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The Boreray is a breed of sheep originating on the St Kilda archipelago off the west coast of Scotland and surviving as a feral animal on one of the islands, Boreray. The breed, also known as the ''Boreray Blackface'' or ''Hebridean Blackface'', was once raised for meat and wool, but is now used mainly for conservation grazing. The Boreray is one of the Northern European short-tailed sheep group of breeds. It is the rarest breed of sheep in the United Kingdom. It is the only breed classed as "Category 2: Endangered" by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, because fewer than 300-500 are known to exist. ==History== Until the late eighteenth century, the domesticated sheep throughout the Scottish Highlands and Islands belonged to a type called the Scottish Dunface or Old Scottish Shortwool, which was probably similar to the sheep kept in the whole of northern and western Europe up to the Iron Age. A local variety of Dunface was kept on the two main St Kilda islands of Boreray and Hirta by the crofters of the islands, who lived on Hirta, the largest island of the St Kilda archipelago.〔 In the mid-eighteenth century the crofters' sheep were described as being "of the smallest kind", with short, coarse wool, and all having horns – usually one pair, but often two pairs. At that time there were about 1,000 of these sheep on Hirta and about 400 on Boreray. In the late nineteenth century the crofters' sheep were cross-bred with Scottish Blackface sheep, which by then had replaced the Dunface throughout mainland Scotland. The other breeds descended from the Dunface include the North Ronaldsay and the Shetland. Before the evacuation of the St Kildian inhabitants, these sheep were farmed. However, when the St Kilda archipelago's human inhabitants were evacuated in 1930, the sheep of Hirta were also removed and in 1932 they were replaced by Soays, which still live there as well as on Soay itself. Meanwhile the remaining sheep on Boreray were left to become feral;〔 these became the only survivors of the crofters' sheep, and one of the few surviving descendants of the Dunface. This means that they are the original, unmodified sheep that used to be farmed on the island. In the 1970s half a dozen of them were exported to form the basis of a breeding population on the mainland, but the majority of Borerays still remain on the island.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Boreray sheep」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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