Breeding Practices (Please scroll down)
In the beginning, we had our ups and downs trying to locate good breeding stock that was truly polled because there had been so much cross-breeding between the American and Barbados breeds. We purchased some stock and began doing our best to raise the polled breed. To our dismay, the purest ones we could buy were still producing scurs, some horn buds and some horns. So we sold what we had and purchased more polled breeding stock, only to find that they also produced horn buds and scurs. We have since learned that the horn buds and scurs come from two separate genes that breeders tend to lump into one single category. Horn buds are knobs firmly attached to the head where a horn would normally grow on a horned variety of sheep. A scur is loose horn matter that is not attached to the skull. Until its recent revision of the Breed Standard, the BBSAI was in agreement. However, they have changed their "Poll" standard to say that a scur can be attached to the head and can be as long as 1 1/2 inches. In our humble opinion, that is not a scur, it is a hornbud. At Lone Star Farm we have worked hard to eradicate hornbuds and scurs far too long to regress now. That is not to say that every ram lamb that is produced on our farm is scur-free, as we still occasionally get one with scurs which is then culled, but our odds have improved considerably. We believe if a ram has a clean head, meaning he is smooth-headed without scurs, there is no doubt about his polledness. This is a polled breed. It should not be that hard to find a completely polled ram in this breed. This is our own personal opinion and we will continue to cull our stock to insure that, as breeders of the "Ideal" of the standard, we will offer nothing for sale but completely polled rams that are GUARANTEED scur free. See our "Ram Policy" for details.
We are also making a concerted effort to eliminate the occasional white markings that seem to be popping up in some lines, more and more often.
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Lone Star Twins
Mike has traveled far and wide acquiring the stock that we are breeding today. It has not been an easy road, and we are not naive enough to think that we have the only game in town when it comes to breeding Barbados Blackbellies. We do, however, know what we have in the way of quality in our sheep, and breed characteristics in our animals that we cultivate and guard when we pick mates for them. We are also careful not to double up on flaws when breeding, and we definitely don't stick our heads in the sand and pretend that their flaws don't exist. In other words, we know what our sheep are made of and we breed accordingly.
Once we begin to see the desired results of the traits we are breeding for, we are firm believers in linebreeding at that point. If we don't linebreed then, we will never produce the consistency in quality that we want. In simpler terms, we could get a sheep of a different color each time we outcross. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for linebreeding and outcrossing within the breed in a breeding program.
Remember the "horse of a different color" in the movie Wizard Of Oz? If we want to consistently breed good quality purple horses, we cannot do it by breeding a poor quality green horse to a mediocre yellow one. Rather, we continue to linebreed our good quality purple horses together until we have consistently set their traits without losing anything else in the process. In the same manner, when we begin producing the desired traits in our sheep, we linebreed to set those traits so that we don't lose them by outcrossing to a line that doesn't have that particular trait. When we are ready to focus on introducing a trait that needs to be strengthened in our stock, it is at that point we outcross to another animal within the Barbados Blackbelly breed that is strong in that trait, which preserves the integrity of our pedigrees and safeguards the genetics of the breed itself. It is difficult to set (lock in) a specific inherited trait, while maintaining other breed characteristics and superior quality. We know this, therefore we are extremely selective in our criteria for breeding. Our goal is to set those specific traits, one at a time, and yet keep the other qualities balanced.