Ram Sale Catalogues

This week Sheep Ireland continue to help breed societies to prepare sales catalogues for upcoming ram sales. We explained in our weekly update last week a number of possible reasons which would prevent an animal’s €uro-Star evaluations not appearing in a particular sales catalogue – these included;

1.  No animal NSIS recorded for the animal (official Department ID).
2.  The animal was added to the Sheep Ireland database after the lambing data entry deadline of April 30th .
3.  The accuracy % for any of the animals Indices are below 10%.
4.  Flock owner has an extremely low DQI (Data Quality Index).

For breeds that do not use the Sheep Ireland database as their flockbook database, there are additional parentage checks that need to be carried out on all animals entering a sale. Unfortunately we are finding cases where the parentage data being provided for a particular sale entry varies from one database to the other. In these cases Sheep Ireland has no choice but to refuse to publish the genetic index for these animals in a sales catalogue. The genetic Indices provided by Sheep Ireland are hugely influenced by the animal’s parentage. Where any questions exist over this parentage, these need to be resolved immediately.

These errors are major negative consequence of operating two separate databases for the same information. With the best of intentions, sending parentage information to two different databases is open to human error. A small number of societies use DNA sampling to verify the accuracy of parent records entering their databases and this is a very advisable practice. For now the breed societies that operate their individual databases outside of the Sheep Ireland system, checks on parentage will need to continue. Where any inconsistencies are identified these genetic evaluations cannot be included in sale catalogues.