Miss Baabuka Program – 2024 Update
For another consecutive year, we’re continuing our commitment to the Miss Baabuka program in partnership with ProSpecieRara. This organization has successfully worked with local breeders to continue increasing the population, improving care, and enhancing the tracking of rare, endemic sheep. And the Miss Baabuka project continues to provide support for this ongoing conservation program.
As of 2024 the program needed our donations more than ever.
Currently, key problematics for the Saars sheep programme (as well as other ProSpecieRara programmes) consist of:
- Specific threats, such as wolves, therefore supporting breeders with training dogs, building fences, helping with the replacement of sheep (some sheep farming having to be abandoned due to wolf pressure)
- Genetic diversity preservation. Genetics of rare animals with few or no offspring are at risk of disappearing. These animals need to be recognised through the breeding monitoring and be integrated into the breeding programme to ensure that the entire genetic diversity is preserved.
- Avoiding and/or minimizing inbreeding through targeted breeding mating in order to improve animals’ health and overall breed diversity.
- The importance of sensitising and informing breeders to these breeding issues throughout working with the Swiss conservation network.
And therefore, the key costs our donations are helping the programme with are:
- Herd Books and its managements: her books are a key expensive tool which is at the core of the programme. They record pedigrees of breeds, preserve the diversity and authenticity of the specie and keep inbreeding at a low level.
- Mediation Platform: this is an intensive online platform that ProSpecieRara team created and manages for the mediation of prospective buyers and Saars Sheep breeders. It facilitates ProSpecieRara programme to guarantee transfers with true genetics and real preservation of the specie.
- Emergency Fund: this is a programme envelope which allows ProSpecieRara to intervene on urgent and / or specific actions (ex. Providing more dogs to prevent against wolves’ threats, support to unexpected relocation of mobile shepherd huts due to changing wolf appearance, etc…)
- Rearing of young rams: At the Tannenberg project farm, measures are carried out to preserve and promote endangered livestock breeds that are almost impossible to achieve in normal day-to-day breeding. In addition to other rare sheep breeds, ram lambs from Saas sheeps are also reared there and different predispositions are tried to be recognized (e.g. robustness, parasite resistance, etc.)
- Consulting services: Advising interested people who would like to start breeding Saas Sheep in order to expand the population