Hey ya'll my boy Leggs is 1 month and 2 days old. I can already tell that he is built slighlty different from the rest. He is very stocky and has a nery short muscular neck, wide stance and straight back.
I know it is hard to tell from pictures, but does his conformation look good? I am still not sure how to go about picking a good buck.
Any and all opinions are welcome! Thank you!
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Leggs looks like a fine young buck. I'll tell you what a judge told me 3 weeks ago about my 2 month old buck, they change so fast that you have no idea where their confirmation will end up at. You can have a grand champion confirmation wise one day and two days later have a flaw. Other than the obvious straight legs and stuff, tomorrow he could grow more neck or not. They change so fast at this stage it is real hard to tell where they are going to end up. All we can do is provide the best care we know of and use our best judgement on genetics and go from there.
It is very hard to tell in the photos and he will change a great deal. He is very young. He doesn't look to bad other than his neck does look short and his head even looks tiny. But he does not appear stocky or short legged or anything like that. If he does turn out to have a real short neck or any obvious fault I would not breed him to any doe.
Remember this when picking breeding partners. We will use the neck as an example since that is what we are discussing. You always want the best male (not just goats but all animals) you can get because you want to breed a male to a female for one of 2 reasons, to either compliment (or fix the feature)or improve upon her qualities. If you use a male with a short neck then you are deliberately breeding short necks into your herd and will always have to worry about short necks. If you have a female with a long neck you would correct that by using a male with a perfect neck not a short neck. If you use a male with a short neck the result will be offspring with long necks from mom, SHORT NECKS from dad which you DON"T want either and if you are fortunate MAYBE some good necks! If you use a good necked male you will hopefully get lots of good necks and probably some long necks from mom, but the short necks are left out of the equation. Do not try to use a male with any fault to over compensate for the female having a fault in the opposite extreme. The example above should be sufficient to explain how that does not work.
At any rate he is very young with a long way to go and photos can be very deceiving. Don't give up on him just yet. See if you can find a way to get him evaluated in person by someone who knows what they are looking for.