Pruritic behaviour and deranged fleece are often used as indicators of sheep louse infestation but the exact relationship between infestation and the observation of signs of pruritus was unclear. Two studies were conducted to examine this association. In the first, 24 castrate Merino sheep were randomly assigned to six pens in groups of four and the sheep in three pens infested with 10 lice eac...

Sustainable rural development depends on a multidimensional process based the interaction of economic, cultural, social, environmental, and political subsystems. Many studies have ascribed extensive livestock systems potential role in sustainable development. Sheep farming Europe involves meat or dairy breeds that produce coarse wool unsuitable for textile use. Coarse has been historically used...

forty sheep skins were allocated into two groups. group one was sheared using shearing machine and group two was chemically dewooled using 15 percent sodium sulfide. results indicated that fibre diameter of slipewool (39.3 ± 2.3 µm) was significantly (p< 0.05) higher than the sheared wool fibers (36.3 ± 0.7 µm), but staple length of slipewool (3.3 ± 0.7 cm) was significantly (p< 0.05) lower tha...

In this study, all the hairs and their follicles characteristics of Iranian Bakhtiari sheep were investigated. A total of 48 healthy Bakhtiari sheep (aged 5-8 months) were selected and categorized on the basis of sex (24 females and 24 males). Samples were taken as small pieces from different regions of the skin, fixed and stained with haematoxylin and eosin. The following indices in each piece...

Sheep and goat breeds are selected worldwide for meat, wool, and dairy production, and breeding objectives also include other functional traits such as reproductive performance and disease resistance. In early 2007, the development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) allowed de novo sequencing of sheep (Jiang et al., 2014) and goat genomes (Dong et al., 2013). In turn, it offered an opportunity...

The short-tailed sheep, native of an area stretching from Russia to Iceland, are generally considered a primitive type. These robust northern sheep seem to have been spread by Norse vikings to several countries in this area from the late eighth century to the middle of the eleventh century ad. They have several common characteristics in addition to the fluke-shaped and tapered short tail, such ...

The organisation of the domestic bovid genomes is very similar, thus ovine and caprine genome mapping may benefit from the most advanced bovine map. At present, there have been identified over 2000 markers in the sheep and over 700 in the goat. Recently, several spectacular examples of the genome map application for the identification of loci controlling important traits have been reported, for...

• The average annual economic loss due to OJD infection on farms was $7.68 per DSE or $65.92 per hectare. These figures represent the cost of premature sheep deaths, and lost wool and lamb production. There was substantial variation between farms, with some properties losing as much as $244.80 per hectare. Losses due to trading restrictions and variable input costs have not been included in the...

Molecular genetics provides an increasing capacity to modulate the function of individual genes, but the practical implications of these technologies are still poorly understood. This study examined adult Merino or Merino-cross sheep that had an additional copy of the ovine GH gene with a modified metal-lothionine promoter, which resulted in a doubling of the plasma concentration of GH. Previou...