Gene study shows sheep not inbred fools

Well, the article is half right. Better then weathermen used to be on channel 4. It must pain this author to admit there are separate breeds of sheep at all!

Quote :

But the main goal of sheep breeding over time appears to be the removal of horns.

"When we looked into the data we could see that there was a single gene that causes absence or presence of horns," says Kijas.

"The absence of horns is a highly desirable attribute that sheep breeders have been breeding into their animals for many hundreds of years and its left this detectable signature that we were able to find in the data."

Australian sheep growers could use selective breeding practices to eventually phase out mulesing, says Kijas. Mulesing, which involves removing flaps of skin from the rear of sheep to prevent flystrike, is considered by some as an unnecessary painful procedure.

I find this to be odd. The main goal in sheep breeding, moving from wild to domestic was to move the wild hair sheep into being domesticated wool sheep. Maybe they are only dealing with the traits after domestication.

The wrinkle issue is more based on ease of shearing, I've read. Fly strikes are sure to be a part of that but I guess all that I have read before was skewed towards the practical issue. The article generally makes the Merino appear to be a mongrel breed.