A question about breeding/inbreeding:
If you have a buck that sires all your does, he is therefore the father of any baby does born. So when those baby does are ready to breed, who mates with them? Do you let their father do it? If not, do you have to regularly buy new bucks to keep fresh blood?
I think that many people bring does to a buck, but thats not really an option for me here, so I am just wondering about new blood/inbreeding etc and do I need to regularly replace my breeding buck or not.
Thanks for any advice
Katharine
PS Locally here (Nigeria) it seems that a herd has 1 intact male that services all the females ie his mother, sisters, daughters............
Replies
Thanks Deborah and Julia, for your comments and the interesting article. I think I need to read up on breeding! Any suggestions for a good, basic book?
Here is an interesting article about line-breeding and in-breeding. If you breed a father to his daughter the kids will have 75% of his DNA and 25% of their mother's.
http://onpasture.com/2014/10/20/breeding-matters-iii-inbreeding-vs-...
According to this research it's best to stay at 50% or less. If you breed brother to sister, it's not considered in-breeding because there is still only 50% from each parent.
Personally I don't in-breed but after reading this article, I might someday breed siblings if both have very desirable traits I want to enhance.
You can let him breed his daughters. They say that inbreeding creates trash or treasure because it concentrates the genes, so it's a just a matter of which genes it concentrates -- ones that are desirable or undesirable. Will you wind up with a goat that's a better milker than her mother or one that has three or four teats? It all depends on the genes that the sire is carrying. Some people in the US will breed a daughter back to her sire to see if they can force out any undesirable traits ASAP.