Mon, 11 Apr 2005

Protecting sacred sheep

I find it a little hard to believe that there are only 1500 of these sheep still around as the the wool is prized by handspinners. I personally know of at least three flocks of over 100 animals, and I'm nowhere near Navajo country.

Animal geneticist Harvey D. Blackburn collects and stores thousands of samples of animal germplasm -- mainly semen and embryos -- to make sure there's enough genetic material to reintroduce a species if necessary. Much of his collection deals with important livestock such as Holstein cattle and Yorkshire pigs. But one of the collections Blackburn is working on is likely not familiar to many Americans. He is trying to collect 6,000 units of semen from Navajo-Churro sheep, a breed culturally important to the Navajo tribe of the Southwest.

(link) [Science Blog]

/Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time