Infertility

[Maggie]

What are some signs that a buck is infertile besides being unable to settle a doe? What about a buck that never comes into rut? Never attempts to breed does in heat? Never gets musky or attempts to pee on himself... what could these be signs of? Other bucks in the same pen with same diet and minerals do come into rut and do successfully breed does. I’m getting ready to run a fertility panel but I just wondered if anyone else had any experience with this.

[Deborah Niemann-Boehle]

Sometimes an intersex or hermaphrodite looks like a buck. 

Scrotum size is one of the things they measure when determining if a buck is fertile, and I noticed that the testicles and scrotum shrunk a LOT on an 8-year-old buck after he unsuccessfully bred several does. He also lost his stink. 

[Maggie]

Thanks. I didn’t even think about intersex because he has all of the typical buck parts but yeah genetically he could be so I’ll have to check that too. At first I thought he was maybe a late bloomer but he’s now a year old and still showing no typical buck signs besides a penis and testes. And now that you mention it he doesn’t have very big testicles.