Ideal Sheep

Dear Folks -
Over the week-end I received the 2011 Tunis Sheep Directory from the national registry. Very interesting to learn some new things about the sheep I love. Like rows of mailboxes, the breed must have certain characteristics, but is allowed variation within the standard.

The registry's list of ideal characteristics includes "pink skin" -- look at that rosy nose on Hunky! The standard also lists "white on crown of head and/or tip of tail" -- look at all the lambs, here and on the Farm's webpage! The twins (also an ideal characteristic) all have white caps and Harmony's (now missing) tail exhibits desirable white marking as well. Even King, the growthy singleton, showed a few white hairs when he was born. Because of the breed's "slight fat tail," standards call for not docking the tail too short. For whatever reason, tail docking has been a difficult thing for me to figure out. One of the CVM ewes we got from Cunnington Farms in Moab, Utah has an undocked tail which took a little getting use to - just very different looking for what you expect to see. The other extreme are tails docked so shockingly short that there is the real possibility of prolapse during labor and delivery of lambs. I finally found a printed ruling for our local county and state fairs that seems reasonable to me: the judge has to be able to lift the sheep's tail during judging.

It's interesting to look at the tops of heads of both rams and ewes and see where horns might have grown (that little curly looking place below on King's head). One of the original reasons I was attracted to Tunis sheep was because they are a polled (or hornless) breed. It's nice to read that the registry standards disqualify any horned ewe or ram and fault any ram with scurs (or vestigial horns). All in all, I felt very good about the sheep we have, the lambs we got, and I can project promise into the future. Not bad from one slick-paper publication.


Thinking of ewe - The Shepherd