Sheep Instruction
Sheep are superb models for teaching animal behavior, characteristics. Thus, livestock management/handling skills, applicable to all livestock, is taught to novice as well as experienced personnel. The sheep maintained at the Sheep Unit are used in numerous phases of hands-on instruction in undergraduate courses taught by the Animal Sciences faculty. They are also used by graduate students pursuing degrees in nutrition, physiology, and food science. Areas of undergraduate learning, that use sheep, include docking, castrating, internal parasite control, disease prevention and control, feeding systems, evaluation, artificial insemination, and harvesting food and fiber. Graduate students learn digestibility determination techniques, surgical procedures, pasture management, estrous synchronization, and food and fiber harvesting in relation to human consumption. Learning sheep production principles and management/handling skills provide young people a career-lasting knowledge base that extends throughout the animal industry.
