The breeding season is fast approaching and many LambPlus breeders are using their inbreeding checkers on their Sheep Ireland accounts to select suitable rams to serve their ewes.
When selecting a suitable ram it can be a slow and tedious process to figure out if the ram is related to ewes within your flock. Sheep Ireland’s inbreeding checker is a quick and easy way to determine whether a ram you’re interested in is related to your ewes and how closely related he is. The image below is a snapshot of some of the information you see using the inbreeding checker tool on the Sheep Ireland website.
Finding the Inbreeding Checker
- Login into your Sheep Ireland account
- Select ‘Reports’ followed by ‘Inbreeding Checker’ from the dropdown menu
How to Select a Ram
- Enter or begin entering the ID or the rams name into the search box. In the picture above ‘Coolgarragh Gior’ was typed in before only one option appeared below from the dropdown menu
- As you type ,select the ram that you want to view from the dropdown menu highlighted in grey and click ‘select ram’
- Repeat this process for up to 5 rams
Search for a Group of Females
- The report automatically displays inbreeding levels across all females in your flock.
- This can be filtered using the search box to view the inbreeding coefficients for a specific group of females
- To can filter by year of birth. In the above example ‘2023’ was searched to find all hoggets
- To filter for breed you can type the breed code into the search bar eg. TX
Interpreting the Results
- The results will be displayed in a table with colour coded risk levels.
- Green – Low risk (0-3%); Safe to mate these animals
- Yellow – Medium risk (3-6%); mating is possible but monitor levels over time to avoid increasing inbreeding levels
- Red – High risk (>6%); Avoid mating these animals