- Location
- Highland
Watched this last night, it was excellent. Mark Ferguson of Nextgen New Zealand. They have scoring systems and years of research, plus mountains of data on the many factors causing bad feet and strike in Merinos. Big takeaways:
1) both are highly heritable and can fairly easily be bred out of the flock by tup selection and removing bad feet/struck ewes. Shouldn't be tolerated and no second chances
2) both controlled by many genes so there's no magic bullet genetic test
3) what you see is what you get, sheep that resist either or both are actually genetically resistant.
4) IIRC as mentioned on here before, flystrike-prone sheep produce a fly attraction odour, so much so that they've been able to train sniffer dogs to detect the susceptible sheep.
I have maintained for years that scouring sheep are not wormy; they just have defective digestion and shouldn't be kept. Plenty sheep in the field not scouring! He confirms this, and that it's not worm related. They found sheep with high worm burdens not scouring, and scouring sheep with low worm burdens.
We'll be adjusting our expectations and marking/retention systems accordingly.
1) both are highly heritable and can fairly easily be bred out of the flock by tup selection and removing bad feet/struck ewes. Shouldn't be tolerated and no second chances
2) both controlled by many genes so there's no magic bullet genetic test
3) what you see is what you get, sheep that resist either or both are actually genetically resistant.
4) IIRC as mentioned on here before, flystrike-prone sheep produce a fly attraction odour, so much so that they've been able to train sniffer dogs to detect the susceptible sheep.
I have maintained for years that scouring sheep are not wormy; they just have defective digestion and shouldn't be kept. Plenty sheep in the field not scouring! He confirms this, and that it's not worm related. They found sheep with high worm burdens not scouring, and scouring sheep with low worm burdens.
We'll be adjusting our expectations and marking/retention systems accordingly.
