A long time ago, the Ewe Win blog wrote an interesting post about two distinct body types they get in Katahdin lambs, and it generated a lot of good discussion. I’d not had any such extreme variances, until now. This year, I got one of the strange “B types” discussed there. Just look at him, he looks like a baby camel, or a whippet, or a praying mantis. Or something. In my mind, I’ve been calling him the Dromedary Lamb.
He has a regular-looking ewe sibling. And, as cited in the post above, even though he looks skeletal, he was a full two pounds heavier than his twin at birth, And, they appeared to have similar-sized frames. Peculiar! It would seem perhaps that heavy bone gives a scale advantage, even if it doesn’t come with the musculature we desire.
In the photo below, he’s next to some very standard-looking lambs, and you can see the stark contrast in type. He always stands kind of hunched, as if he doesn’t yet know what to do with all of that running gear.
His dam is a short-legged fatty out of my fatty from Montana. He is out of my new lunker of a ram, who is out of a fancy White Post Farm sire. I have no idea if that has anything to do with it, but I can sort of imagine the sire looking like this as a lamb. All legs and joints and angles and long everything. And, no…. I’m not sure how to capture what he’s missing- fleshiness? It doesn’t help that his baby wool is tight and crimpy, accentuating his gigantic bone structure.
I can’t decide if he’s my worst, weirdest lamb that should just be castrated and sold as a butcher lamb; or if he’s some amazing outlier that will blow the NSIP growth metrics out of the water. We shall see, I’m trying to keep an open mind. But he sure is odd looking!
June 1, 2012 at 6:03 am
Oh, give the guy a chance. You may have introduced to the world a whole new kind of super-lamb!
June 1, 2012 at 1:17 pm
My experience with this kind of lamb (my flock is small and its Icelandic) is that they finish out at a really nice size.
June 1, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Thank you for the reference back to my original post on this subject. He exhibits all of the same charateristics of the Type “B”- tight, curly wool type coat, hunched stature, big bones, odd neck…. You can see those charateristics in the pictures on my blog as well. If you were to grow him out, you would begin to think he has no “butt” and that his shoulders were more massive than Type “A”. Based on my own experience, he is neither your “best” nor your “worst”. At the butcher, I have found that they still have good lenght of loin, and good “leg” cuts.
Of course if you don’t want to continue to get this type of lamb in the future, don’t keep him for breeding- but my guess is that based on your new ram, you will get more of it in the future anyway. I think this style is more common in the Eastern US. At a KHSI meeting YEARS ago I brought it up to one of the “biggies” in the organization and they had no idea what I was talking about. When I finally got to go to their farm, they had all Style B- so then I understood why she didn’t understand what I was talking about- that is what a lamb looked like to her.
June 1, 2012 at 2:55 pm
How about keeping him for the Muslim community. That way you keep him intact and if he grows like crazy you can use him or if its unimpressive you sell him to the muslims since they want him intact anyway.
June 1, 2012 at 8:13 pm
By the “schmootz” on his face I would also think that his mother may not be nursing him well. Does the sibling have it as well? We usually see it on young ewes that are not milking too well.
June 1, 2012 at 8:31 pm
Ewewin- yeeks, I’m not sure I could cope with an entire flock of lambs that look like this- they are so not very cute!
I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t keep him for breeding for myself, but wondered if he ends up with strong NSIP metrics, with the sought-after Eastern lines (which are hard to get way out West), if someone else would prefer him. I only had 6 lambs out of this new ram, but the other 5 are typical, so it’s funny that this wildcard got thrown in. It’ll be interesting to see how many more I get in the future when I use him more!
I wonder what set of traits this type comes with that we don’t know about- good or bad? It is such a distinctive set of phenotypical traits, I have to imagine that there must be a whole batch of genotypical traits that come with it that are different than the standard look we are used to.
June 1, 2012 at 8:34 pm
Bill- yes, the messy face is from “nursing up the back” such that they get pooped and peed on. I, too, sometimes associate it with a nursing problem, where maybe a ewe is not being friendly to a lamb so he’s hiding back there, or it’s a lamb that’s bumming off of other ewes from behind so they don’t know who it is. I don’t think this guy is doing that though, and his momma likes him, so I think sometimes it’s just random that they get into the habit of nursing backwards. He seems cleaner now, so maybe it was a one time thing.
June 1, 2012 at 8:37 pm
ellenseggs, I’ll decide whether to keep him intact after the 60 day weighing. I usually keep a small percentage intact to sell as breeding rams, but don’t like to keep too many, as then they are extra management work for me. I do sell intact rams to the butcher market regardless of market (ethnic or otherwise); but if he doesn’t make the cut, he’ll get cut- no pun intended!
June 1, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Andrea- I’m curious about Icelandics- in your experience with lambs that look like this, but a “nice size” do you mean big or small compared to the average?
June 2, 2012 at 4:59 am
CF, that little gent is an ovine example of a hobbledehoy! TMJ
June 3, 2012 at 3:58 am
Nice, TMJ, well, I’ll have to consider that for a name if he becomes a pet.
June 3, 2012 at 5:23 am
CF…names? Whatever happened to 2046?? TMJ
June 3, 2012 at 5:22 pm
TMJ, yes, well this one is #2031, and he’ll stay that way if he’s a butcher lamb. But sometimes breeding rams get names. My flock sires have them, though they certainly don’t know them, and they are dumb names- it just makes it easier to read since they appear in a lot of data manipulation.
June 4, 2012 at 1:21 am
Cf, so much for “spring” lambs, right? The summer solstice is just around the corner. Do you suppose those six ewes had “headaches” when the guys were on the prowl? Or is your sheep ranch on the “A lamb for all Seasons” schedule? I’m interested in the aka’s of the rams (aside from the numerical). Are you reluctant to share them? The naming of animals tells much about their owners, you know. I drove by your spread yesterday and saw neither wool nor fleece of the woolies. Where are they? TMJ
June 4, 2012 at 1:50 am
LOL, TMJ, well they are not complying with the program I’ve set out for them! I’d like them to all lamb at the same time, but sometimes they abort, resorb, or whatever and then come back into heat. And a few of the yearlings didn’t seem to take, they may have just been too immature, or lost fetuses and then didn’t come back into heat. Usually the reduction in daylight length is what kicks them into heat, so some won’t breed at all if it’s not in the Aug-Nov window. Ones that will breed aseasonally are extra-value sheep. With those, you can get three lamb crops in two years, which is cool.
Ram names: Liberace (“Lee” to friends
), Lefty, Lumpy and Scooby. 
Somehow I just can’t join the ranks of the people who name their rams fancy pedigree monikers like “Elite Generation” or “Cornerstone”- I defy the trend. And I’ve realized that official names never last anyway, all of our animals end up with dumb nicknames that stick, so I’ve just come to terms with that.
The sheep are out there- they’ve been in some particularly tall grass the last week or so, so may have just been invisible, especially if they were laying down in the heat of the day.
June 4, 2012 at 2:09 am
Cf, I’ll look closer next time. Heat of the day? That’s a chuckler…where did you come up with that one? Re: sheep and hifalutin’ names. Common names are much more exotic. Cats, according to T. S. Eliot, have to have at least three names (ours: “Ezra,” “Doozers,” “Mr. B.” or just plain “Mr.”). By the way, do you play the piano??? TMJ
June 5, 2012 at 4:46 am
No piano here, unless lessons in 3rd grade count…
June 8, 2012 at 3:27 am
CF, 3rd grade, eh? Just enough time to master “Chopsticks.” TMJ
June 8, 2012 at 3:42 am
Yes, and The Entertainer.
June 8, 2012 at 3:38 pm
CF… and probably in the key of “C.” A little trivia for you: did you know “The Maple Leaf Rag” was the first piece of sheet music ever to sell a million copies? TMJ
June 8, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Makes me think of the Gala apple. If I remember the story right, it was a whip, found in a ditch… And now….
June 9, 2012 at 3:51 pm
adalynfarm- it could happen, those outliers are what help us make big leaps! I would hope that they would be attractive outliers though!
As it turns out, I did 60 day weights last night, and he has fallen behind his sister and is generally at the bottom of the pack. So his future is locked in as a wether…
December 14, 2012 at 5:26 pm
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