First select the type of sheep you are looking for – Dual Purpose to breed replacement ewes or Terminal Sire to produce only lambs for carcass production.
The New Zealand Standard Maternal Worth (NZMW) or Terminal Worth (NZTW) indexes are displayed or you can customise an index by ticking the boxes in the "Use in custom index" column. Note that you can still show SIL sub-indexes for traits that are not in your overall index of merit by checking the “Show” box for a trait while leaving the “Use” box clear.
The Lo/High ranges indicate the top and bottom 10th percentile value for the evaluation. If you are interested in animals above the 10th percentile leave the maximum blank.
Choose minimum or maximum constraints for a few indexes (or BVs). Putting too many constraints on will lead to few or no animals found. A maximum of 500 animals are displayed, so it is useful to use some selection criteria to focus your search.
To view BVs, tick the "Show BVs" box and select the BVs you want displayed.
Alter the sort criteria if required.
Select age of animals you want to find. Note that if you have a very wide range the search may fail due to too many animals being found or taking too long to find animals that match your other specifications.
Pick progeny birth years if you want to restrict a search to animals with progeny i.e. list sires or dams.
Select region if you want – SIL recommends you do not initially
Specify the Type of sheep, Breed (Genetic Vision) or Breed proportions to restrict the search to the type of animals you are looking for.
Use the flock criteria to restrict a search to just three or less flocks and/or exclude just three or less flocks from your search
Hit the search button at the bottom of this window to start your search.
For more details see Guide to RamFinder.
The sheep type - Dual Purpose or Terminal Sire, a specific Genetic Vision/Breed or the Breeds in Pedigree can be selected.
Genetic Vision is like "breed" but it accounts for the fact that some flocks are marketed based on a breeding strategy or brand and may have more than one breed in the background pedigree.
You cannot select multiple breeds for this variable. You must conduct separate searches for each breed you may be interested in.
Breeds in Pedigree allows you to specify which of several breeds may (or may not) be in the pedigree background of animals you are searching for.
NB: The breed names used in eSearch are based on information provided to SIL for flocks and for individual animals. While effort has been made to ensure accuracy, in some cases these may not be correct.
Selection for faster growth is expected to lead to increases in adult size if genetic merit for adult size is ignored. SIL recommends that both Lamb Growth and Adult Size be included for DP sheep indexes where rams are used to breed replacement ewes. However, you can choose whether or not to do this because there may be circumstances where genetic merit for adult size is not wanted in the index for total genetic merit. The grey arrow linking these Goal Traits for DP sheep is a reminder that these two traits are closely linked genetically.