Sheep

Baasil “Baa”

Both sheep here at Safe Harbor are Valais Blacknose hybrids. The Valais Blacknose became all the craze in the US a few years ago after being dubbed “the cutest sheep in the world” by various social media. But the Valais are native to the Swiss Alps, and it is illegal to import livestock from Europe to the US (for protection from diseases such as bovine encephalitis - so called “mad cow disease"). So farmers in the US began importing semen of Valais Blacknose rams and using artificial insemination to create hybrid Valais. They would then take the ewes (female sheep) from these breedings and inseminate them with Valais, leading to a sheep that was ¾ Valais, and so on, to create “purebred” Valais Blacknose in the United States. The only problem with this plan was that only half the babies born would be ewes. The others would be rams, and rams were not useful in the “breed up” program. These surplus rams soon became a problem, flooding the pet and fiber industry. As they had been bred using different breeds as mothers, it was impossible to tell how big they were going to get, what kind of wool they would have, or what their temperaments would be. Some had beautiful wool, but some did not. Some stayed small (the so called “Valais Dolls,” a result of breeding a Babydoll sheep to a Valais ram, a dangerous procedure for the ewe as Valais are so much larger) but some got the the full, robust size of a normal Valais, which are not small sheep.

Our two Blacknose are Baasil and his buddy Daazle. Baa and Daa, as they are called, are ¾ and ½ Valais, respectively. Baasil has the distinctive curly horns and panda-like face, and is virtually indistinguishable from a full Blacknose. Daa has shorter, curlier wool and a longer face, looking more like his mother, who was a breed called a Teeswater. While both boys have very nice fiber, we do not have them for their wool. In fact, because it is so warm here and they are bred to live in the cold Alps and have very thick wool, we shear them 3 times a year, keeping their wool quite short. This means that the sheared wool has very little value, as the strands are not long enough to spin into yarn without adding a lot of extra fiber. We do have the resulting wool cleaned and brushed out, and hope to start selling needle felting kits in the future. Needle felting is a fun hobby where the shortness of the wool is not a problem. Baa and Daa are inseparable and hold the dubious title of being the messiest animals in their paddock! (To be fair, they do not share a paddock with the large animals!)