How Many Kinds Of Sheep Are There?

Long ago, on the back of a donkey, I had a lot of time on my hands to contemplate sheep, or at least the counting of sheep while wide awake with fright. So I know a little about sheep and recently thought that simply telling you about Walking With Rosalio, just doesn't give others the fascinating insights into all the different kinds of sheep.

Depending upon your source or sources, the answer to how many different kinds of sheep exist -- will often lead you to widely differing answers. Some modern day sources will say that there are only slightly more than two hundred domestic breeds of sheep. Other sources will claim that there are really more than a thousand different types of sheep. One thing is certain, there are more varieties of sheep than cattle or dogs.

Just as man has been able by careful selection for generations to develop many different breeds of dogs and cattle, so we find that many distinct breeds of sheep which differ more or less. All have one or more qualities, such as hardiness, flesh, or type of wool, which are valuable in a particular market.

So many breeds have been developed that it is hard to group them all. Generally, European breeds of sheep have the most varieties, but Spain and France have the most famous breeds. Most sheep came originally from one of these countries. Sheep may be divided in several different ways. There are mutton breeds, wool breeds, mountain breeds, lowland breeds, long-wools, medium-wools, short-wools, and so on.

It is impossible to discover who first tamed sheep. However, it must have been in the Mediterranean region, probably in western Asia, for that is where the wild sheep live from which the tame ones came.

Since wild sheep are hairy, they were probably tamed for mutton and for the shaggy clothes their skins would make.

After a while someone saw that their wool could be used, perhaps first for making felt cloth. Each year sheep shed their coats and grow new ones. The mixed wool and hair sticks together when wet to make a crude felt.

The more woolly sheep were kept for breeding when this was discovered, and many years later shearing was invented and the wool was spun into threads for weaving. The people who first kept records had been shearing, spinning, and weaving wool for generations, so we will never know who learned these arts first, or when.

Although for centuries men have been breeding sheep that grow good fleeces, unless the flocks are cared for and only the better ones allowed to breed, sheep revert back to coarse wool and hair.

Even what food sheep eat affects the quality of their fleece. Flocks that have the lush grass and moisture of the lowlands do not grow the best wool. Those that live on the colder hills, where food is less abundant, have the finest fleeces.

Sheep are not very intelligent animals, especially the lowland breeds which cannot look out for themselves. They have some deep-seated instincts. whatever the leader of a flock does, the others will do. In slaughterhouses, a goat is sometimes kept to lead the sheep in to their death. The goat knows the way that is strange to the sheep and the trusting sheep follow without questioning or fear.

It is recorded in history that once in Grenoble, France, two thousand sheep were being brought down from their mountain pasture in the autumn. A dog frightened the leading ram, which jumped down a precipice. The whole flock followed and plunged down to death, carrying their shepherd with them.

Another interesting point about sheep is the ability of the hardier breeds of sheep to endure privation. After a bad storm flocks have been buried in the snow for days and even weeks and yet have been found still alive. This does not mean that it is not important to feed sheep.

These sheep were fat, they could not move head or foot and so did not exert themselves and use up their strength. Their thick wool coats keep the heat in their bodies, and the snow actually helped in this -- snow is a fine insulating material.

Unlike other mammals sheep are extremely hardy when it comes to being able to cope with cold or freezing weather, along with food shortages. Drought conditions also apply to sheep when it comes to hardiness.

Sheep have both coarse hair and fine, curly wool. In the wild sheep and in some domestic breeds, especially in warm countries, the air covers the entire body and mixed with it is the shorter wool. However, most domestic sheep have lost the coarse hair, except on the face and legs, and have grown a thick long fleece of wool.

The wool fibers are really very fine hairs, so fine that you can barely see the separate fibers. In the best Merino wool they are only 1/2000 of an inch thick. However, in ordinary wools they are three or four times as thick as that. Viewed under a microscope the wool fibers look rough and scaly.

It is this quality that causes them to stick together to form thread for making cloth. When clipped, the whole fleece hangs together and falls in a single piece. The wool may be as much as a foot and half long and the fleece may weigh thirty pounds before it is thoroughly washed.

The Merino is one of the most widely distributed varieties of sheep. It was brought to North America more nearly two hundred years ago, and soon made itself at home. American Merino wool is not surpassed anywhere.

The Merino developed first in Spain ad from there has been taken to all over the world. The wool is fine, and the sheep thrives in poor pasture, but it makes poor mutton. So in many countries, the Merino is crossed with one of the larger breeds, such as the Lincoln.

The weight and quality of the flesh is improved, and the fineness of the wool is not much injured.

Another variety of sheep, is the Rambouillet, which has been developed in France from Merino stock, and many Merinos have been taken to other countries.

Of the many British breeds, the best known long-wools are the:

• Leicester
• Border Leicester
• Lincoln
• Cotswold

The Leicester is one of the most important and shows the progress of all. In little more than a century and a half, it was improved from a gaunt, coarse sheep of heavy, inferior wool into a good quality of flesh and fleece. It is often crossed with other breeds.

The Border Leicester has Leicester characteristics combined with the hardihood of sheep that thrive in the North. Great size is attained by the ancient Cotswolds and their rivals, the Lincolns.

The romneys are an anciwent and famous breed for their resistance to foot rot and for an independence of sprit which causes them to keep apart and so avoid overcrowding of pasture.

Ireland has only one native sheep, the Roscommon, which turns sparse hillside herbage into good mutton and wool. These various traits are the result of centuries of domestication.

The short-wools give us nearly a dozen classes of sheep. The most important are:

• Southdown
• Shropshire
• Suffolk
• Hampshire Down
• Oxford Down

The Southdowns are famous, not for size but for their mutton and the excellent quality of their wool. They began their career as a breed of fame at the same time as the Leicesters, and have relations in many distinguished breeds.

It is said that the peculiar excellence of Southdown mutton comes from the multitude of very, very tiny snails that they eat. Snails teem on the herbage of the Downs, and snails and grass together satisfy a Southdown sheep appetite.

The Shropshire Down and the Dorset Horned flocks give the earliest lambs. They put on flesh and wool at express speed. They are very popular and many are shipped to other countries. Most of the European breeds may be found in America. Some of them we have changed to suit our special needs and habitats.

The hardy mountain breeds of sheep do wonders in surrounds which would be impossible for cattle, not only because of the rough country, but also because oft he scarcity and poor quality of food. Yet, their flesh is esteems and their wool, though of less value than other breeds is abundant and admirable for coarser manufacturers.

Nature is mindful of their conditions and not so many lambs are born to mountain sheep as to breeds in more favored pastures.

If attempts at improvement are made by the introduction of other sheep into mountain flocks, stern winters soon destroy them, and mountaineers remain unchanged owners of their hills.

There is a fascinating story about the Herdwicks -- that they are descended from forty sheep which swam to land from a Spanish armada ship cast ashore on the coast of England. The facts, however, are even more romantic.

If historians of the breed have told their story aright, the Herdwicks are Vikings, descendants of sheep carried by the hardy Norsemen to the Isle of Man, and thence taken to England.

Passing to other breeds, we should note:

• The hair long-legged sheep of Guinea
• The Gnu-like Hausa sheep with their curious spiral horns
• A black and white hairy Zulu sheep which produces wool in England
• The fierce Hunia sheep of India, of which the rams are kept for fighting, as bulls are in Spain

Then, there are the Unicorn Sheep of Nepal. Of course there never was such an animal as a unicorn.

But as the two horns of the Unicorn sheep grow together into one stout back-curving horn, they have been called Unicorn sheep.

The growth of this horn is often so great that it has to be cut a the tip to prevent it from growing into the back of the ram.

For contrast there is also the Wallachain sheep, whose long horns, twisted like corkscrews, branch out to right and left.

Another freakish breed is growth is the tail of the Fat-tailed sheep, many pounds in weight.

Often men brace it, by a board, with sometimes even a little wheeled trolley attached, to prevent injury to the sheep.

The wild sheep from which our flocks have descended are not know with any certainty. Our sheep may have come from one or from several wild species or races.

Perhaps the ancestors of the sheep were the Moufflon of Mediterranean Europe, or the Red Sheep of Cyprus or Asia.

These are about the size of tame sheep.

The rams are a little less than thirty inches high. These sheep look much like some of our domestic sheep -- the horns of Moufflon are much like those of the Soay variety and the Red Sheep are much like the tame sheep of ancient Greece and the Swiss Lake-Dweller Sheep.

The Urial is a sheep found in and around the Himalayas to the Salt Range of India. The horns of this species are usually triangular in cross-section, and the rams have a ruff of long hair on the throat.

Urials are grayish brown in color (the Indian variety is more reddish than others) and the underparts are white. The ruff is usually blackish on the outer side, but may be blackish all over.

In the mountains of Mongolia and southern Siberia, the wild sheep are about as large as donkeys, and the rams have splendid horns.

The white of the underside extends up on the neck, and the nose, rump and lower parts of the legs are white. The Marco Polo Argali, found in high Pamirs, has the largest horns of any sheep. They are seventy-five inches long, and twist spirally.

Then, there are the White sheep which live in Alaska. They are white in summer as well as in winter, and during much of the year they live near the snow banks.

Their horns are in spirals, but are not so handsome as those of the Argali.

However, few wild animals are as handsome and graceful as the Alaskan sheep. In the mountains south of Alaska the sheep are almost black, and gray sheep are found in between.

These are all considered to be varieties of the same species.

Our Rocky Mountain bighorns are not restricted to the Rocky Mountains, but are also found to the south, in the snow-clad mountains of Arizona and Mexico.

The largest bighorns of all and those that have the heaviest horns are found in the Rockies. There are rams are dark brown, almost black, and a white large white area on the rump.

In the spring and summer the rams form bands by themselves, leaving the ewes and lambs lower on the mountain slopes.

The lambs are born in the spring, about May, and are able to follow their mothers shortly after birth. Before the breeding season, the rams often battle among themselves. They stand shoulder to shoulder and strike each other with the front feet, as if in challenge. Then they back off a few yards apart, rush towards each other and hit head on with terrific force.