[cairnhill]

Hi everyone

My ear tags arrived today and I think they are far too big for my Hebridean lamb's tiny ears.  I had only seen a picture of them as a sample was not available and therefore could not judge size.  Can anyone suggest a small size tag that doesnt punch out half of the ear when applied.   

thanks
Anna

[supplies for smallholders]

Hi,

I presume you have got the "Button" type EID Tags?

There will be EID Lamb Tags and EID Qwik tags becoming available - I will check to see if the tooling is sorted out for these yet.

Thanks

[cairnhill]

The ones I got are from Ritchey and look like golf tees, RD2000's i think.

[Fleecewife]

Owners of small breed sheep are having big problems with tags, especially if they tag at birth to sell ewes with lambs at foot.  One such breeder lost 80% of the tags and his lambs had horribly split ears - which apart from the welfare issue at the time, means that they can never be tagged as there's nothing left to hold the tag. There is a tag which has a thin pin - think it's by Allitag but I'll look up the details and URL later for you - at least if that pulls out it doesn't leave such a huge wound.  Leave tagging as late as possible so the ears have grown a bit and if they are staying with you perhaps you could get away with the EID one staying in the box.  Also it could be better to put the tag in over the top of the ear rather than dangling under it - stronger ray apparently.  We had hoped RBST would have taken this up but we haven't seen that they have yet.
We haven't bought our tags yet - listening to the stories and trying to decide what to do.

[kanisha]

yep  I would be interested to know how soay breeders deal with this as well  as I will be having the same problem whats the point in not tagging the lambs if you can't tell whose who.

[kanisha]

for some reason my pc won't allow me to open this page tells me its a potential problem page??

[Fleecewife]

Hi Kanisha
We use turkey wing tags at birth to identify the lambs - Soay and Hebridean.  They are tiny with 3 numbers on and look like a tiny padlock.  The wire loop is just pushed through the ear then clicked shut, so mimimal trauma.  They do occasionally lose one but it's not a major problem.  Then at 4 months ie weaning we swap for the bigger permanent tags and cross-ref the numbers.  The tags come from Roxanne and can be re-used if you clean them. This year our Soays are a variety of colours and we can tell them all apart so we didn't bother with the turkey wing tags.

[supplies for smallholders]

for some reason my pc won't allow me to open this page tells me its a potential problem page??

Hi,

If you ever see that warning DONT enter a site.

The site has been compromised by a hack of some sort and google has issued the warning that you see.

Thanks

[kanisha]

Hi Fleece wife we have a derrogation to allow us to use turkey wing type tags permanently on ouessants. they are lightweight aluminium with a bend in them and have my flock and individual registration number on them however once lost the number can't be re issued the  sheep gets a new number.  I am not really in favour of tagging and then retagging my sheep I know one breeder who does as you and uses the lightweight ones on his lambs and then re tags with tip tags later. only trouble is even the tip tags are large and I hate looking at my sheep with yellow butterflies on their ears.  I am keeping everything crossed we get a derrogation but I'm not holding out a lot of hopê

how come you got lots of colours with your soays??  out of interest do you have spotting in your soays as well?

[Fleecewife]

Hi Kanisha
Do you have to have EIDs in France this year?  How will that work with the turkey wing tags?  Here they didn't even try to get a derogation for small breeds - if there's an EU rule then Britain will apply it even more zealously than any Brussels bureaucrat could ever have dreamed of 

The colours in our Soays came about because the first ewes (unreg) we had were black, with a dark mouflon tup.  Some of the lambs were black, some moorit and some mouflon.  Then when we decided to go the registered route, we tried to find blacks and found they were very rare on mainland Britain.  We bought up all we could find - about 4 or 5 !  From one black to black mating two years running we got a piebald (ewe lamb) and a black lamb.  This last year we bought in a piebald tup for those piebald ewes and have piebald lambs plus blacks and moorits from the black to black matings.  White is extremely rare in Soays and is really spotting, so our nearly white ewe lamb really has one giant white spot !  On St Kilda, about 5% of Soays are black but piebald is extremely rare. However, there are a couple of big breeders in England who specialise in piebalds so they are now disproportionately common.  We quite like them because we used to keep Jacobs and Piebald Soays look rather like seriously deformed Jacobs    We have one dark mouflon patterned ewe hogg which I bought last year as I felt we should have some traditional coloured Soays and they are so beautiful, like little deer. Although her lambs will be mouflon they will all be black carriers as I will run her with the black tup.

[bazzais]

The http://www. tagmaster-uk .com/index.html link needs to be edited out of the post above as it has got malware warnings on the site, as has been mentioned - they may be un-aware of it on the site.

Secondly I like to add to the thread.

We are leaving our tagging till later as nothings has left the farm yet, but we are soon going to need some.

We had two new goats last week and their tags are far to big for them imo.  You go through all the trouble and pain in de-horning the poor little bastards to stop them getting stuck in fences for one then you have the put something thats more likely to catch on stuff in their ears.  At least if they got stuck with horn youd just find them after an hour or two with a bit of a fluster. With ears tags its hello split ear.

These things in our new ones are like golf tees but bigger, one in each ears too poor bastards.

What happened to designing stuff thats ergonomic did it end with humans, now I know its nice to be able to read a tag from a glance but it never really happens, you normally got to have them in a pen or race. Why cant they do tags that have a flat rubber tailed top thats easy to read from top with your eye and then the eid in the bottom so its in the protection of the ear flap.

Or better still if you have only got a few animals - smaller tags as you dont have to read them in a hurry in a pen as they go through.


Ta

Baz

[kanisha]

Hi Kanisha
Do you have to have EIDs in France this year?  How will that work with the turkey wing tags?  Here they didn't even try to get a derogation for small breeds - if there's an EU rule then Britain will apply it even more zealously than any Brussels bureaucrat could ever have dreamed of 

The colours in our Soays came about because the first ewes (unreg) we had were black, with a dark mouflon tup.  Some of the lambs were black, some moorit and some mouflon.  Then when we decided to go the registered route, we tried to find blacks and found they were very rare on mainland Britain.  We bought up all we could find - about 4 or 5 !  From one black to black mating two years running we got a piebald (ewe lamb) and a black lamb.  This last year we bought in a piebald tup for those piebald ewes and have piebald lambs plus blacks and moorits from the black to black matings.  White is extremely rare in Soays and is really spotting, so our nearly white ewe lamb really has one giant white spot !  On St Kilda, about 5% of Soays are black but piebald is extremely rare. However, there are a couple of big breeders in England who specialise in piebalds so they are now disproportionately common.  We quite like them because we used to keep Jacobs and Piebald Soays look rather like seriously deformed Jacobs    We have one dark mouflon patterned ewe hogg which I bought last year as I felt we should have some traditional coloured Soays and they are so beautiful, like little deer. Although her lambs will be mouflon they will all be black carriers as I will run her with the black tup.

Hi Fleecewife. The powers that be in ouessant land don't see a problem with the new eid tags so for the moment no request for a derogation but I think that will change judging by the comments here.... This year any lambs born beofre jumy get turkey tags ( amazing how many lambs are born before july this year!)
I have a stash of tags and will continue with them next year until t he fuss dies down and everyone works out whats going to be done only slight fly in the oinment will be that I show my sheep and should I suppose use eid tags for the shown sheep. we'll see when someone gets some!

I have a passion for colour genetics  it sounds as if you have the whole gamut with the soays. white spotting is a rareity in ouessants  Is the soay breed soay ( is there one) have any views on all the non standard spots?

[Fleecewife]

Hi Kanisha
The Soay Sheep Society is very small and registrations are still via the Combined Flock Book of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, so the SSS doesn't really have any control.  Spots etc are fine as we are trying to keep as much diversity as possible in the breed and there are enough mouflon pattern at the moment that it's not a problem yet.  Blacks and self moorit are the ones which we need to watch - I am not aware of anyone else breeding for the moorits so I am trying to spread them around.  Two of the biggest breeders go for the spotties and they are also on the SSS committee.  There is masses of research being done at Edinburgh Uni into the wild population of Soays on St Kilda, producing some interesting results.  One thing is about worms - it had been assumed that wild populations would be resistant to a high worm burden but they have found that the biggest killer (apart from population crashes which arise periodically because of overpopulation) is in fact worms.  This explains what we have noticed that our Soays are far more prone to symptoms from worms than our Hebrideans, which appear to have high resistance (I don't mean worm resistance to wormers, but the sheep being resistant to the worm burden itself - we worm as required, and the Soays require more often than Hebs)
Even the wild Soays have to have ear tags, except on Soay island which no-one can get to as the cliffs are too precipitous. Not sure if they have to have the EID component.