Every year at the winter solstice, usually December 21st, sheep horns (and for that matter all heritage sheep and other mammals’ horns as far as I have been able to determine) begin growing, a process that lasts for about three months and then tapers off through the spring and stops until the next December. To […]
Without doubt the longest-standing widespread myth about Soay sheep is that they “lack the flocking instinct of many breeds. Attempts to work them using sheep dogs result in a scattering of the group.” As far as I know, this statement first appeared in an old writeup about Soay sheep on a site associated with the […]
The third in a series of posts about white spotting. Part I addressed a series of questions about the frequency of white spotting in Soay sheep, whether skewbald is “normal” in Soay, and whether breeders should try to get more or less white spotting in their flocks. Part II presented extensive lambing data in an […]