“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
Theodore Roosevelt

On a semi-related note, I watched a documentary a while ago about to brothers (zoologists) in Germany around the time of the Nazi Party and Hitler. Their goal was to do selective breeding and re-create the extinct wild cattle of Europe. After years and years they more or less claimed success.

"Heck cattle originated in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s in an attempt to breed back domestic cattle to their ancestral form: the aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius).[3] In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck independently started their extensive breeding-back programmes.[4] Heinz was the director of the Hellabrunn Zoological Gardens in Munich and Lutz of the Berlin Zoological Gardens. Only eleven years later, just as the Weimar Republic was drawing to a close, they each announced their success.[5][6] Both brothers used a different selection of cattle breeds in their breeding-back attempts. For example, Lutz Heck (Berlin) used Spanish fighting bulls, while Heinz (Munich) did not.[2] The Berlin breed seemingly did not survive the Second World War, so all modern Heck cattle go back to the experiments of Heinz Heck in Munich."

Here is another related story.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment...es-9958988.html

Hey Aaron and others, please don't post any details about harvesting ballz, and semen transfer on here. My son has some sick idea he's gonna clone me..

Thanks in advance...

Yep. He said a clone of me would be comparable to a 52" pure Persian ibex...

I thought he was the clone!

Nah, his "knots" are all wrong, too much "striping". Length challenged as well. They just don't have "me's" in New Mexico. Texas has the purest bloodline....

moderators, is there any way to start a petition to get the rancher on the wall of shame? He needs to go to timeout.

....he does look like an old goat now that I think of it.

Sorry I am mildly retarded and didn't read the entire thing.

You should call him "Big Sexy"

that nickname is reserved for me per my wife.

Nope, that goat is way prettier than him. People drop change in his coffee cup sometimes when we go out to eat, and then they commend me for taking the homeless man out for a warm meal.

Aaron and I have been working together to find some of the better Persian genetics out there. I have learned over the years to work with what you have. Right now I am going to be adding some Cretan Ibex (sub species of Persian)this year. There are a few private breeders out there that have pure Cretan ibex. There are a few pure Persians out there that do not have Nubian Ibex in them, but they are very hard to find and very expensive when you do. This is a 3 year old billy of ours.



This is a 10 month old billy we bottle raised. Not all of them will have this good of a shoulder stripe at that age.

Rickey and Aaron you both are getting some very good looking Ibex. It really does not matter if they are pure bred or hybrid. As long as it is a good looking Ibex that somebody likes and wants that is all that counts. You could have gone to New Mexico and trapped a couple of the Ibex from there and brought them home and there would be somebody that would say they were hybrids and they are not as pure as the ones in N.M. As long as you have a good product there will be a market for them.

Thanks Don! 25 years ago when I started breeding mouflons it was the same scenario. Look today and you can see numerous breeders with some great mouflons.

Rickey,

I'm not too hung up about a sheep be "100% pure" etc...if it looks like something I want to shoot and the price is fair, and if outfitter is not intentionally misrepresenting it..that's all good.

That said, you stated "25 years ago when I started breeding mouflons it was the same scenario." Are you saying that the initial breeders had to start with Mouflons hybrids that were not "pure breeds" (forgive my use of the term "pure") and by selective breeding they ended up with the Mouflons in the USA that we have today? ...... Or are you just stating that you selectively bred pure Mouflons (as opposed to hybrids) to get a brighter saddle patch and better quality horns.

I'm just curious. I thought that most of the "advertised" pure breed Mouflons have an ancestory that goes back to zoo stock. So the start was a pure breed not a hybrid sheep.

I'm just looking for a little history lesson.

I am not answering for Rickey or anyone else but here is what I think. I doubt that any of the Sheep or Goat breeds are !00% pure as they were say 1000 years ago. Sheep and Goats will breed with the other Sheep and Goat species. There has been a lot of domesticating of both. Who is to say the Ibex in New Mexico have not been crossed with a few feral Goats from that area. Even all the sub species of Sheep from Europe and Asia have had to have mixed among them selves. Sheep and Goats are not like Blackbuck and Aoudad that only breed themselves. I may be full of it but I doubt anyone can be absolutely certain an individual Sheep or Goat of a species is pure.

We know you are prone to telling stories :-)

I get the point about "100% pure" being pretty hard to prove...my question really was around the "extent of selective breeding" that was done on the Mouflons 25 yrs ago vs having good zoo stock available to start with and just "tweaking" those sheep to superior specimens.

Tweaking as in what they are doing to WT now?

On the whitetails I think they are doing more than "tweaking" since no native whitetails would ever look like some of the deer they are producing. BTW, not saying anything negative, but just saying it's more than tweaking.

When I said "tweaking" regarding the Mouflons I was referring to where you have a good sheep and you selective breed to maintain/improve that specific look by selectively breeding for markings or better horns....but still staying within the realm of what you'd see in a superior wild species.

I think in the beginning there were a few zoo stock places, but the vast majority were of a "mouflon type", and maybe not 100% mouflon but pretty good. Selective breeding since the 1920's I think has gotten to the point where we have some mouflon in America as good as the Czech republic. Problem is they shoot them at 8 plus years in Europe, and it is pretty rare for one to live that long in Texas through disease, accidents or getting shot.

Ibex are pretty much the same way today, and the designer sheep (Stumberg) and unfortunately the Urials as well.

It cost a lot to buy pure breeding stock, and a lot less to get into it with a pure "looking" stuff and a few corsican ewes or spanish goat nannies.

In the early 1990's I had a herd of "mouflon type sheep" in New Mexico as a FFA project.