Soay sheep are a rare breed of sheep that have been genetically isolated for an estimated 4,000 years on the island of Soay in the archipelago of St. Kilda, off the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Although it is now illegal to import sheep from the United Kingdom to the United States, before those restrictions were enacted a small flock of sheep derived from the original Soay population was brought to Canada in 1990. Eight years later these sheep were imported into the United States by the late Kathie Miller and Val Dambacher.
Kathie Miller worked tirelessly to conserve these sheep and to get them recognized and registered by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in the UK. Kathie worked with her dear friend Christine Williams from Wales to get semen collected from four rams in Christine’s flock and imported to the U.S. to broaden the genetic diversity of Kathie’s flock.
Other animal conservationists in the U.S. have joined the effort to save these primitive sheep. Among them are Kathy Comeau, Nancy Gaedke and her husband Michael R. Sussman.
Logan is the ram whose blood was collected for this genomic DNA sequencing. Logan is the offspring of two sheep who were the result of artificial insemination using the semen from Christine Williams' farm. Logan was bred by Kathie Miller and raised by Nancy Gaedke in Wisconsin.
This sequence data is freely available to anyone interested in basic research and is dedicated to the memory of Kathie Miller, who was passionate about conserving the Soay sheep in the hopes that some day they would prove useful to humanity. Less...