Livestock > Sheep

EID ear tags

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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:

--- Quote from: Fleecewife on May 29, 2010, 12:48:29 am ---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  ;D  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.

--- End quote ---

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.

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