[Jacob-list] Jacobs to New Zealand

[gordon johnston]

I believe you have scrapie in the US too, so probably the same import rules to Australia would apply as from UK - Tracey mentions that imported sheep would have to go to NZ via Australia.   
We have had an enquiry (genuine) about importing Hebridean sheep to an island just off the Australian coast, so I looked into it quite carefully a couple of years ago.  Basically, they would not let live animals in at all, so any imports would have to be of eggs and semen, or fertilised eggs which would then have to be implanted into suitable surrogate ewes.  In order to have a viable population size, large enough and sufficiently genetically varied not to lead to problems of inbreeding , semen and eggs have to be collected from quite a number of unrelated ewes and rams (there is a formula to calculate it but it is not in my head !!) all of which need to be housed at the collection facility for a few weeks and of course the destination holding would need to be large enough to house the resulting flock.  Cryogenic containers have to be hired, and their return journey also paid for.  The surrogate ewes would have to live in a comparable facility in Oz/NZ while fertilisation took place.  All in all it would be extremely expensive, perhaps in the region of $30000.
The measure to avoid scrapie which NZ adopted was to allow only scrapie-susceptible sheep ie those with valine in their genotype (the plumb opposite of the UK and to my mind far more sensible, as the disease would be readily observed and could be quickly eliminated).  >From results here in the UK, Jacobs have mainly ARR (that is the UK acronym ; yours is probably different...) ie scrapie resistance, so any donor animals would have to be carefully chosen with that in mind and would also have to be screened for scrapie itself - all at a cost. For Hebrideans, there is no valine in the breed at all, which is a bit of a stumbling block !!

In my research I contacted the relevant farming and government bodies in both UK and Oz and spoke with our local collection facility - I suggest that Tracey does the same before contacting potential exporters, so she knows the full picture and costings.

I shall be very interested to hear if I am wrong and live animals can be exported direct to Oz and NZ from the States.

Incidentally there seems to be this idea that the UK is a dirty little island with all sorts of diseases.  In fact when we had the BSE scare, where the government thought that BSE could be passed on to sheep from cattle, but would be masked by scrapie, there was great difficulty in finding vets who could recognise scrapie, as it is quite rare.  I think certain geographical areas have a higher incidence, but in the main it is not something we come across at all.  And now the gov is admitting that they were wrong (well, not in so many words of course) so the whole National Scrapie Plan here in the UK has crumbled.  I think that in fact our health and welfare record for animals is high so when anything goes wrong we make a big fuss about it....and because of that we are being priced out of the world market, but that is of course a different subject !

Juliet in Scotland UK
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