Meat Goat Blog

Breeding Season: The Smell of Love

The bucks are coming into rut and you can smell them. Sure makes you wonder why the does would have any interest in them. They smell worse than a high school locker room left over the summer without any air conditioning. Must be true love for those does to want anything to do with these bucks.

Breeding season is here again. We have wormed and vaccinated. The breeding pens are ready and in a few more weeks, we will start the process. Half the fun is trying to select the best buck for each doe. The strategy is a lot of fun, and sometimes successful. Genetics is important, but you can't always predict what you will get.

We plan to run one buck per 18 does this time. Usually we run 30 to 40 does, but have more bucks this Fall. Why not use them is our thought. There are five that will be used. Two Kikos and three Spanish. The does are primarily pure Spanish with some Kiko/Spanish crosses also.

Goofy Genetics

    It's intriguing to see how traits pass from one generation to the next. Your biggest kids can come from the tiniest mothers and the most gorgeous does can have the plainest babies. This year, while watching our kid crop develop, we noticed a fairly average doe nursing a beautiful new doeling. On further examination, we found that the baby was the spitting image of her grandmother. Guess the coloring just skipped a generation. Similarly, other traits like parasite resistance, twin production, and hoof growth can pass in and out of the genetic pool. According to an article by Gail Bowman: "It is also said that it takes three generations to breed out a trait. That would only be true if the trait is not carried as a recessive gene in each generation, in one or the other parent. In other words, it can be difficult to completely remove an undesirable trait from your herd, once you have it." Just goes to show the importance of bringing only top of the line genetics into your herd.