- Location
- Dumfries & Galloway
Yeh along side mules and texel x mules. The pures lambs were far too slow at growing, pure ewes and even x lleyns had the worse mastitis ive seen, poor milk yields and never held there condition anything like a texel x mule does. If they worked like they have for you and some others id have a full flock of lleyns too but id never go back again.
Slow growing lambs compared to what though?
I'm really surprised at the mastitis and lack of milk comments (not just from you). I've had 2 ewes with mastitis this year (out of 600) - the first triplet ewe, her bag was buggered when she lambed and I got a ewe this morning... I can't recall any mastitis last year. The Lleyn does have a smaller bag with finer tits, compared to the Mule (which has big advantages in itself - less blown tits and no bags dragging on the ground for instance).
Hard to say what's going on there with not milking.
Sadly, as has been said many times before - the rapid growth of the breed meant a lot of people got on the bandwagon and graded up from any old sheep they had running. They didn't cull the crap, they were only interested in getting as many 'pure' as quickly as possible so that they could exploit the new found demand.
I won't deny the breed is made up of the good the bad and the ugly. That's why I don't really advocate buying females too much