Many start out with a few Blackbelly in order to get their feet wet only to find out that these are really great sheep to own. Rather than just owning them to clear our brush, some of us want to take it to the next level and start to breed them for sale and for the love of maintaining the true nature and look of the breed.

 

I'd recommend looking at the North American Barbados Blackbelly Sheep Registry and see for yourself how east it is to register your sheep. A few basic things you'll need to do (But you should look at the site yourself for all of the details):

 

1) Look over the breed standards and decide if your animal will meet the standard. You'll need to examine the traits that would disqualify your sheep and read through the registration information before going any further with the process.

 

2) Order a series of serialized ear tags that would be unique to your herd and get them on your sheep. I've used the tags shown in the link provided. They take about 2-3 weeks to get so you might want to start on this as soon as you can. Along with the tags you'll need what I call an

Ear Punch to apply them. I looked into tattoos but the cost is higher and the Blackbelly have dark ears which make reading the tattoo difficult or impossible. The tags I've recommended are fairly inexpensive and easy to apply. To reduce the amount of struggling, and prevent infection, my daughter (14) and I worked as a team to tag all of our sheep. It was quick and the only pain they felt was the initial punch through the ear. After that, they had neat new ear rings. We tagged everyone about 20 lbs or heavier else the tags would weight down the ear too much.   

 

3) Take a lot of digital pictures. Digital is just extremely easy and will let you see good and bad pictures within minutes of taking them simply by downloading them onto your PC. Try your best to show the entire animal's body from front to back in their best pose, try to keep other animals out of the registration picture (which seems impossible if it's a lamb), and try to be close enough to fill most of the picture frame. If your digital camera has a high enough resolution you might try downloading it to adobe and edit the picture to accomplish this. 

 

Once you've decided which picture to use, I'd suggest e-mailing them into your local Walgreen's using Snapfish and you'll be able to pick them up the same day, or, you can wait a few days and save a couple bucks while they put them in the mail for you. When you order them, make two 4" x 6" pictures with white edges. As I was taught in photography, always present your photo's framed and this simple white boarder is free for the asking. The second picture you should keep along with a copy of the paperwork you'll fill out and send in. 

 

4) Fill out the paperwork; it's self explanatory. But because I like things to be neat and pretty when someone is judging my sheep, I downloaded the form from the site, scanning it into Microsoft Word, and filled it out as I would any letter. Now I have the form as a template to register my qualified lambs in the future.