The Tunisian Barbarin is a Tunisian

breed A breed is a specific group of domestic animals having homogeneous appearance (phenotype), homogeneous behavior, and/or other characteristics that distinguish it from other organisms of the same species. In literature, there exist several slig ...

of fat-tailed sheep. It is distributed throughout Tunisia, and on both sides of the Tunisian border with Algeria, on the Algerian side particularly in the area of

Oued Souf El Oued ( ar, اﻟﻮادي, ber, Suf meaning ''the River''), Souf or Oued Souf is a city, and the capital of El Oued Province, in Algeria. The oasis town is watered by an underground river, hence its name is El Oued which enables date palm culti ...

. Related to the Awassi

History

The Tunisian Barbarin descends from the

Near East Fat-tailed NEAR or Near may refer to: People * Thomas J. Near, US evolutionary ichthyologist * Near, a developer who created the higan emulator Science, mathematics, technology, biology, and medicine * National Emergency Alarm Repeater (NEAR), a form ...

. Two Italian breeds, the

Barbaresca Siciliana The Barbaresca or Barbaresca Siciliana is a breed of large fat-tailed sheep from the Mediterranean island of Sicily, in southern Italy. It derives from the cross-breeding between indigenous Sicilian Pinzirita sheep with fat-tailed Barbary (o ...

of Sicily and the

Laticauda Sea kraits are a genus of venomous elapid sea snakes (subfamily: Laticaudinae), ''Laticauda''. They are semiaquatic, and retain the wide ventral scales typical of terrestrial snakes for moving on land, but also have paddle-shaped tails for swimmi ...

Calabria , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = , demographics1_info1 = , demographics1_title2 ...

and

Campania Campania (, also , , , ) is an administrative Regions of Italy, region of Italy; most of it is in the south-western portion of the Italian peninsula (with the Tyrrhenian Sea to its west), but it also includes the small Phlegraean Islands and the i ...

, are derived from it. In 1991 the total population in Tunisia was reported to be 5 million; in 1992, a population of 50 000 was reported in Algeria. In 2008, the Barbarin constituted about 60% of the overall sheep population in Tunisia, which was estimated to count approximately 4 million ewes.

Characteristics

The Barbarin is a coarse-wool breed, and is reared mainly for meat. It is particularly well adapted to the intense heat of desert areas, and can tolerate

brackish Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. It may result from mixing seawater (salt water) and fresh water together, as in estuari ...

water. The coat is white, and the face is either brick-red or black. The black face gives the animal better resistance to sunlight and to photosensitivity caused by eating ''

Hypericum perforatum ''Hypericum perforatum'', known as St. John's wort, is a flowering plant in the family Hypericaceae and the type species of the genus ''Hypericum''. Possibly a hybrid between '' H. maculatum'' and '' H. attenuatum'', the species can be found a ...

'', "St. John's Wort". Apart from the two principal types, a further eight sub-populations have been identified within the breed. These include an all-black variant, and two "spectacled" sub-types with a white head and patches of colour only around the eyes and round the muzzle: the black-spectacled type is called ''sardi'', and the red-spectacled one, ''sagaa''.

References

Sheep breeds originating in Tunisia {{Sheep-stub