Ladies and Gentlemen in the Blackfaced Sheep breeder’s world stand up and take a bow.  You are a shining example to all those who would set out to breed livestock.  And why do I think you mention such special mention amongst all of the other breeds that have made the headlines this year?  No, it’s not the plethora of five figure prices or even the anecdotal evidence about how much whisky that was drunk in the bar at the Newton Stewart tup sale.  No, it’s simply this.  I salute you because the word of the breeder is all that is required to satisfy any potential purchaser of the lineage of the animal that is being sold in the ring.  It’s a simple system that seems to have served the breed well enough and any suggestion to do otherwise should be avoided like the plague. 

I suspect it is just the sheer scale of the task that has meant that no formal record is kept of the pedigrees of Blackfaced sheep. The Blackfaced breed is the most numerous in the UK and will run to several million, no doubt, if they were all rounded up and counted.  The breed’s annual yearbook, which contains the highlights of each of the sales, is as close as you get to a permanent record of bloodlines.  It also has the added attraction of containing photographs which will be visited time and time again by those who love the breed.

The reason that I am beginning to see some merit in the Blackie system, where everyone is content with a minimalistic approach to pedigrees, is because I’m beginning to get a bit browned off with the extremes that some other breeds are going to. 

The Beltex Sheep Breeder’s Association, for instance, maintains a brilliant database which my wife and I love to use to study the pedigrees of animals that interest us.  You would think that this would be far better than the Blackie word of mouth system.  Indeed it is far better.  You can look up any sheep in the database and click on its name or number to display the sheep’s own parentage or any progeny that is bred from it.  So what could be better?  This level of recording would seem to offer any potential purchaser of livestock an enormous amount of information and a guarantee that what he was buying was exactly what it said on the tin.  That is, as long as you chose to believe, as the Blackie men do, the information that the breeder of the animal has given about its parentage.

Sadly, today the modern phenomenon of widely available and affordable DNA testing has presented the paranoid minority that lurk in every breed society and association committee a new toy to play with. 

Many cattle breeders already have to submit DNA material from bulls that are to be registered and now Beltex sheep breeders are the latest to join the circus.

This year all Beltex breeders will be obliged to have their vet take blood samples from all of their stock rams that are used to produce their 2010 crop of lambs and submit it for DNA testing.  From this information, I would imagine that, the society body will be able to run paternity tests on any member’s lambs next year.    

Thus the full might of science will be brought down to bear on each and every one of us that register birth details on the society database.  And what might this all prove?  It will prove that every honest breeder will be as good as their word; the same system that they use in the Blackfaced sheep breed but without the added expense of vets and laboratories. 

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