I agree with a lot of what Holly writes but have to take issue with some things > Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:50:07 -0400 > From: Holly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> There is much controversy among North American breeders about Shetlands, > mostly surrounding their wool. Shetland, being a "successful" > endangered breed, suffers the usual issues of such > critters--indiscriminant breeding to bring numbers up, then a collapse > of the market and selling for $50 to anyone who will take it One view is that the indiscriminate retention of lambs allowed so much atavism that the breed type suffered. The Shetland as a breed resulted from the selection by Shetland flock keepers out of a gene pool which is now represented as several Northern Short Tailed breeds across the Northern parts of Europe. AS too the endangered point I have discussed this with some of the founders of RBST the UK rare breeds organisation and they say that actually the Shetland ( even only counting coloured one) never met their own criteria for being endangered... I think last year there were about 35000 Shetland sheep in Shetland. > The trouble with Shetlands is the split personality among the possible > conservation approaches. One approach is to breed for commercially > viable sheep (meaning commodity marketing)--that seems to be the > approach taken in the UK dating back to about 1920, and tends to result > in what some of us call the "Big White Sheep" or BWS for short. Actually the SFB set up in 1926 wrote a breed description aimed at returning the breed to the type that was successful in their parents and grand parents times. Successful commercialisation came from meeting needs for cross sheep which retained the Shetland characteristics of hardiness, easy lambing and good mothering .. This is the Shetland Cheviot cross sold in large numbers off Shetland to flocks on the Scottish mainland by the boat load ... >The breed society that formed in the Shetland Islands then focused on saving > the breed by making it viable as a branded item--white sheep mostly, > with a few black or brown sheep with NO white fibers, so many natural > colors and patterns were selected against and nearly bred out of > existence. The problem here is two fold .. Firstly the sheep in England became much smaller than those seen on Shetland and this somehow got a BWS tag on sheep that were actually a more normal size .. The ultimate idiocy for me came when a noted breeder of white Shetland won the pre sale show at York with a white ram .. Reported as BWS ..only standing in the pens it was clear to all who were actually there that it was notably smaller than ay of the coloured rams at the same event. Also we have bought sheep from all over UK and find that the biggest coloured ones are from English breeding ( the same folk who are actually colour prejudiced) and where we have smaller sheep from England we find that their offspring are larger ... Our environment and flock management allowing the actual genetic potential to show. The flocks of coloured sheep retained by the crofters on Shetland remained in their thousands and far exceeded then and today the numbers kept outside Shetland .. I had the delight of seeing many flocks in their own habitat and seeing a hundred Black and Moorit rams on one holding ..plus countless patterned Shetland sheep on others with many patterns I have only seen in Shetland. Further the white flocks retain a huge 'coloured gene ' pool. Robin -- Robin and Margaret McEwen-King Lanark Scotland To stop mail temporarily mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: set nomail To restore send: set mail
