Rat Tail???

[dun]

I dont understand why alacattleman's would refer to Redpoll52s remarks as B...S... but one thing for sure the SUPERGENE System is real B...S...

I think it may have had more to do with the doubting of the genetic link for rat tails and referring to at as poor managment.
But that's just what I think

 

[Malter]

Many years ago we had a problem in our sheep breeding programme with lambs born with excessive wool, about two inches long. They were usually twins and one was always often much larger than the other. They were always poor doers, and very vulnerable to stormy weather at birth but eventually they lost their "Hairy" appearance and always were sent off to the meat packers with the last of the seasons crop.
It was a widespread problem with up to one per cent occuring and many ideas were put forward from mineral deficiencies to bloodlines of base stock.
Using Blackface rams was supposed to be the cure. This improved the situation. It didnt cure it and the blackface ram sellers did better than others for a year or two but somehow we still had to produce white faced ewes as replacements.
Finally most people adopted the policy of culling or putting any ewe that had one of those lambs into a "non replacement" flockand mating them with a blackface ram.
We identified 30 ewes out of 1500 and the problem disappeared.
Would similar policies work for your Rat Tail problems.

 

[dun]

Many years ago we had a problem in our sheep breeding programme with lambs born with excessive wool, about two inches long. They were usually twins and one was always often much larger than the other. They were always poor doers, and very vulnerable to stormy weather at birth but eventually they lost their "Hairy" appearance and always were sent off to the meat packers with the last of the seasons crop.
It was a widespread problem with up to one per cent occuring and many ideas were put forward from mineral deficiencies to bloodlines of base stock.
Using Blackface rams was supposed to be the cure. This improved the situation. It didnt cure it and the blackface ram sellers did better than others for a year or two but somehow we still had to produce white faced ewes as replacements.
Finally most people adopted the policy of culling or putting any ewe that had one of those lambs into a "non replacement" flockand mating them with a blackface ram.
We identified 30 ewes out of 1500 and the problem disappeared.
Would similar policies work for your Rat Tail problems.

It's both much simpler and harder with rattails. It's as simple as a diluter gene and a black gene pairing up. For as often as blacks are bred to diluters it still a very rare occurence. The harder part is you might make the identical mating with the exact same animals 10 years in a row and never get one.