Sheep Ovis aries
تعريف
Domestic sheep are the most widely distributed small ruminant, bred into hundreds of types for wool, meat, milk and hides and kept everywhere from the cold wet highlands of northern Europe to the arid rangelands of Africa, Asia and Australasia. They are grazers rather than browsers, cropping pasture close to the ground, which is why flock medicine and pasture parasitology are the same subject. The US flock gives the scale of a developed-country industry: 4.99 million head on 1 January 2026, of which 3.61 million were breeding sheep and 2.85 million ewes a year and older, producing a 2025 lamb crop of 3.03 million at 105 lambs per 100 ewes, plus 20.5 million pounds of shorn wool, with 28 percent of the flock now hair sheep or wool-hair crosses. Adult sheep weigh 200 pounds or more and lambs are born at 8 to 12 pounds. Ewes are short-day seasonal breeders, most fertile in autumn, though Dorset Horn, Merino and Rambouillet hold extended seasons; gestation is about 146 days. Resting heart rate is 70 to 80 and respiration 16 to 34. Clinically the flock is defined by Haemonchus contortus and coccidiosis, by clostridial enterotoxaemia and tetanus, and by contagious ecthyma and foot rot; sheep also carry the malignant catarrhal fever virus that is fatal to bison.
المؤشّرات الحيوية
- معدّل ضربات القلب
- 70 – 80
- معدّل التنفّس
- 16 – 34
- مدّة الحمل
- 144 – 150 days
- الوزن عند البلوغ
- 11 – 150 kg
Sheep at rest.
Sheep at rest.
Normal ewe gestation length as stated in a veterinary reference. The same publication's sheep husbandry chapter gives the point figure - 'Gestation in sheep lasts an average of 147 days' (Merck Veterinary Manual, Breeding, Parturition, and Common Lamb Diseases of Sheep) - which sits inside this range; both come from the same manual, so 144-150 is not stitched from two publications. The manual also notes that gestation length differs by breed within a species and that the exact length is seldom known unless ewes are hand-served or artificially inseminated. This replaces the Manitoba/Cornell STAR figure of 146 days, which is two fifths of 365 in an accelerated-lambing calendar, not a measurement.
MATURE weight, sexes separated, BOTH ENDS FROM ONE SOURCE that prints an explicit 'Poids adulte' (adult weight) field per sex on every breed page. Ewes 11-95 kg, rams 12-150 kg. FLOOR 11 kg is the ewe end of the Ouessant (https://racesdefrance.fr/race/ouessant/, verbatim 'Poids adulte femelles : 11 a 16 kg / Poids adulte males : 12 a 20 kg'); CEILING 150 kg is the ram end of the Suffolk, quoted below. The heaviest ewe in the set is the Charollais at 95 kg. About 30 French and French-registered breeds are covered, including Suffolk, Texel, Hampshire, Charollais, Merinos d'Arles, Ile-de-France, Lacaune, Romane, Ouessant, Corse, Martinik. FOR MENA THE RELEVANT FIGURE IS AWASSI, and it sits inside this range: FAO Animal Production and Health Paper 57 (https://www.fao.org/4/aj003e/aj003e04.htm, 'All rights reserved', FAO 1985, ISBN 92-5-101414-0) states verbatim 'In 1978 the author recorded an average weight of 126 kg in 20 adult rams and 68 kg in 60 ewes of improved Awassi dairy flocks in Israel' and 'The live weight of adult stud rams ... now varies between 130 and 160 kg', i.e. elite Awassi stud rams reach slightly above this ceiling. NOT COVERED: Australian/South African Merino, hair sheep other than Martinik, African and Indian breeds. This replaces the single point 91 kg, which came from an Extension blog post giving a sex-blind FLOOR ('200 pounds or more').
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