Below you will find some links related to why we are investing in genetic testing, the process itself – and why we feel it matters for our flock. However before we head into a lot of detail we wanted to cover a couple of points. First of all – for many Damara owners, if you want to tune out now, go for it! If you are keeping Damara as a home flock, an acreage mob, as pets, or even a small breeding flock you may not really need to head into this level of detail if you don’t want to, as your source studs will be setting you in the right direction (for example, we keep a small herd of British Alpines as milking goats and we know very little about the details of their genetic composition or place within the wider population in the way we do for our Damara flock – but we know and trust the stud that they come from does, so obtaining bucks and knowing the kids will be healthy and well bred is essentially taken care for us). If however, you are looking at breeding your flock, have a wider breed conservation in mind (we feel smaller flocks can play just as a important role in this as large ones!), or just have an interest for how this all works, keep reading on!

Genetic Diversity Is a Tool, Not a Goal: Why Type Still Comes First

Managing genetic diversity in any small population like the Damara is in Australia is an ever present requirement and necessity. Track your COI, spread your founders, avoid tight matings — and the impression can be that if you’ve done all that, you have done your job. Breeders talk about it a lot – however we wanted to take a moment to really make clear that for us, diversity itself is not actually our end goal, it’s rather an important tool for keeping our Damara being Damara long-term. If we lose sight of that, diversity management can quietly erode the very thing it was meant to protect. “Type” sounds like a show-ring word, but it’s not. It’s the descriptive and performative sum of the accumulated result of generations of selection pressure — every breeder who culled a weak-structured ram, kept the ewe that reared twins without help, passed over the animal that never quite grew out, was adding a small contribution toward what the breed should look like and should be able to do. Type is that history, compressed into a standard. Regardless of its genetic makeup, a Damara that is small, of poor confirmation – one that is susceptible to parasites, mothers badly, does not handle rugged terrain or does not hold condition isn’t “a genetically diverse expression of the breed” – it’s evidence that somewhere upstream, natural or managed selection stopped doing its job.

Here’s where we think diversity management can go wrong. Founder representation or COI as numbers do not know or care whether a founder or specific individual was an excellent animal or a poor one — it just tracks how much of the gene pool traces back to each one, or what % of genetic material is not duplicated. That’s exactly what they are meant to do, and they are extremely useful for that purpose. But if a breeder starts treating “this bloodline is rare” or “this animal is unrelated” as a reason to breed regardless of its quality, the metric has quietly become the goal instead of the tool. When our genetic pool is so small here it can be tempting to do, because it adds that bit more longevity to the breed. Push that logic far enough though, and you get a population that scores well on paper — low COI, founders well spread, genetically diverse by every measure that gets checked — while in the bush or paddock the flock drifts steadily away from what the breed should be. Smaller animals. Weaker structure. Reduced performance. The breed-defining features — the traits that took generations to fix — start to decline. Genetic diversity is meant to be insurance for the breed’s future. Pursued without regard for quality, using every ewe, or without extreme strictness on ram selection – it becomes a slow trade off between “good and improving” for “varied and mediocre.”

So how on earth do we balance this, considering we are simply not in a strong enough position to select against a rarer bloodline even when we would prefer to? We think it means that COI, KM and MK are better used as constraints — guardrails that stop you from making a mating so tight it damages the flock — while the actual selection decision, the “which animals do I breed forward from,” stays anchored to type and performance. In practice, for our flock, that looks like: Watch KM and MK. Manage COIs. Within those guardrails, cull hard on real faults. We wont keep a poor animal in our breeding flock just because its bloodline is rare — we find the best individuals within that line and work to improve it, rather than treating rarity itself as a pass. Never use rams from a poor performing line – maintain the diversity and improve through the ewe. A rare bloodline carrying a real fault is a problem to manage, not something we want to spread pervasively throughout the flock. We have multiple ewes and rams from our founder lines, and we aim to match the best together. Our flock is in a constant upgrade cycle – we don’t breed from every ewe, and lesser ewes, ones who have been improved upon via their daughters, are sent to the … gulp! … river snacking crew while the rest run with the rams (not so bad huh – we do adore all our sheep even when we know they are not the right ones for the job!).

Despite what eventuates to a lot talk about genetic diversity – because let’s face it, it is centrally important, and it is why we are investing in genomic testing – we wanted to be clear that it is not our only goal. Rather, our aim is to breed unmistakably, functional Damara … with a genetically diverse and sustainable flock one generation, ten generations – twenty generations from now. Type without diversity is a dead end. Diversity without type gets variety – it doesn’t get you a Damara.