Sunday, July 29, 2007

Bakewell's sheepish doctrine

A rather amazing illustration (not sure how well it will reproduce here) from Roger J. Wood and Vitezslav Orel's fascinating Genetic Prehistory in Selective Breeding: A Prelude to Mendel:



The caption: "Plaster models of two sheep made from life to scale (2.25 inches to 1 foot, or 1:5.33) by George Garrard: (a) Old Lincoln ewe (c. 1800) and (B) New Leicester ewe (1810). (Copies of photographs supplied by The Natural History Museum Trading Company Ltd (London)."

I can't seem to find the absolutely perfect link on these sheep--here's a good bit, though--really the great account of this era of animal breeding (with great pictures!) is Harriet Ritvo's The Animal Estate. I've been minorly obsessed with Bakewell [ED.: breeder/"inventor" of the New Leicester] for a long time--he gives me a sinister skin-crawling kind of feeling--he really was an artist, and his medium was the actual flesh of real animals, which he bred "in-and-in" for bulk--like an eighteenth-century georgic incarnation of China Mieville's Remades...

2 comments:

  1. Didn´t he have something to do with scrapie (prion disease) in sheep? I think I remember his name from that prion book...

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  2. Well, you pretty much don't want to know how he got the animals that big (and yes, Max writes about it in that rather good prion book)--it really was the beginning of the kind of practices that led to all this BSE stuff now...

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