Wiltshire Horn

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A Wiltshire Horn sheep with triplets

The Wiltshire Horn is one of the oldest British sheep breeds and belongs to the group of short-wool sheep. His main focus was the English county of Wiltshire in south-west England.

Since the Wiltshire Horn sheds its wool in spring, this breed of sheep does not need to be sheared. For these reasons it has been crossed into various other breeds of sheep.

Wiltshire Horns are among those breeds of cattle that are endangered. The conservation efforts to help preserve the breed are supported by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust .

features

The Wiltshire Horn is a very large-framed sheep. The bucks reach a height of 85 centimeters at the withers and weigh between 125 and 130 kilograms. The females remain slightly smaller with a height at the withers of 80 centimeters and weigh between 75 and 80 kilograms.

Both sexes have horns, but in the case of the male goats these often develop into widely spreading snails. The physique is compact with a large trunk width. The sheep are white with a very short wool that is very fine and dense. If the sheep are sheared in spring, their fleece weighs less than 1 kilogram. Older bucks develop a mane on the underside of their necks.

Wiltshire Horns are considered a very hardy breed. They are very insensitive to ectoparasites and only rarely have myiasis . They lamb very easily and are considered good ewes. The lambs grow quickly under normal grazing conditions and do not need any additional feed to be quickly marketable.

Breeding history

The Wiltshire Horn goes back to old heather sheep breeds in south-west England, whose modern descendants also include the Dorset sheep breeds and the Portland sheep . Features of these original races were the fawn body color and the horns. It is traditionally assumed that these fawn-colored sheep breeds are related to the sheep breeds of the Orkneys and Hebrides . Walling doubts this in his History of British Sheep Breeds. The characteristic of the three breeds of sheep Portland, Wiltshire Horn and Dorset is that their reproduction is not tied to any season. Sheep of the northern type can only be covered by a ram in autumn and lamb accordingly in spring. With them, multiple births are common even under poor grazing conditions. Walling therefore argues that the original breed from which the Portland sheep emerged is more likely to have descended from Mediterranean sheep breeds. The British Breeding Association also points out that excavations at a British farm dating from the time of the Roman occupation have found skeletons of sheep resembling the Wiltshire Horn. It is therefore possible that it descends from Sardinian and Corsican-Corsican sheep breeds that still live semi-wild there today. Pictures and descriptions from the 17th century also show that the Wiltshire Horn was one of the most common regional sheep breeds in Wiltshire.

The keeping of this breed of sheep is influenced by the respective wool prices. In the 19th century, when high prices were paid for wool, this breed became increasingly less attractive to farmers. The stocks decreased accordingly, so that towards the end of the 19th century only remnants were left. However, Wiltshire Horns have been repeatedly crossed with other breeds of sheep kept in the tropics and subtropics. In the 1960s, the Easy Care was bred with the cross-breeding of Wiltshire Horns into hybrid sheep from Welsh Mountain and Cheviot . The reason for this was that at that time the wool prices were so low that the income from the sale of the fleece did not cover the costs of the shearing.

Breeding association

The British breed association that keeps the herdbook for this breed was founded in 1923.

literature

  • Hans Hinrich Sambraus: Color atlas of farm animal breeds: 250 breeds in words and pictures , Eugen Ulmer Verlag, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3800132192
  • Hans Hinrich Sambraus: Rare farm animals: 240 endangered breeds from all over the world. Eugen Ulmer Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-8001-9527-5
  • Philip Walling: Counting Sheep - A Celebration of the Pastoral Heritage of Britain . Profile Books, London 2014, ISBN 978-1-84765-803-6 .

Web links

Commons : Wiltshire Horn  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b c d e Hans Hinrich Sambraus: Color Atlas of Farm Animal Breeds , p. 144
  2. ↑ Hans Hinrich Sambraus: Seltene Nutztiere , p. 145.
  3. ^ A b Philip Walling: Counting Sheep , p. 235
  4. ^ Philip Walling: Counting Sheep , p. 11
  5. ^ Philip Walling: Counting Sheep , p. 12.
  6. ^ Philip Walling: Counting Sheep , p. 13.
  7. ↑ UK Breeding Association website , accessed June 13, 2015