[Jacob-list] Comment on "American Jacob"

[Betty Berlenbach]

Hi, George,

I believe I have read somewhere or another something about the American jacob, or the original jacob parksheep, which roamed around estates with very little input from owners as a landrace.  I think of those original imports, before the later importations of sheep which were larger and "improved" as er flock doesn't look a whole lot different from my flock, in terms of the numbers of yucky horns, etc.  She, it could be argued, is in attitude, allowing a "landrace" to perpetuate.  To the extent that we have breeders who are line breeding to gain more predictable traits, we have standardized breed groups, but I think that some of these are very small, $16 a pound for at the New Hampshire Wool festival.  I think that each of our flocks is on a continuum with each of these women at the two ends, and most of us somewhere in the middle.  To me, standardized implies, almost,, some line breeding to imprint predictable traits.  In the case of my flock, for example, that will never happen.  And I try to buy from flocks where line breeding has not happened.  So, what I lose in predictability, I seem to gain in variety.  

I wonder, in this day and age, how many true landraces there are left in the world, except in very rural, isolated areas, which are few, so long as electricity is around the area.  Hence, all breeds, and to some extent, flocks, are on this aforementioned continuum between true landrace and true standardized breed.  It would seem that the old textbooks need to find new ways to talk about the divisions as technology leads us into the fifth generation and beyond.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: George L.Benedict 
  To: WenlochFrm at aol.com ; jacob-list at jacobsheep.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 8:45 AM
  Subject: Re: [Jacob-list] Comment on "American Jacob"


  Joan,
  I assume from your "famous quote" that you are chosing your own definition of the term landrace. Meanwhile the rest of us botonists and agronomists will continue with the broadly accepted definition in our textbooks. The American Jacob IS a standardized breed. Particularly with respect to color ratios and horn set, we breed for very restricted phenotypes and genotypes with respect to what would occur without the deliberate intervention of humans. Furthermore the term landrace is used by botanists and agronomists to indicate a local population highly adapted to local environmental conditions and selected by local farmers who have no organized breed organization or scientific approach to breeding. Presumably you think we are also "on the cusp" of having a standard for Jacobs. It looked pretty well written down and developed the last time I looked at JSC or JSBA literature.

  George

  PS
  Excerpt from one of my texts:
  "The term "landrace", a somewhat misleading direct transliteration of the German "Landraße" (which connotes autochthonous or indigenous race or variety), is widely applied to local, often genetically highly variable, crop variants or animals cultivated as part of traditional agriculture [Simmonds (1979) and Harlan (1992) contain useful discussions of landraces]. Both ecogeographic and human cultural contexts influence landrace evolution." 

  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.  
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