New Zealand farming. Hides and skins – Glossary of terms

 

Dr Clive Dalton

Wool, Hides and Skins 

Cockle: Defect in a lamb or sheep pelt  seen as nodules that have developed over the pelt surface.  Can be prevented by appropriate dipping.

Dressing skin:  Woolly lamb skin, which is suitable for processing into leather after all wool has been removed.

Fellmongery: Factory or department in abattoir or freezing works where wool is removed from lamb and sheep skins.

Grain: Surface layer of a pelt, hide or leather containing and showing wool or hair follicles.

Green skin: Undried skin from a farm or slaughter facility, which does not have long-term keeping quality.

Hide:  Skin from a mature cattle beast or calf.  Also used in deer.

Liming: Alkali chemical treatment of a hide or pelt to make it softer and pliable

Paint:  Chemical mixture to penetrate the skin to loosen wool. 

Painting: Applying paint by spray or other means to the flesh side of  a sheep skin to remove the wool.

Pelt: A lamb or sheepskin after wool has been removed.

Pickled pelt:  Lamb or sheep pelt preserved for export with brine and sulphuric acid.

Pinhole:  Defect in a lamb or sheep pelt seen as small holes in the pelt grain caused by wool fibres growing in groups, and most prevalent in fine wool breeds.

Rawhide:  See green skin.

Ribby pelts:  Pelts of wrinkly sheep breeds such as Merinos, which greatly restricts their value.

Skin: Derived from sheep, goat, deer, opossum or rabbit (not cattle).

Slink: Skin from young dead lamb or fawn in utero or just newborn.

Skins from these dead lambs (slinks) will be processed for high quality gloves.

Slipemaster:  Machine used to recover wool from pelt trimmings in a Fellmongery.

Slipe wool: Wool recovered by a wool puller, after chemically loosened with sodium, sulphide and hydrated lime mixture.

Sweating:  Method of dewoolling skins which depends on induced bacterial degradation to loosen the wool. Used mainly in France.

Wet blue: Hide or skin tanned with chromium salts and kept in a wet state, which also make it a blue-green colour.

Wool pull: The estimated weight of wool able to be removed from a skin.

Wool puller:  Person or machine who removes the wool from a lamb or sheep skin after it has been chemically loosened.

Sheep farming in New Zealand. Missing sheep – where do they go?

 

By Dr Clive Dalton

 

How many of these sheep will disappear without explanation?

Accurate records

The first requirement of any researcher is to make sure that all records are accurate, so the resulting conclusions can stand peer review and are reliable for when the outcomes are used in practice. 

Breed comparison trial

From 1972 to the early 1980s when I ran the breed comparison trial at the MAF (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries) Whatawhata Hill Country Research Station, looking at mainly Romney, Coopworth and Perendale breeds, I got very frustrated over the regular problem of sheep we had on the records from birth,  then just disappeared over time from the farm. 

Tallies never tallied

Our tallies never fully tallied over the year, and nobody could work out why.  It was particularly vexing because the farm was fully fenced, and there was no scrub on the grazed areas for sheep to hide.  It was standard practice as our technicians and stockmen had to bring the tags into the office of all dead sheep they found so the records could be updated.  We had a foolproof system - so we thought!

The problem I suspected was not unique to us at the Whatawhata research station. I was sure that other research stations had problems too, but we never discussed them as we were all very competitive and didn’t like to admit failure - and inaccurate records were certainly a failure.

Massey University research

So I was most interested to read recently that a team of veterinarians at Massey University were going to research the problem of ‘wastage in sheep flocks’, and were taking detailed records in a few fully recorded flocks to find out why sheep died, and how big the wastage problem was.  But what caught my eye in particular was that they had already found that sheep just went missing and could not be accounted for.

Dobbie–Dalton survey

What got me into trouble at Whatawhata was because I started to talk about the problem, and soon realised that it was one of those ‘don’t mention the war’ issues, and you never raised the problem openly. So I enlisted the help of my MAF colleague John Dobbie to collect some data, as he had spent many years as a Farm Advisory Officer in the MAF Hamilton office specialising in sheep and wool, so he knew what went on in the North Island hill country really.

A few local farmers  were willing to talk to us about the problem and give us their honest tallies of sheep losses they couldn't explain, and it was clear that if you had 3% disappearance you could rejoice, but when it got to 5% and even up to 9% on some farms, you kept very quiet and when asked, you always quoted 2-3%!  In Scotland it’s called ‘the black loss’, and you can’t imagine many Scottish shepherds saying much about their unexplained losses and giving anyone their tallies!

Table of data from survey

Possible reasons

We used to go around in circles suggesting possible reasons why we had sheep that were never seen again after their last recording. All ewes were weighed pre-mating, pre-lambing, and at weaning.  Lambs were weighed at birth, weaning and monthly after weaning up to June (7 weights on each lamb/hogget).

Our biggest Whatawhata loss was in weaned lambs from December into the New Year until about March, and among the breeds, the Perendales were the best at turning up at each muster.  The reasons for this were never worked out.

Everybody had a theory for missing sheep which ranged from misread tags, fly blown deaths, escaping through the boundary fence into the bush, and poor mustering which straggle musters never proved to be true.  Rustling came up as the final suggestion, but we could never find proof which would satisfy the police.

MAF Head office auditors

Things got so bad at one time that auditors in suits arrived from MAF Head Office in Wellington with new gumboots to count all the sheep on the station.  The technicians and shepherds thought this was a huge joke to have to muster the sheep, and I’m sure they just ran the same sheep around the yards for the auditors to keep counting.

Multi-million dollar loss

Then things heated up and I was called  to the carpet of the Director of Ag Research at Ruakura (Dr Lyn Wallace) because of the cover of the NZ Journal of Agriculture for February 1972.  I think Gordon McLauchlan was editor at the time.

The designer made a clever picture of sheep fading away into the distance, with the heading ‘Missing sheep - a multimillion dollar loss’.  If you put any sort of value on sheep, the problem certainly was a massive loss for the industry because of the large size of the national sheep flock at the time.

Unfortunately the article was published when Prime Minister Muldoon’s Sheep Retention Scheme was at its zenith – so we were blamed for inferring that farmers were collecting money for phantom sheep. Maybe they were, and there was always plenty of comment that it did go on.

Shepherds’ solution

But in my private inquiries, I learned of a way to successfully hide the problem used by shepherds at the Lands and Survey Department to keep their Field Officers off their backs.  They simply fudged the docking tallies (their first accurate tally) by keeping extra lamb numbers up their sleeves, to be drip-fed into the tallies later on in the season.   

This was an effective way to cover up lambs that simply disappeared without trace after weaning and the reasons could not be explained. Under  Lands and Survey management, shepherds had to tally sheep every time they were moved from paddock to paddock so there was regular monitoring for audit purposes.

Conclusion

There was no conclusion - and I have no doubt that the problem remains today.  Our missing sheep must have left the planet without trace!  I wish the Massey team better luck than we had at researching the issue.

Further reading

DOBBIE, J L; DALTON, D. C. (1972).  Missing sheep - a multimillion dollar loss.

NZ Journal of Agriculture, 124(2):19-20.

Shepherd's Crook. How to make a horn-headed crook

Making a horn headed shepherd's crook

By Dr Clive Dalton

The bigger and more solid the horn, the more material you have to work with and hence the better the end result.  See the Border Shepherd's Stick Dressing Association website .  British sheep breeds with heavy horns like the Scottish Blackface or Swaledale are ideal, with other breeds like the Merino in Australia and New Zealand are lighter and not so good.  Some Wiltshire horn rams have good horns and so did the Drysdale in New Zealand before it's coarse wool went out of fashion.

 Plain horn head
Here are some basic instructions to make a 'plain horn' stick which would be used for generally walking around the farm, or taking with you to the sale - sometimes called a 'sale stick'.

The horn as cut from the ram’s head. Note the bone core which is part of the skull and which falls out on boiling.  You can't use that bit

Only use the solid end of the horn which comes from an old ram, best over two years old and has a second curl in the horn.  A single curl will be all core bone.

Decide which is going to be the neck of the horn handle. Start rounding it into shape.

Keep removing horn to develop the round shape.

 Boil the horn for about 4-5 minutes, then hold in the vice to bend the end twist out. Hold in position until it cools and is stable.

Hold the horn firmly in the vice to bore the hole for the shank spigot. Make sure the brace is perpendicular.

A hole of 60mm deep is ideal.

 Cut the spigot on the shank to fit the hole.

Bore a hole to insert a nail right down the length of the spigot and into the shank. This is to strengthen the joint with the horn.

2Cut the nail off and smear with plenty of a good two-pot glue.

 Check the join between horn and shank has no gaps.

Use cramps to keep pressure on the join till the glue dries. Let the glue dry for at least 24 hours. Check the joint is good and the glue is hard.

Use tape to protect the bark before trimming more off the horn with rasps or glass.

Protect the bark when holding it in the vice.

 

Thin the horn to weaken the corner so it bends easily after boiling for 4-5 minutes.  Keep shaping the head to remove excess horn.  Horn is easier to cut when it's warm.

 

 Put a tourniquet on the horn to prevent it opening up when bending it in to get a nice shape.  It should fit over a wrist when finished.  

Boil the very end only to soften it and bend it in the vice so it's in line with the shank.Pull it in by twisting the torniquet.  Let it cool right down before removing.  If it is not in line with the shank, twist it in the vice till cold

 Use a full range of sandpaper grits to finish the head.  If you find rasp marks at this stage, remove them with a bit of glass and re-sandpaper.

Shape the end of the head to put a name or decoration on it.

Put a tourniquet on the end again to stop it going back to it's natural bend, and let it cool before removing the tourniquet.  It must be in line with the shank.

Hang the stick up by the end to varnish.  Fit a ferule on the end to stop it wearing when used on hard ground.  A bit of copper water pipe is ideal but make sure some wool protrudes below the ferrule to get a grip on hard ground.

Further reading
See the website for the Border Shepherds Stick Dressing Association
http://www.bsda.eu/

Agricultural history in New Zealand. No 1. Importing exotic sheep breeds

Introduction to Blog series

Early sheep imports to New Zealand

Renewed interest in 'exotic' sheep breeds 

Disease concerns

Recent imports

Why the need for new sheep breeds?

Where are the official records? 

The national archives

By Dr Clive Dalton

Introduction to Blog series
This is the first of a series of blog posts on the importation of exotic sheep breeds to New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s. The stimulus for the blogs was to record what I consider to be an important bit of New Zealand agricultural history - which I have grave doubts will ever be prized out of official government files, if anyone today would even know where to look.

Early sheep arrivals New Zealand

All sheep are ‘exotic’ to New Zealand, but for some reason, the sheep breeds imported in 1972 and 1984 are always referred to as ‘exotic importations’ or 'exotic breeds'.  Over the early history of New Zealand and the arrival of the first Europeans, long before there was any concern about introducing diseases, an amazing array of sheep breeds was brought here from all parts of the world, but for a variety of reasons they didn’t survive. The early flock books of the New Zealand Sheep Breeders’ Association record the importation of 30 different breeds.  There seemed to have been no problems with Scrapie arriving in New Zealand with any of these sheep. Sheep scab was a far greater threat which was eliminated by 1894.

Old references show that between 1893 and 1914 the following breeds were imported:

• Border Leicester
• Leicester
• Cheviot
• Cotswold
• Dartmoor
• Dorset Horn
• English Leicester
• Hampshire
• Lincoln
• Merino
• Oxford Down
• Romney Marsh
• Roscommon
• Ryeland
• Scottish Blackface
• Shropshire
• Shropshire Down
• Southdown
• Suffolk
• Tunis
• Wensleydale

Scottsh Blacface - came to New Zealand in the late 1800s but didn't stay.   The sheep in this photo with mottled brown faces are 'mules' or 'greyfaces' - Border Leicester or Blue faced Hexham Leicester  x SBF.  Photo by Don Clegg.

Renewed interest in 'exotic' sheep breeds

In the 1970s a wave of enthusiasm gained momentum to bring more  breeds to New Zealand that we didn’t have, and a whole range of people and organisations got very animated about the benefits they would bring for the economy. 

I was an interested observer at the time as I had arrived from UK in 1968 to do hill country sheep and beef  research, and because of my involvement with Sheeplan (see my blogs), I started trying to remember bits and pieces about the ‘exotic sheep importation saga’.

More questions than answers

I seemed to dredge up more questions than answers, so I had to dig out some of my old MAF mates, (for some sadly it was too late) who were closely involved at the time, and it was interesting trolling through their memories.  Some scored well and some badly – but they all could tell me who they thought would probably still remember – if they were still above ground! 

So I’ve had a big catchup with many old Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) former colleagues, and they have all been supportive of my attempts to find out as much as possible of events, as there’s no doubt that in years to come, after all of us have been collected in the final straggle muster, somebody will want to bring more sheep to New Zealand, and they’ll want answers to three obvious questions:

1. When was the last sheep importation to NZ?
2. What happened?
3. Where is the information and will Mr Google be able to find it

This is not some hypothetical dream for the distant future.  New Zealand could get Foot and Mouth disease tomorrow, and if livestock in large areas of the country had to be slaughtered to contain the disease, importation would be a logical option.

So that’s why I’ve blogged what I’ve been able to find about what happened with the exotic sheep imports.  Clearly there’s a high risk of error as the human memory has its limits, especially for events that happened three decades ago.  So I’d be very grateful for any corrections of the blogged material that I have missed, and especially for new material.

The big worry - where is the official record? 

Dr Neil Clarke

When I visited my former MAF Ruakura colleague Dr Neil Clarke, he had pulled out a couple of the many cardboard boxes he took away with him when he retired from MAFTech Ruakura Genetics.  If he'd left them, without doubt they would be in the dump as the Genetics section wound down to near extinction.

Thankfully Neil kept copies of all the material he wrote to go up through the system, but as we concluded - that's where our knowledge ends. Those boxes are a treasure trove - with no known destination after Neil's office finally closes.

We both agreed that none of our offspring would want our 'stuff', and in any case they would have no room to store it in their own homes. They have enough stuff of their own!

And no museum or library wants it, as they claim they have not space either.  And who would digitalise it?

 Question 3 is the big worry, as where would the official files of events be found now? Nobody I have talked to who worked for MAF at that time has any idea where the information went; they all have to conclude that it would go into the big black hole we used to call ‘Head Office’.

Dr Leyden Baker

Other MAF Genetics staff on retirement thankfully took copies of their bits of the story with them, and some like Dr Leyden Baker  told me he'd had a big clean out and his stuff had just gone to the dump. 

The problem is that there have been so many changes from MAF to MAFTech then to AgResearch, with short-term ‘managers’ with no institutional memory or knowledge or appreciation of history.

The old colleagues I've managed to find all assure me that their original reports and copies of data etc were all send up through the MAFTech pipeline, which they assumed ended up in MAF Head Office in Wellington.  So goodness knows where it all is now that MAF has  recently morphed into the Ministry of Primary Industry (MPI) with the Minister about 13th on the caucus pecking order.  You can predict from this that New Zealand's agricultural history would not figure highly in the scheme of things.

The national archive 

MAF used to have an in-house archivist in the Wellington Head Office, and I have been told that all MAF/MPI archival material is now in the National Archive.  So let’s hope the exotic sheep import story is nicely filed and readily accessible in there.  

Prospects do not look good though, as when my former MAF Information Services Director, Geoff Moss recently spent a morning at the National Archive in Wellington to find me a photo of Dr Sam Jamieson (see later blogs), he described the experience as - 'bureaucratic and complicated'! 

A concern now is what’s going to happen to the files of these old retired MAF retainers after their final muster.  Most of them agree that their families won’t want their ‘stuff’, as they’ll have no room to store it - so it will add to landfill and global warming.  Important agricultural history is going down the offal hole I’m afraid, but nobody seems to be able to stop it.

Any historians interested?

I once tried to make contact with the newly appointed head of the History Department at Waikato University, as the University had been built on land which was once a Ruakura dairy unit – so I presumed (wrongly ) that it may have had a bit of empathy for the cause. 
   
Also the University is a major partner of the massive National Fieldays ( photo left) proving their great support for the industry in a major farming area. But making contact was impossible. I have not tried again.

Recent sheep importations 

The importation of sheep into New Zealand from all countries except Australia was banned in 1952 after a case of Scrapie was found (see other blogs), so in the 1970s when interest grew to import a range of different European and UK breeds which were deemed to have desirable traits for New Zealand, plenty of pressure was put on the then Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) to view the request with great caution.

The main reason for the importation was to see how some new breeds, which had shown to have potential in UK and Europe could improve mainly fertility and meat production, as wool was not a priority.

Why the need for new sheep? 

Without doubt, the driving force behind the importation was the Ruakura genetics team of Drs Alan Carter, Neil Clarke (and later Drs Leyden Baker, Howard Meyer and Andrew Parrat).  The Genetics Section was also well staffed with technicians to supervise all stock work and data collection from an importation, which clearly everyone involved saw as no small challenge. 

Finding new ‘genetic resources’ was a fruitful area for research, as national meat and lamb performance in the 1950-60s certainly needed a boost, and researchers knew that their work would attract big farmer interest.  Regular progress reports would be in demand and help fill conference halls for many years ahead.  Then the resulting published papers would help scientists’ reputations and promotion, as well as adding to the great reservoir of scientific knowledge.  It all looked very exciting.

Photo: Dr Alan Carter.  Photo  taken by MAF Ruakura's long-serving photographer, the late Don 'whiskers' McQueen who worked with equal skill  in both laboratory and field. Don was a legend! Photo AgResearch archives.

New Zealand agricultural history. No 2. Importing exotic sheep breeds

Scrapie in UK

Cause of Scrapie
Scrapie history in New Zealand

By Dr Clive Dalton

Scrapie was a major importation risk and this certainly worried a lot of people both in New Zealand and in UK.  

Scrapie in UK

Scrapie is endemic in UK, and we budding young shepherds used to see what must have been the disease in Cheviots and Scottish Blackface sheep on my native Scottish Border. Sick sheep used to act a ‘bit daft’ and scrape their wool off by rubbing against stonewalls and fences – hence the name. but no farmer would ever have dreamed of getting a vet to look at a sheep – they would have cost money!  Scrapie wasn’t common in UK, but it has a fearsome reputation for countries like New Zealand that want to claim a ‘clean health’ status, especially for exporting animals. 

(See Wikipedia for full details of Scrapie).

In the UK in recent years a testing programme was undertaken to eliminate Scrapie from the Swaledale breed, so it must have been serious enough to go to all the work and cost involved. 

 In the past, it was not easy to diagnose, as it required slaughter and examination of brain tissue. Brains are still examined today but there are now other fancy DNA diagnostic tools that can be used.

 Picture shows Swaledale ewes in their native Swale dale in Yorkshire, England

Cause of Scrapie

The organism causing Scrapie is a prion, which is a protein, and is most commonly spread from ewe to lamb at birth in all the birth fluids and close contact although a lot of this is still a mystery.  A prion has no DNA and multiplies by simply duplicating itself like the growth of a crystal.

The problem with Scrapie is that it develops slowly and is usually only seen in sheep around 3-5 years of age. So this is the challenge for quarantine which consequently has to go on for years, and greatly increases the cost of importations and especially if in the end, animals have to be slaughtered.

So nobody would risk buying sheep (or goats which can also carry Scrapie) from New Zealand if it was ever shown to become endemic here.

It’s always easy to show that a country has a disease; the hard part is proving that it has been eliminated with a high level of guarantee.  New Zealand’s trading competitors love this and just keep on demanding more data before they will relax their import regulations for New Zealand produce.  We live with this as a daily threat.

Scrapie history in New Zealand

This photo tells a bit of important history in the study of Scrapie.  

Dr R.H. Kimberlin who is the world authority on such diseases visited New Zealand and Alan spent time with him.  He was a valuable resource to check diagnostic criteria on such diseases.

Kimberlin edited the 'bible' on the subject. See reference below:
'Slow virus diseases of animals and man'.  New Holland Research Monograph, Volume 44.

Photo:  Dr Kimberin standing, Alan Julian at microscope.  Photo by Alan Julian

Veterinary pathologist Alan Julian gave a paper in 1996 to a workshop in Australia on a range of nasties called ‘spongiform encephalopathies’ in domestic animals where he reported the Scrapie saga in New Zealand.  Here are the key points:

•  Scrapie was diagnosed for the first time in New Zealand in June 1952 in two Suffolk sheep in Canterbury imported from England in 1950.
• Farm was quarantined and all sheep on property were destroyed.
• All sheep sold from this property in the previous 3 years (a total of 225) were traced. (Presumably they were sent to the meat works).  
• The farm was restocked 4 weeks after slaughter. 
• Control measures were not effective as in 1954 an outbreak in Southland in a South Suffolk ewe was traced back to the Canterbury property.
•   Control measures for this outbreak involved 191 properties, with the slaughter and burial of 4,399 sheep. (Presumed they were sent to the meat works).  
• The farms had restrictions put on them for 3 years during which time all sheep sold from the properties had to go direct to slaughter. 

 
No other outbreaks were ever recorded so New Zealand was declared Scrapie free.  This saga was well documented and used for veterinary teaching, and it made the profession very determined never to allow it into NZ again!

Picture of Suffolk sheep - the breed that brought the Scrapie to New Zealand from England in 1950.