Most expensive sheep ever sold fetches £367,500 at auction

Previous record sale was £231,000

Double Diamond sold for a record £367,500 at auction on 27 August, 2020. (MacGregor Photography)

A Texel lamb has become the world’s most expensive sheep after being sold for nearly £368,000 at an auction in Scotland.

The sheep, called Double Diamond, went for 350,000 guineas (£367,500) on Thursday at the Scottish National Texel Sale in Lanark, Scotland.

The bidding started at £10,500 before rising dramatically amid fierce competition between different consortiums.

The final bid, which was made by a partnership of three buyers, set “a new UK and world record price for a sheep”, according to a statement on the Texel Sheep Society’s website.

Double Diamond, which was sold by Charlie Boden from Cheshire, is an embryo-bred lamb.

A spokesperson for the Texel Sheep Society told The Independent: "An ‘embryo bred’ lamb is a lamb which is the result of embryo transfer (a form of IVF) in livestock in which the female animal is artificially inseminated and then embryos collected from her six days later and implanted in to surrogate mothers."

"It is done to maximise the genetic progress within a flock by maximising the number of progeny from the best animals," they added.

The previous record price paid for a sheep was the £231,000 that was spent on an eight-month-old Texel tup in Lanark in August 2009.

At the auction on Thursday, 19 sheep sold for more than £10,500 and the second most expensive sheep of the day fetched 65,000 guineas (£68,250).

Most farm livestock is still sold at auction in guineas, a unit of currency which is worth around £1.05.

Originating from the island of Texel in the Netherlands, the Texel sheep breed is popular among British farmers because of the high quality of its meat.