My A.I. fun begins

We will start by doing a clone of a sheep tomorrow.  We cloned a very big rocky bighorn which was very wide for bighorns.  Then we will LAP AI some hybrid sheep.  The next day we will LAP AI our mule deer.  Then we will LAP AI another group of Mule deer the next day.  Then the final day we will LAP AI our whitetail.


I sure like to put together the different sheep and deer programs for the best genetic improvement at least in my mind.


Our hybrid rocky mountain sheep will be LAP AI'd to a Stone sheep.  This will make the lambs 75% wild sheep.  My mule deer will be bred LAP AI to the best mule deer semen in the industry with a buck that scores 280 standard 5x5 and is 38 inch's wide.


My whitetail will take a different direction as my grandson wanted some non typical so we will be using Texas Double Down and Refrigerator on his does.  He is 10 years old and has the bug as bad as any of us.  Scott and my does will be getting Fear Factor, Eye Appeal, Pay Day, Triton and WWF Rowdy.  We will also LAP AI our rocky mountain goats this year as we had to sell our billy because he turned very mean.  With the grand children here he had to go.  He was the one that stabbed Scott.


We will be LAP AI'ing for five days and it will be a lot of work but then in spring my real fun starts as I love fawning and lambing season.


Our elk were cervical AI'd in Sept with two bulls one was 525 SCI 7X7 Durango 2 a very clean antlered bull the type that industry needs and the other was Chernobull who is around 600 SCI.


We expect some great animals to be born this spring.

I'm not sure we will be successful on the clone but wanted to get my feet wet on this.  I think it is easy to get a clone but making it into a viable baby is what is hard.  Just to give you an idea it takes 8/10 oocytes to make one embryo.  It then puts the odds of making a viable baby at one out of ten embryo's to get one viable offspring.  They just aren't that far along with deer or sheep.  I have 40 embryo's on that sheep and realisticly hope to get one lamb.  Guess the odds are real bad in actuality.


If this works well on sheep I'll try it on a AZ. wild big trophy mule deer as I get post mortem semen from that area.  We get 230 and up bucks from there from my outfitters that work with me on that.  It would be awesome to retrieve the genetics from a trophy buck like that for the mule deer industry.

We Embryo transplanted 41 embryo's into ewes today.  I sure hope we can clone this ram as he was such a nice looking animal.


We will be LAP AI'ing our hybrid rocky ewe tomorrow to Stone semen.  I hope to make something close to Stone looking sheep out of the white hybrids.  In Canada the are crossing Rocky bighorns to Alaskan dall and the resulting lambs look like stone sheep just with bigger bases.  So another fun day tomorrow.  LOL