Texas Dall

About the Texas Dall

A white ranch sheep bred to look like a wild mountain ram, and a fixture on Texas exotic ranches. The Texas Dall is not a wild species at all - it is hybrid stock, developed in the Texas Hill Country in the 1960s, with the Y.O. Ranch generally credited, by crossing Mouflon with white domestic sheep such as Rambouillet and then selecting hard for the white coat and the heavy outward-flaring horns. Rams carry thick, deeply ridged horns that sweep out and down in a wide corkscrew, and a long coarse bib of hair hangs from the throat and chest. Ewes are smaller and usually hornless or nearly so.

The name causes real confusion, so it is worth being plain: the true Dall sheep, Ovis dalli, is a wild sheep of the mountains of Alaska and northwestern Canada, with short white hair rather than wool, no throat bib, and a tighter, more massive amber full curl held close to the head. It does not occur in Texas outside of captivity. What ranches here call a Dall is this hybrid.

The Texas Dall is one of several color varieties bred from the same Mouflon-and-domestic foundation and usually grouped together as Corsicans. The others turn up on the same ranches and are easy to confuse at a distance: the Corsican itself is brown with a dark chest and a pale saddle, the Black Hawaiian is near-black, and the Painted Desert is pied brown and white. The Texas Dall is the all-white one, and its lambs are born white rather than changing color with age.

They behave like the domestic stock they largely are - grazing in loose groups, tolerant of vehicles, breeding readily, and far more approachable than any native wild sheep. On South Texas ranchland they live alongside native whitetails and the other introduced hoofstock without much interaction.