Dubo sheep is an excellent meat sheep breed native to South Africa, which has a strong feeding ability and a high feed conversion rate and the unmatched meat yield of other meat sheep breeds. It is precisely because of these advantages of the Dubo sheep that it has been promoted all over the world, and China has been introduced from abroad on a large scale since 2002. After being introduced, The Dubo sheep is mainly used as the terminal father to cross with the original sheep breeds in China, and due to the low reproductive rate of the Dubo sheep, it is mostly hybridized with the high-yielding sheep breeds of small-tailed cold sheep and lake sheep.
Today we will mainly introduce how the Dubo sheep hybridize with the small-tailed cold sheep.
Meat sheep are bred in the form of crossbreeding of purebred Dubo sheep with selected purebred small-tailed sheep. The average number of small-tailed sheep selected by the farm is about 3 lambs, and the breeding rate of such a population has always been at the forefront of domestic meat sheep farms. The level of reproduction rate depends mainly on the ewe, and the ram has less influence on the reproductive rate. The use of selected purebred small-tailed cold sheep as the hybrid mother, then the reproduction rate can be guaranteed, so that we can get more hybrid meat lambs.
The above is the method of binary hybridization, which is also the most basic hybridization scheme. In addition to binary hybridization, there are progressive hybridization and ternary hybridization, etc., which will be introduced in detail below.
Progressive hybridization refers to the first level of hybridization of The Dubo sheep with the small-tailed Han sheep, so that its genes are constantly close to one of the breeds. Due to the high value of Dubo sheep, and the small-tailed han sheep is very common in China, the progressive hybridization of the Dubo sheep and the small-tailed han sheep is generally to make its genes close to the Dubo sheep. The lambs produced by the hybridization of purebred Dubo sheep and the small-tailed Han sheep are Duhan hybrid generation lambs, and the genes of the Dubo sheep and the small-tailed Han sheep each have 50%; and the lambs born by using another purebred Dubo sheep and the Duhan generation for hybridization are Duhan hybrid second-generation lambs, with 75% of the Dubo sheep gene and 25% of the small-tailed Han sheep genes; and so on, the Duhan hybrid sheep after four generations is basically close to the pure breed Dubo sheep.
Ternary hybridization refers to the hybridization between three meat sheep breeds. The Dubo sheep is still used as the terminal father, the small-tailed cold sheep is still used as the basic ewe, and the second father generally uses Suffolk sheep. First, Suffolk sheep were used as fathers to cross with purebred small-tailed han sheep, and the hybrid was born of a generation of Sahan hybrid sheep. Then use purebred Dubo sheep to cross a certain sheep for cross-breeding, and the bred lambs are then fattened.