[Jacob-list] Comment on "American Jacob"

[Edd Bissell]

  This does not characterise the modern Jacob as bred in the US.
   
  A landrace is a breed that has not been defined by a codified breed standard. For at least 200 years Jacobs have been bred for cosmetic and ornamental purposes and we in the US have taken this to an extreme when it comes to color ratios, horn conformation, eyelids, body size and weight and ,of late, heavy emphasis on fleece qualities.  

  -----------------

  Well, George - not everyone in the past who have bred Jacobs are the norm.  I for many, many years have used multiple rams, not selectively kept ewes for all of the normal aesthetic reasons i.e. wool, horn set, color percentages, etc.  There were as many fused horned, dark/light colored, etc ewes in my pasture as there were closed to the perfect ones.  I always let the buyer pick out what they wanted leaving me with the far from perfect ones. So there are those flocks or remnants that would probably adhere to the definition of a landrace.  Now, granted I did select my rams - leading me down a narrow genetic path with them.  And I did cull for split/eye/lids - BUT in the old original Jacobs there were VERY FEW with this condition.  If fact I had seen only one split eye lid until probably 10 years into the Jacobs.  And it came from a group of ewes that I had purchased early on at a sale in Mo.  And she was nowhere near a problem that I would run into later in my breeding years.  

  ==========
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.pairlist.net/pipermail/jacob-list/attachments/20010725/97b87ace/attachment.htm