The breeding season is approaching in the coming months and many LambPlus breeders are using their inbreeding checkers on their Sheep Ireland accounts to select suitable rams to serve their ewes. It is difficult to find suitable rams that have all desirable traits and even more difficult to figure out if the ram is related to any ewes in your flock, and if so, how closely related. The inbreeding checker application on the Sheep Ireland website will allow breeders to control the levels of inbreeding within their flock. The tool itself is very easy to navigate and use. This breeding tool is extremely useful for breeders that are searching for potential sires nationally as any ram recorded on the database can be ran against all the breeding ewes in their flock. At any given time, five rams can be selected and compared. See Image 1 below of the inbreeding checker on the Sheep Ireland website.

Click here to find out more on how to use the inbreeding checker on the Sheep Ireland website.

The image below; example of inbreeding checker, on the right hand side green boxes  with ‘low’ stated,  indicates that there is a low level of shared ancestry with the ewe. Yellow boxes stating ‘medium’ indicated a medium level and the red stating ‘high’ indicates a very high level of shared ancestry with that particular ewe.