Thursday, March 25, 2010

Foundation Rams and ewes


I mentioned previously that I used Kerry Hill ram semen collected in the UK to artificially inseminate cheviot ewes in the US.

So how in the world does that work?

Well it wasn't easy.

First I had to find someone with Kerry Hill rams that might be interested in helping. I first contacted the secretary of the Kerry Hill Flock Book Society in the UK, who in turn put me in touch with Mr John Terry, of Oak Tree Farm, in Warwickshire UK.

Mr Terry was very amenable and in turn brought his two rams (Oak Tree Charles and Oak Tree Teddy) to a Defra facility for collection .

The semen then went through a few dozen tests, sat in a liquid nitrogen freezer and eventually (5 months later) made its way to the US. I had thought I had it all figured out and that FEDEX would deliver it to the US. It did, but not where I expected. In fact it took me 2 days to track it to a frustrated cargo locker in Newark NJ. (fyi: the customer service rep doesn't usually know what REALLY happens in shipping)

I had to work with the USDA to redo my permits, but the shipping container eventually made it to Virginia. I had the semen tested on arrival and a sample of the little guys passed muster.

The girls were a tad bit easier to come by. I purchased some beautiful yearling ewes from John Eaton of Triple J Acres in Pennsylvania. Since I was using these girls as the foundation for a new breed, I wanted to obtain the best animals I could find, and these girls were them. John often brings home national titles for his Cheviots (NAILE etc). I wanted beautiful 2 year old's that had already had a successful pregnancy, as these are easier to AI. yeah, right. Such ewes could not be had at any price. The only other requirements were prion precursor protein (Prp) allele status. That's complicated and I will address at a later date, but it has to do with disease susceptibility.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Kerry Hills


Since 2006 we have been working to establish a small flock of Kerry Hill sheep here in the US. Difficult to do when they don't exist in the US and you can't import them from the UK due to USDA regulations. So what to do? Breed up.

It goes something like this:

We began what seemed like a simple process of finding a Kerry Hill breeder in the UK that wouldn't mind helping out by having Kerry Hill ram semen collected (from 2 rams), then frozen, then shipped.

Then there was the matter of getting some ewes (we found some lovely cheviots) and then a vet capable of artificially inseminating (AI) our ewes (apparently this is laproscopic surgery for sheep and you can't just run them down to the vet clinic down the street).

Then there is the birth, and the hoping for ewe lambs (0% KH Mom plus 100% KH Dad=50% KH lambs). Getting little boys for your trouble isn't the end of the world, but you can't artificially inseminate them...first they don't appreciate it and second you get nothing for your trouble.

Once the 50% girls are old enough you AI them and the resulting lambs are 75% KH (50% Mom+ 100% Dad= 75% lamb) Then those ewe lambs are AI'd and their progeny will be 87.5% and their AI progeny will be 93.75%, and their AI progeny will be 97%. You'll never get to purebred this way, but most breed registries that recognize 'breeding-up' shoot for 97% or 15/16 pure.

The picture on this post is one of our 50% ewes (Bella) with her 75% ram lamb (the ram lamb 'prince' also on the side-bar with a 75% ewe lamb). So we're 2/5s of the way there, and this blog will describe our efforts.

Hope you enjoy.