Alberta sheep producers are having an anti-beauty contest.
The province’s sheep organization is looking for 500 of the worst-looking sheep in the province.
By examining old cull ewes, the Alberta Sheep and Wool Commission hopes to identify what diseases the province’s sheep have or don’t have.
“We’re looking for every disease under the sun,” said commission manager Tony Stolz.
“We want to assess the health status of the Alberta flock.”
Stolz suspects mastitis is the number one reason ewes are culled. If this is confirmed, the commission can look for ways to help producers reduce the udder infection.
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“It’s designed to see why people are culling,” Stolz said.
“It will be a saving to producers if we can reduce the culling rate.”
The commission has started to collect cull ewes that are more than four years old. They will be analyzed at Alberta Agriculture diagnostic labs in Edmonton, Airdrie and Lethbridge.
The Alberta Sheep Disease Survey Project will test for Johne’s, scrapie, maedi visna, caseous lymphadenitis, footrot and mastitis. The liver and feces will also be tested for liver flukes, salmonella and possibly E. coli.
“There’s a lot of really good information we’re going to gain from this survey,” said Brian Miller, a veterinary pathologist with Alberta Agriculture.
The study must test 240 of the pro-vince’s 110,000 ewes to be scientifically valid. Organizers hope producers will donate 500 ewes between April and November.
Cull ewes are worth $20 to $50. In exchange, producers will receive their sheep’s lab results, which is worth $270.
“The benefit of donating is they get to find out what’s wrong with their animals,” Stolz said.
The scrapie test will allow Alberta sheep producers to say with confidence that the fatal disease is not found in Alberta flocks.
Scrapie is in the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy family of diseases, which also includes chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans.
Symptoms include intense itching and rubbing, which causes the wool to be scraped off the sheep’s body.
The last reported case of scrapie in Alberta was August 1993.
Miller said the scrapie study fits with the province’s TSE monitoring, which routinely tests elk and cattle heads for CWD in elk and deer and BSE in cattle.
“We know it has occurred in the past,” Miller said. “We’re just looking to see if it’s there.
“We’re looking at the worst of the worst.”
