01/30/2026
Examples of basic evaluation concepts and terminology when judging. Part #3.
Flank, shallow chests, and underline...
First a disclaimer: I was fitting flank wool three plus decades ago. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Most animals with adequate capacity and spring of rib also show adequate “flank” in its historical usage. The term “Flank” as currently used is primarily about gut fill, or flank fitting, in the show ring. The main difference between the cut flanked lambs of the 1990’s and today is that back then lambs were shown sucked up, emptied out, and dried out. (You gotta love the whole “trendy” thing the show ring embraces at different times and places!) Today, as any judge who is also a deer hunter might say, “Happiness is a big gut pile.”
As an aside, selecting a deeper flank when picking your project lamb at a young age is not indicative of the appearance of more flank at a later point on the maturity curve, but selects for lambs with poorer milking mothers. I guarantee lambs with great milking mothers will have less “flank” early than ones which needed to start eating more hay and grain in the creep because their mothers are poorer milking.
“Flank” as currently termed will end up in a pile at the kill floor. Flank fill does make a lamb appear shallower chested, but it does not effect real depth balance in terms of actual mass between each part of the carcass.
“Shallow” currently is a popular sort/oral reason, particularly when combined with a fully filled flank. Once upon a time really shallow ones were called pinch/tight hearted and considered correlated negatively to production. They tend to be harder feeders and more prone to respiratory issues.
When discussing underlines it is important to realize that while the underline starts at the chest floor it does not stop at the flank, but extends fully through the back of the rear quarter of the lamb. Gut fill can make the front end look shallower, but also can make the rear quarter’s muscle length appear shorter. For me nothing makes a lamb look less balanced, front to rear, in terms of depth than a lack of muscle length in the rump. True depth balance and a proper underline is a function of chine to chest floor depth as it relates to muscle length from pin to stifle. It is not about the flank/gut that hangs nearest the ground.
Reason sets should not be like a politician’s stump speeches, smoothly stringing together focus group tested phrases. When evaluating livestock it is useful to think about differentiating concepts and how you should go about rationally sorting classes.
