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[UncleHoot]

Quote:
And if he enjoys his job, I really don't want to know about it.

 

[Bossroo]

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Kind of off topic, but it's also common practice to use surrogate females to gestate the off spring. Dirty Jobs showed this being done with racing horses. The sperm is collected from the sire then the eggs from the female. The eggs are then fertilized and implanted in totally different horse. It's surprising how often this is done.Those butterball turkeys you buy at that market are the product of artificial insemination too! Imagine having that job, "I'm the sperm collector for butterball."

Not to rain on your parade but... the terminal sire for sheep is mostly the Suffolk. As for the race horses and embryo transfer, the Thorobreds do not even permit artificial insemination, natural cover ONLY. The Quarter horses and Arabs do however. The mare and recipeant mares ( usually 3) undergo hormone treatments to sincranize the heat cycles. The stallion's semen is collected and then the semen in placed into the donor mare, then in about a week to 9 days the mares uterus is flushed and the embrio is collected and then placed into a less valuable recipiant mare to be the foal's surrogate mother. The sucess rate is not very good as it may take several cycles to get a pregnancy. It is very expensive to do this proceedure, therefore not too many are being done unless both of the parents are very valuable. Cloning has even a less success rate and therefore is much more expensive.

 

[greyfields]

Well that would explain why the US produces such terrible lamb!

I agree that in many production flocks, the ewes have some Suffolk in them. But, as terminal sire? Daft. Too large of frame causes too many lambing issues. Putting a Suffolk ram on your flock could kill any number of your ewes during lambing.

Every single production flock I know of (including my own) uses Texel, Coopworth or Dorset at the terminal sire.

 

[Bossroo]

The Texal sheep was first imported to the US in 1985 to a reasearch facility in Nebraska and after a five year quaranteen was released to the public. Whereas the Suffolk has been successfully used as the number one terminal sire of market lambs in the US for over the past 100 years. The number two most popular was the Hampshire due to it's wide shoulder that gave difficulty for some ewes in lambing. Followed by the Oxford, Shropshire, Dorset and Southdown. I have used the Suffolk,Hampshire, Dorset, and Southdown rams. I have successfully used the Suffolk as a terminal sire for years, and lambed out hundreds of Rambouillet, Corriedale and Polypay ewes with only very minor lambing difficulty in a few firt time breeding yearling ewes. The Suffolk was the most profitable as the lambs grew very fast and most finished on grass. I sold my flock several years ago. Today, finding a sheepsheerer is very dificult and the price of the wool doesn't even cover the cost of sheering. My accross the street neighbor still has a flock of Rambouillet/ Coriedale/Suffolk cross ewes that he crossed with the Suffolk, Hampshire, Columbia and Barbados, then Dorper . Three years ago he switched to the Dorper as he found it to be the most profitable. The Dorper and White Dorper were developed in South Africa using the Dorset ram and the desert Persian ewe. It thrives in very sparce browse and grass and produces a marketable lamb were other breeds fail miserably. This breed also sheds it's wool anually and produces three lamb crops at about 180% per crop in two years. The lambs are born small, very vigorous, and grow very rapidly and finish on browse and grass, with a high quality carcass yield. The ewes are very good in mothering ability and produce ample milk even on sparce feed. This terminal sire became the dominant terminal sire used in Africa. Then it was exported to Australia and Canada where it too outperformed all other breeds first in University then in comercial field trials and tenderness and taste tests, and profitability. The Dorper and White Dorper was imported to the US about 10 years ago and it is now rapidly becoming the most popular terminal sire in Texas as well as several other states as they are found to be the most profitable. Check it out with Frost-King Dorpers in Amboy, Washington and Lewis White Dorpers in Bonanza, Ore. If I was still in the sheep raising business, I would be using the White Dorper as my terminal sire.