SOME farmers are blaming the Animal Welfare Act 1999 requiring a longer tail dock for more dags, now that it’s being policed with greater emphasis.
It’s been on the cards for a few years, but much ignored. The tail, if too short, affects the muscles of the anal sphincter and hence the action when voiding the faeces.
Notice how a sheep voiding faecal marbles wags its tail in the process, especially when walking and spreads them, which helps their drying and dehydrating the worm larvae.
Ram breeders, especially those with meat breeds cut the tail right off to highlight the rear end conformation, but then are not worried about dags as the problem is solved by massive regular drenching.
The dag problem is not the tail, it’s the genetics of the sheep that has a major part to do with it and breeders selecting for worm resistance can prove it. But there are limits and the diet of course is involved.
It’s an interesting exercise for a hill country sheep farmer to look at a group of sheep in spring, knee deep in grass where there will be various grades of dags, but some sheep will have a completely clean back end.
That’s genetics and not drenching and something to work on. It would be worth putting a tag in their ear and keeping an eye on to put into a worm resistant nucleus (group) for a proven purchased worm resistant ram.
