The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: Fluffywelshsheep on September 25, 2008, 06:13:02 pm
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Okay On Wednesday, I was out and about doing my jobs that i had to finish this week and i lead me to Callendar (well the outskirts of it).
I needed to Visit a couple of farms, While driving up to the farm I happened apon Orange sheep in a field to my left handside.
After googling i found this
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8716290618398057063 (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8716290618398057063)
Now i now why
Linz
btw if you click on more links on google you get some really good info too.
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Hiya,
I'm afraid I can beat that ! :o
Last year while doing the M8 commute from Glasgow to Edinburgh I passed the pyramid hills one day (I'm sure there's a proper name for the place, but don't know it) they usually have sheep grazing there - only this particular day they were RED :o, yes really !
I'm not sure if there was a reason (although it was round about comic relief time)maybe the farmer was just having a laugh !
Hopefully, someone else on here saw them and will back me up on this so I know that I wasn't seeing things - lol !
Karen :pig:
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There is a reason well several but this is the one often quoted; there is a tradition amongst scottish blackface sheep owners of taking their sheep to shows dyed orange the stroy goes that the farmer could see the brightly coloured ram moving across the ewes on the side of a hill.
Now the biological explanation because there really are orange sheep!
heres one
(http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd278/SperedBreizh/)
this photo and sheep are not photo shopped dyed or in any way enhanced. nor is it a result of mud colour or other natural phenomena its colour genetics!!!!!
in shetland sheep there exists a gene which is curently being explored its called colour modification and it changes coloure d sheep to make them a few shades lighter; most shetlands these days are so purely bred for even colour the often fading red tones are bred out of them but in sheep that stil have red ( phaeomelanin ) this colour modifiying gene changes the normally dull browny red to something far more intense and so you get orange sheep! the colour eventually fades out but in intense animals last until at least after the first shear. The sheep in the photo by the way is a ouessant. it is most likely that a stray shetland gene moved across and mated with a scottish blackface hence the original ( many moons ago) orange from time to time scottish blackface;
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Brilliant :)
I do understand you get the Gean thing but one i saw where Orange dyed .
Some one on a website wrote 'It looked like a field with heinz beans with leggs in' lol.
RE Orange sheep the original 'see you Jimmy' was a sheep !!!!!!!!!!
Lol
linz
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yep they are now dyed because the understanding o f the recessive genetics has never been explained until very recently so the practice of h aving orange sheep has been continued only now they dye them where once many many years ago they occurred naturally; the other thing is that with the fixing of the breeds shetlands are no longer able to mix as freely with SBF not every shetland carries the colour modifying gene and even if it did it would take two carriers and only a one in four chance of a modified coloured lamb and then one that had intense phaeomelanin in other words they're rare !
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thanks :)
I now know more sheep stuff lol
:)