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Breeding polled & polled...the hermaphrodite question :)

Posted by Juliana Goodwin on July 30, 2011 at 10:44am in Breeding

So, our buckling is polled.  He is staying intact to breed for us.  He has been pastured with our first doe (3 y/o disbudded).  

 

We have been waiting for the next available doeling from our breeder and it turns out she's polled.  I have been reading up on the polled & polled phenomenon.  Now, we have recently made the decision that we are going to invest in a second buck next year so that we can breed back some of our daughters to the buck who didn't sire them. 

 

Based on the little bit of information I've been able to dig up, it seems that if we are sure to get a horned (or disbudded) buck to be our second buck then we could breed our polled doe to him, and wait for her to have a horned daughter to breed back to the polled buck.  In the mean time, we might wind up breeding her to the polled buck once or twice but it seems to me that the chance of hermaphrodites isn't high enough to worry about it.  

 

Is that good logic or am I being too lax?

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Replies

  • Emmie S August 7, 2011 at 12:42pm
    This is such a great thread and such a great forum!  As Deborah knows, I LOVE polled goats!  I own one polled doe, and bred my two disbudded does to a polled buck for fall kids.  I might breed my polled doe to a polled buck this fall, but I haven't officially decided yet...
  • Juliana Goodwin August 1, 2011 at 10:37am
    Well, our polled buck is no relation at all to the new doeling.  We are going forward with her, so I imagine her first breeding will be to our polled buck.  I'll let you all know how it turns out, but she's only a week old so it will be a WHILE lol.
  • Deborah Niemann-Boehle August 1, 2011 at 7:42am
    You got it, Jackie! And that's why I haven't done a polled-polled breeding -- all of my polled goats are related. So maybe a few years down the road, I'll breed second or third cousins.
  • Jackie K July 31, 2011 at 5:10pm
    Please let me join this discussion, since I have a polled buckling. He was born of a polled/horned breeding. So I assume that makes him a heterozygous  polled.  Since polled is dominant...oh, nevermind. I just answered my own question by doing a little Mendelian diagram of the genes. I was going to question Deborah's 50/50 comment but I should have known better! So his polled kids, if  bred to a heterozygous polled, would then be 25% homozygous  horned, 50% hetero- polled, and 25% homo- polled. Right? But you really wouldn't know which was heterozygous and which was homozygous for a few breedings on those goats. It is nice to aim for polled and I, too, dread the idea of disbudding. But in the final analysis it is *milk* I want from my goats. As my husband says to the trophy buck hunters, "You don't eat the horns!" Or in this case, you don't milk the horns! I belong to that yahoo group, Deborah, but haven't had time to read all the studies. It also seems to me, though, that most of the breeders who are actively working for polled have much larger herds than most of us on this list. So they hopefully have more diverse genetics. I would worry that in a small herd, if you played with it too much you'd end up with a polled goat with three legs and four eyes!
  • Cheryl K. Smith July 31, 2011 at 11:53am

    As you can see by the years of the studies, they weren't done on Nigerian Dwarves. I have known of breeders who bred polled to polled with no problem. I have had a hermaphrodite or freemartin born out of a quintuplet kidding, and another (purported) out of triplets. No polled, all horned parents. So I don't think it's that big a deal; at least until there are studies showing a correlation.

     

  • Juliana Goodwin July 30, 2011 at 6:10pm

    Well Deborah, as always I appreciate your thoughtful and knowledgeable input.  Having a hermaphrodite doesn't freak me out, one of the best school ponies I ever had the pleasure of working with was one, with all the external stuff!  She preferred to be called a 'she' :)

     

    It isn't something I'd keep on the farm here, because due to our small acreage we just can't afford to keep animals around with no job...and we already brought home a wether against our better judgment who my daughter is attached to now.  But, he's still useful as a companion to our buck until we get around to having another buck.  It's not as if every kid would be abnormal, and the one out of five or ten years who was I could just sell as a pet, assuming the buyer wouldn't be freaked out by it...

     

    We leaned towards polled goats for probably the same reason as you- although you didn't say why you hate disbudding.  I've watched it on Youtube and I'm just not sure I have the stomach to do it.  

     

    Anyway.  I'll have to pass this by my husband and be sure HE can handle it :)  

     

  • Deborah Niemann-Boehle July 30, 2011 at 5:52pm

    Homozygous means she has two polled genes, so she can only throw polled kids.

    If you breed a polled goat to a horned goat, assuming the polled goat came from a horned/polled breeding, the odds of polled kids are 50/50.

    I hate disbudding, which is why I have polled goats.

    Deciding to breed polled to polled is such a personal decision. Some people swear they've had goats with sexual abnormalities when they've done it, so if you would be totally freaked out by that, don't do it. If you'd be okay with that risk, then go for it.

  • Juliana Goodwin July 30, 2011 at 4:35pm

    Homozygous polled doe meaning she would only have polled kids?

     

    So, in your more experienced opinion you don't think it would be a  bad idea to breed this doe to this buck once or twice?  

     

    Do I have it right that having one polled member of each breeding pair would make it more likely that we'll have more polled kids?  I think I have that right, and if so, then I'm glad...I don't particularly want horns or the experience of disbudding...

    Deborah Niemann-Boehle said:

    I've never had any polled goats that were unrelated, nor ones that I wanted to linebreed on. Perhaps a few generations down the road, I'll do it. Personally, I'd do it in the hope that I got a homozygous polled doe, so I'd keep any does from the breeding.
  • Deborah Niemann-Boehle July 30, 2011 at 4:25pm
    I've never had any polled goats that were unrelated, nor ones that I wanted to linebreed on. Perhaps a few generations down the road, I'll do it. Personally, I'd do it in the hope that I got a homozygous polled doe, so I'd keep any does from the breeding.
  • Juliana Goodwin July 30, 2011 at 2:53pm

    Well...as far as my selling my kids, if it were to be a hermaphrodite that looks like a doe: I'm not selling any kids with any kind of a guarantee of fertility, nor am I marketing them into the dairy category, they aren't even papered.  So, I suppose I think that if I sold what I assumed was a fertile doeling who was really a hermaphrodite, it wouldn't really matter unless they tried to breed her and were unable to, which I assume could possibly happen to any doe in a small percentage of cases.  So I guess I don't feel like it would matter, unless I kept her doe back to breed here and she was unable to conceive, in which case I suppose I would sell her as an adult as a pet, and if I had been unable to get her pregnant I would disclose that to a buyer.

     

    I assume you don't purposefully breed polled to polled for this reason?  Or it just hasn't come up for you?

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