Listen to a reading of James Little’s memoirs about breeding and exhibiting Corriedale sheep. Little successfully experimented with crossing Merinos with Lincoln or Leicester sheep from the 1870s. He promoted the inbred halfbred, as they were called at the time, first showing them at the Christchurch show in 1890. In 1905 the New Zealand Sheep Breeders Association acknowledged the breed’s name as the Corriedale.
Transcript
To quote James Little, it was about this time that I started the Lincoln Cross to which I gave the name Corriedale. Simply because it was on the Corriedale Estate that the inbred halfbred used were first thought of or saw the light of day. After I had got two or three crosses of inbreeding for two years running, I entered them to Christchurch shows inbred halfbreds, or Corriedales. As there was no one to compete with me, I could not get a prize. I obtained leave from the association to put on my pens a large card with inbred halfbred printed there on. That represented the first occasion on which Corriedales were ever exhibited in a show. As time went on, however, the worth of the Corriedale, or as in those days, the worth of the back-breeding system which it was known as, began to be proved by high sales for wool, very satisfactory sales for mutton and more and more people began to be interested in the breed.
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