Texel sheep

The Texel is a Dutch breed of domestic sheep originally from the island of Texel.^[3] It is a heavy and muscular sheep, and produces a lean meat carcass. It is polled, clean-faced and clean-legged, with white face and wool. The fibre diameter of the wool averages about 32 μ, with a staple length of 8–15 cm; it is used mainly for knitting and hosiery wools.^[4]: 932

Texel

Conservation status	FAO (2007): not at risk[1]: 148  DAD-IS (2023): not at risk[2]
Other names	Texelaar Texelse Improved Texel Verbeterde Texelse
Country of origin	Netherlands
Use	meat
Traits
Weight	Male: average 95 kg[2] Female: average 75 kg[2]
Height	Male: average 70 cm[2] Female: average 68 cm[2]
Wool colour	white
Face colour	white
Horn status	polled
Sheep Ovis aries

Three-year-old ram from the island of Texel

British Texel ewe with twin lambs near Erpingham in Norfolk

The Texel is distributed in approximately thirty-five countries in Europe, the Americas and Oceania, with estimated populations of over 5000 head in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom.^[5]

History

The Texel sheep originated on the island of Texel, the largest of the Wadden Islands off the north coast of the Netherlands. The exact origin of the breed is unknown although it is thought to be a cross of the original Texel sheep with multiple English breeds. It was slowly bred into a meat breed of outstanding carcass quality. It is now one of the most common meat breeds in the Netherlands, making up seventy percent of the national flock.

United Kingdom

Stock imported from France by the Animal Breeding Research Organisation in Scotland in 1970 was cross-bred with a variety of British breeds including the Border Leicester, Hampshire Down, Leicester, Lincoln and Southdown, leading to the development of the British Texel; a herd-book was started in 1972.^[6] It is larger and heavier than the original Dutch stock, with weights to 120 kg for rams and 85 kg for ewes. It is the most numerous British breed, with a population in the early twenty-first century of some 350000 ewes.^[4]: 932 Some of the sheep are valuable: a ram lamb was sold in Lanark in 2009 for £231000, and in 2020 another was auctioned for almost £368000.^[7][8]

Peru

In 1951, Texel sheep breeder and exporter Herman J. Keijser of Den Burg exported 100 Texel ewes and rams to Peru on the cargo ship Baarn, where their stocks were used for both meat and wool.

Characteristics

^[9]

A mutation in the 3' UTR of the myostatin gene in Texel sheep creates target sites for the microRNAs miR-1 and miR-206. This is likely to be the genetic cause of the muscular phenotype of this breed of sheep.^[10]

See also

• Beltex
• Blue Texel