Seeing is believing

Since the days of Aristotle, we’ve understood that there is a hierarchy of senses. Aristotle proposed an order of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. More recent authors have dropped smell to the bottom of the list. However, all authors agree that sight is the dominant sense in humans, with plenty of evolutionary evidence that sight has been given priority over the other senses in predatory species.?

Recently, this concept of a bias towards what we can see got me thinking about why humans struggle to comprehend things that are not immediately obvious. It also made me consider why we often prioritise our decisions based on how visually obvious they are, rather than on their impact. Think of the farmer spot-spraying thistles in a paddock that is being attacked by earth mites. The thing you can see from the road takes priority over the one dropping your potential stocking rate. Now, I’m going to relate these concepts to genetics - predictable, I know!

The inevitable interplay between genes and their environment

A lot of farmers struggle to understand the role of genetics in their business because they only ever see the genetics they use in their own environment and under their management. When it comes to the visual aspects of livestock, environment and nutrition will trump genetics every time. It doesn’t matter how good the genetic potential for growth is, an underfed animal will be small and look terrible.?

We can extend this to less obvious impacts on phenotype (ie what we see), which can mask genetic differences:?

• The single v twin effect in sheep (and fibre goats for that matter) is large but rarely considered.?
• The impact of being born from a first-calver or first-lamber can be significant, but is also often overlooked.?
• A lamb or calf born early in the first cycle has a natural advantage at weaning time (and beyond) but again this is often not considered when inspecting a weaned lamb or calf that looks fabulous at weaning.?

Depending on which trait it is, some of these impacts will be permanent and others will be transient and will disappear later in life. Because most selection happens early in life, both permanent and transient effects of the environment will likely impact our visual selection of livestock.?

A great example of a combination of permanent and transient effects is the impact of birth type on a merino sheep. Twin-born animals have less secondary follicle density than single-born animals. This results in a phenotype where twins cut less wool and their wool has a higher fibre diameter than singles. The wool is also less visually attractive in twin-born animals compared with single-born animals. This was perfectly demonstrated in the AWI Merino Lifetime Productivity project.?

Bron Clarke and Thommo published a paper in AAABG that showed that professional sheep classers have a natural bias towards single-born animals. In that trial, the animals classed as worthy of retaining consisted of 70% singles and 30% twins, whereas the cull group had the opposite split (30% singles and 70% twins).?

When you let your eyes do the work and you don’t provide any further information, you are heavily biased toward single-born progeny. This exact phenomenon is playing out in thousands of classing races across Australia and New Zealand each year. This is the very reason we have developed our OptiEwe classing system; get in touch if you’d like to know more.?

The hyperfocus on using visual traits to select animals has not served the industry well. Our tendency to prioritise the things that we can see - and that are obvious - over those that are invisible, yet profoundly impactful, is the single greatest factor holding back our sheep and beef industries.

Traits you can see versus those you can’t

The traits that ram or bull buyers prioritise is often very different to what they would be if their bank manager had full control. For decades, the traits that have been given priority have been the ones that are the most obvious visually. The price of bulls and rams is often better correlated with weight on sale day than any other factor. That is, the obvious thing that buyers can see becomes the highest priority - sight over-riding logic again!

Most people can pick the biggest bull or the ram with the whitest, most stylish wool. What about the future reproductive potential of the daughters or the ability of a ram’s progeny to navigate a worm challenge? These traits may have the biggest impact on reducing the cost of production, yet often don’t get a look in.?

Our eyes are actually not very well-equipped to guide us in selecting the right ram or bull. Most of the information our eyes can appraise is heavily biased by environmental effects, making it impossible to ‘see’ the best animal to select. How many times has a big, fat and shiny single-born ram out of a mixed age ewe topped the sale? A lot.?

Most of the traits that directly impact profitability in a livestock operation are very difficult to see or can be purposefully masked through controlling the environment. A low growth animal can be made to look great with the right feeding. An animal that has a predisposition to have more dags will not display this if provided with hard feed in a shed and crutched before the sale. An animal with terrible feet can look great after those feet are trimmed.?

Again, the visual cues we use to make a selection decision can be (and arguably are) heavily influenced by management and environmental factors that we may or may not be made aware of.

What does different look like?

The reality is that the only way you can assess the value an animal to you is to have a full suite of information to help you make that assessment. In livestock, this means breeding values and it means combining a range of breeding values of both measured and visually-scored traits into a system that allows these traits to be treated equally. A system where the visual traits don’t take priority but are definitely considered.?

Since the famous virus forced us to provide visual scores for buyers that weren’t allowed to go to a sale, we have fully embraced visual scoring at neXtgen Agri. Visual wool scores, structure, feet, dag, breech cover and wrinkle (in merinos) are routinely scored across the animals bred by many of our clients. What is really awesome is that, for many of these traits, we can submit this data and have it converted into breeding values - where the environmental influence on these visual traits can be considered and removed.

So what do I say to my critics who tell me I am just focussed on the numbers? They are 90% right. For the measured and visual traits that have a direct or indirect effect on profitability, and do have a breeding value, I will focus on the numbers. I will make sure that the visual traits are scored and turned into breeding values so that I remove the bias of visual dominance and carefully consider the different aspects of the animal. The last 10% is left for things that currently don’t have a breeding value. For instance, we don’t yet have breeding values available for some of the structural aspects of animals, so these are assessed independently of the data.

The big breakthrough for us came when we developed our index tool that includes both the measured and visual traits in a balanced way, which can be completely determined by the client. By combining the measured performance and visual breeding values into a single system, the animals that rank near the top are both highly profitable and also visually appealing. We have a number of studs that have fully embraced this concept and I am really excited about how this will continue to evolve.?

We’ve found a way to use our eyes to do what they are good at: discerning the difference between things (ie scoring wool character, wrinkle or dag) and balanced it with things that our eyes are useless at (like predicting an animal’s resistance to worms).?

It is uncomfortable to think that the numbers are a better predictor of future profitability than our trusted eyesight. But I think it is very much time to embrace this discomfort. I will never forget the words that Clinton Collette, a South African sheep breeder once said to me: “Breed a profitable sheep and learn to like what it looks like”. We don’t often go to this extreme, but it is always worth considering the hierarchy of senses when you are making decisions. Is the most visually obvious thing actually the thing you should be focussed on?

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