Almost every year I have a ewe or two that delivers an unplanned breeding. Either due to a ram breakout too early in the fall, or perhaps she lost a pregnancy early-on, and re-bred once all the rams were all together with the we group. Often I don’t care who the sire is, I just mark it down as “UNK” (unknown). Then, the lamb either goes to the slaughter channel, or I sell at a discount the mystery ewelambs as 50% recorded ewes.
This time, with those January triplets, I was interested in the parentage. The mother is a good ewe and I’d like to register them. So, I DNA tested them. I already had DNA banked on all my adult rams, and the cost is $18 per lamb to match them up with the appropriate sire. Er, sires.
As everyone probably knows, but doesn’t think about often, mammals can carry babies from multiple sires in the same pregnancy. (Yeah, even humans!) In this case, the ewe was in a whole pasture full of rams. I figured the adults wouldn’t have let the rookie ram lambs anywhere near her. I also guessed that the older ram might have driven away the three yearlings and would have sired all three lambs. I was right on the first count, wrong on the second! These three lambs each have a different father, all sired by (what were at the time) yearling rams. They sure do look different, although that isn’t unusual, even in single-sired sets.
Sometimes people do these kinds of matings on purpose, for various reasons, like preserving genetics in rare breeds. In NSIP, it’s referred to as a “syndicate mating.” (Doesn’t that sound collaborative? Like she was bred by a committee?) The database program into which we enter data would normally error-out on sibling lambs with different sires. So, I have learned, you have to remember to annotate them in the comment field with “DNA SIRE” to flag that they should be allowed through.
So, I have a “ram sampler” set. Every year, Mother Nature throws a curve ball or two!
The Collie Farm Blog 
February 5, 2017 at 11:23 pm
I think you have a really unique opportunity with these three lambs. The odds of duplicating this would have to be huge. It would be extra time, but considering you have NSIP data and the advantage of what would normally require three generations (relative to the ewe), it would be interesting to calculate expectancies and raise them together and see if actual values correlate with data estimates. If data from three sires is really similar, then there may not be much difference from the lambs. Still would be interesting to compare as opposed to multi-year data that always has some difference in feed, weather and management.
You didn’t specify the sexes, so raising all three in identical conditions might not be possible, and one lamb is not the same as generations of lambs. Of course triplets are much more variable than twins due to nursing time not always being equal either. Sure is an interesting dilemma though.
February 6, 2017 at 2:17 am
Joel, so true, but boo: there is one ram, two ewes, and I’d let one of the ewes become a bottle lamb, so I can’t compare them fairly. The bottle lamb happens to be out of a very high WWT/PWWT ram (top 3% in the country), though, and she is already much bigger than the other two. I think she’s getting more milk, as the dam is kinda thin from not being on the right feeding schedule, so the other two are probably getting mediocre milk. So I dunno know how much is milk vs growth genetics, or a little of both.
And, because they were born so much earlier than the rest of my crop, they won’t land in the same contemporary group comparison. So, their NSIP scores are a little bit shot, they’ll probably just have zeroes averaged in with their parents’ scores, because there is nothing to compare them to. Oh well, it’ll be interesting to at least informally compare them.
February 6, 2017 at 3:51 am
Is there no chance to bottle feed the ram? Maybe use a bottle rack or other holder so he doesn’t have to get handled much and then compare the two ewe lambs?
February 6, 2017 at 4:34 am
They’re already a month old, so it’s kind of water under the bridge. If I had known, I might have chosen differently. But, the lamb that did end up an orphan-rear was one of those that was particularly determined that she liked being a bottle/bucket lamb and didn’t want to work hard to learn to nurse off the dam. The other two were the reverse, they were very uninterested in bottle assistance after the first day. So, I just rolled with it.
February 7, 2017 at 2:28 pm
Proof positive to my question on an earlier blog post about multiple sires. Haha.
March 7, 2017 at 6:18 pm
[…] Seven tested positive, so that gave me a good guess as to which ones were likely bred earlier. One of those lambed in January. In early Feb, I looked at the remaining six and decided five were bagging up, so I brought them […]