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Sheep farming in Namibia (2017). According to the FAOSTAT database of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the top five countries by number of head of sheep (average from 1993 to 2013) were: mainland China (146.5 million head), Australia (101.1 million), India (62.1 million), Iran (51.7 million), and the former Sudan (46.2 million). [2]
As of 2007, New Zealand had approximately 39 million sheep, nearly 10 sheep for every person in the country (the 2006 human population was 4,027,947 [15]), [16] placed in sixth position among the most populous sheep farming countries of the world. In June 2015, sheep numbers were at 29.1 million.
The exact line of descent from wild ancestors to domestic sheep is unclear. [2] The most common hypothesis states that Ovis aries is descended from the Asiatic (O. gmelini) species of mouflon; the European mouflon (Ovis aries musimon) is a direct descendant of this population. [3]
In 2007, New Zealand even declared 15 February their official National Lamb Day to celebrate the country's history of sheep production. [51] The First Fleet brought the initial population of 70 sheep from the Cape of Good Hope to Australia in 1788. [52] The next shipment was of 30 sheep from Calcutta and Ireland in 1793. [52]
Cartogram of the world's population in 2018; each square represents 500,000 people. This is a list of countries and dependencies by population.It includes sovereign states, inhabited dependent territories and, in some cases, constituent countries of sovereign states, with inclusion within the list being primarily based on the ISO standard ISO 3166-1.
According to the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook for 2016, the top consumers of sheep meat in 2015 were as follows: [34] EU countries are not individually surveyed in this list. Among EU nations, Greece is the per capita leader in consumption at 12.3 kg, [ 35 ] while the UK's annual per capita lamb consumption is 4.7 kg. [ 36 ]
Farmland accounts for a little over 80% of the Falklands land area [15] and a sheep appears on the islands' coat of arms, but agriculture is now less than 2% of the economy. [10] As of 2007 [update] , 670,000 sheep resided on the islands; [ 16 ] a 2011 report estimated the sheep population at over one million. [ 17 ]
Fat-tailed sheep at a livestock market in Kashgar, China. The fat-tailed sheep is a general type of domestic sheep known for their distinctive large tails and hindquarters. . Fat-tailed sheep breeds comprise approximately 25% of the world's sheep population, [1] and are commonly found in northern parts of Africa, the Middle East, and various Central Asian countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan and ...