The effects of fat supplementation and weaning system on commercial milk yield and milk composition were determined on 129 East Friesian crossbred ewes. Prior to lambing, ewes were randomly assigned to one of two weaning systems. The DY1 system involved weaning of ewes from their lambs within 24 to 36 hr post-partum and then twice-daily machine milking. In the MIX system, ewes had access to the...

A study was conducted to estimate heritabilities of, and genetic correlations among, body weight (WT) and testicular measurements - scrotal circumference (SC), testicular diameter (TD), testicular length (TL) and epididymal diameter (ED) - in ram lambs between 6, 9 and 12 months old, and relationship of the testicular traits with age at puberty in ewe lambs (AP). Two fat-tailed sheep breeds, th...

The five Northern European short-tailed sheep breeds present in North America are the Finnsheep, Romanov, Icelandic, Shetland and Gotland. The Finnsheep and Romanov were first imported in 1966 and 1986, respectively, for their high reproductive performance. The Shetland, Icelandic and Gotland breeds were first imported in 1980, 1985 and 2005, respectively, for the uniqueness of their physical a...

20 one-month-old sanjabi suckling lambs (ten males and ten females with initial liveweight of 13.4 ± 1.3 and 11.6 ± 0.9, respectively) were used to assess the effect of ad libitum creep mixture on dry mater intake, live weight gain and carcass characteristics. the lambs were blocked within sex according to their live weight and randomly allocated to one of two treatments, control (free suckling...

In a comparative-slaughter experiment, individually rationed wether lambs initially of 42 kg were given 235, 362 or 456 kJ metabolizable energy (ME)/kg live weight (LW)0.75 per d as sodium hydroxide-treated barley straw with urea (six lambs per treatment), or NaOH-treated barley straw with urea plus 125 g/d white-fish meal to give 307 or 488 kJ ME/kg LW0.75 per d (seven lambs per treatment) for...

This study was carried out to investigate the effects of probiotics and Chinese medicine polysaccharides (CMP) on carcase characteristics, meat quality, muscle fibre type intramuscular fat deposition in lambs. Forty female lambs with 4-5 months old 21.69 ± 0.46 kg were randomly divided into four groups as follows: control, probiotics, CMP + groups. The results showed that supplemental increased...

The objective of the present study was to compare live animal performance and carcass characteristics of 3/4 or 7/8 Dorper (DO; n= 30), purebred Katahdin (KA; n= 20), purebred St. Croix (SC; n= 17) and purebred Suffolk (SU; n= 10) lambs born in the spring and fall of 2001. After weaning, lambs were supplemented with up to 680 g of a corn-soybean meal supplement while grazing bermudagrass pastur...

Long-distance dispersal (LDD) plays an important role in many population processes like colonization, range expansion, and epidemics. LDD of small particles like fungal spores is often a result of turbulent wind dispersal and is best described by functions with power-law behavior in the tails ("fat tailed"). The influence of fat-tailed LDD on population genetic structure is reported in this art...

Five microsatellite markers were selected for studying the DNA polymorphism of fat-tailed sheep, aiming to understand the genetic diversity of this species. The genetic diversity of five microsatellite markers (BL1038, BM757, BM4621, OarFCB304 and OarFCB48) in fat-tailed sheep population was detected through the native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. The results indicated that fat-tailed sh...