. Outstanding breeding keeps the features of the parents AND advances a desired characteristic.
Sheep with weak toplines, dull expressions, incorrect hind quarters, beefy shoulders, heavy bone or wrinkly noses lost something in the pairing of the parents. If a breeder claims that they are just breeding for fleece, and the rest can/will be fixed later...think door to door salesman again!
If super short fleeces are the "true" Shetland sheep, it would be easy to get that while maintaining Shetland conformation and expression characteristics. You would be able to do it without heavy "culling".
Here in the midwest, you'll find a lot of these problems, especially weak toplines. It runs like a disease among flocks because breeders propagating sheep for short fleece haven't paid attention to these other details. If it's so easy to "fix", why don't they? When IS later?
No comments:
Post a Comment