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Body condition scoring of sheep

BODY condition scoring of sheep is now widely used by the agricultural advisory services and livestock producers as an aid to flock management. The technique is simply a means of subjectively assessing the degree of fatness or condition of the live animal and as such is not new. *Stockmen have always appraised the condition of their animals, describing them in terms such as 'lean', 'forward store', 'fair to middling', 'not too bad', 'fit' or 'rolling fat'. One of the difficulties of such descriptions is that they are all relative so that a ewe which, for example, might be considered by a low ground flockmaster to be in only moderate condition could be judged as 'very good' by someone accustomed to handling hill stock. Over the years a number of attempts have been made to formalise condition scoring using numerical values in place of the often more colourful but frequently ambiguous verbal descriptions. Many of these systems used a 10 point scale but have failed to stand the test of time, probably because of the difficulty of defining clear differences between one point and the next. A system based on a six point scale and developed in collaboration with Dr R. L. Reid, was described by Jeffries (1961) and advocated as an aid to sheep management under Australian pastoral conditions. Using this system as a basis, Russel and others (1969) showed that subjectively assessed condition score was closely related to the amount of chemically determined fat in sheep and that it could provide an acceptable and useful means of estimating the proportion of fat in the animal body. This system, for sheep, has now been adopted by the Meat and Livestock Commission and advisory services throughout the United Kingdom and has also proved to be a useful tool in certain areas of research, particularly in studies on sheep production. Its success relies principally on the clear definition of each of the six grades or scores in terms of readily identifiable anatomical characteristics (see below) which enables the technique to be learned easily and which helps to ensure a high degree of consistency between scorers.