You're right Sally, I do have a soft spot for Nez Noire de Valais - I became aware of them long before Adam did his visit and just fell for a picture of a lamb at a wool event. But I'm laughing my head off at folk importing them at such vast expense.
When I saw them in person at the Smallholders show, I was surprised that a) they are huge, and b) their fleece is not very nice, from a spinners point of view. I also wonder how they would adapt from their native environment: largely our wet, v their relative dry. All that heavy fleece in our endless rain could mean they struggle outdoors.
As for embryo transplant per se, I have mixed feelings. One of my sons worked with the Dolly team, so I have an insider's view to some extent - not all positive. However, I almost became involved in embryo transfer myself when I was trying to get a 'fallback' flock established in Oz. The reason behind that was that in the aftermath of the horrors of F&M, we realised that all the Hebs were in Britain, so very vulnerable to extinction by Government policy. Unfortunately, the importer, who lived on a small island off the Oz coast, in the end couldn't afford the costs involved, so the plan fell through. In that situation, embryo transfer (in this case into a maternal hostess of a different local breed) was the only way to get the animals into Oz. All to do with Scrapie Resistance genetics. So I think it has it's place, and of course it's a scientific breakthrough tada. In the case of the Hebs, as an extra protection for Oz from Scrapie, all the donor Heb ewes here, would have had to be slaughtered after egg collection, so their brains could be checked for signs of scrapie itself. Well, no-one was going to give up their quality stock for that, so the Ozzie animals could have ended up as being second rate. I've not totally forgotten the scheme and its purpose of creating a small nucleus of a British rare breed as far away from here as possible, as an insurance policy, but I'll let others actually do it.
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