Breeding age

What’s the earliest that you guys will breed a doe age wise? I have a doe that is 6 mo old but she’s already over 60lbs and 18inches tall. I usually wait until my does are 10mo but it usually takes them that long to be that size. I have access to a great buck next month (she’s be just shy of 7 mo then) for one of my other does and I’m wondering if I could just expose them both. Or do you think she’s too young? Thanks!

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  • Haha yeah that’s a good point. She is long bodied as is her dam but not oddly so. I’m gonna weigh her again too cause even though she is close to the same size as my other doe around that weight I’m starting to wonder if maybe the scale was just off that day. Thanks!

  • I would definitely breed her ASAP. If she has to divert some energy to growing kids, maybe that will slow her down a bit. She is on her way to being oversized if she continues to grow this fast. Unless she's as long as a freight train, I'm having a hard time imagining a ND that's less than 21 inches and weighs 60 pounds. 

  • She is a registered PB Nigerian. She’s certainly the biggest doe I’ve had at that age and she is the same size as my other adult does. I also have her mother and She’s still nursing. Don’t know if that has anything to do with it. She is smaller than her mother but just slightly. She will be bred to a ND buck who is about 24”. I’ll have to watch her and see what size she ends up at. She’s definitely an anomaly in my herd. 

  • I'm assuming she's not a purebred Nigerian, as that's the weight of a full grown doe. You shouldn't breed them until they are about 2/3 of their adult weight, so typically, that means you don't breed at less than 40 pounds for a ND. However, if she's a cross, she'd need to be 2/3 of whatever her adult weight will be. If you are breeding her to a ND buck, she's definitely big enough, assuming she's not half boer or something really huge because her kids will be 1/4 of whatever her other half is, so you don't want her to have kids that are too big for her to birth naturally. Hope this makes sense! 

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