Comments on: Soay ram lambs: Whether to wether, when, and how

By: Melissa

Melissa — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:33:14 +0000

Thanks so much for this post, Priscilla–it’s really useful information, and it’s great to have it as part of the regular “archive” of topics.

By: priscilla

priscilla — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:14:35 +0000

Hi Elizabeth, true confession time. This is the first year we have thought to compare yearling rams and wethers of the same age for size and horn variances before the wethers headed out to new homes. We will watch more carefully with this year’s ram lamb crop, that’s for sure. Our hunch, and believe me this is seat-of-the-pants not scientific, is that the earlier a ram is castrated, the larger the size differential will be, but we are fully prepared to have someone with more experience tell us we are wrong about this. As for the horn genotypes, it’s something Steve has wanted to investigate and you may well be right about the differing results in wethers. We cannot raise enough sheep to test your notion in action and so far we have not done a literature search either. If you find anything, let us know, and if we come across anything that might shed more light we will let you know.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:18:28 +0000

This is very helpful! I wonder when you start to notice the size difference between wethers and rams? Do you think, for the purpose of size of an 18-month-old Soay, that it makes a difference whether you castrate lambs or yearlings? I was leaning toward the later time because I like the larger horn growth; but your wethers seem to have nice horns! The yearling wethers I purchased only had tiny, invisible horn buds, even when they were almost two years old. Do you think this has more to do with age of castration, or with horn genetics?
Perhaps, for example, a wether with HO+/HOL might end up with horns (as it would if it were a ewe) but one with HOL/HOP might end up with no horns? Any thoughts?