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Ennobled Head Highly Feminine Teats and Udder Width and Length Focus on Walking Heavy weight Worm Resistance

Our Belief: We believe that the focus on how a doe looks should be on not looking bucky rather than looking ultra feminine.

Potential Problems with ultra feminine does:

The trend in breeders wanting ultra feminine does came about because of a trend in show wethers. The pictures to the left are of winning show wethers.  The wether breeders and judges started selecting wethers with a tubular body and a long, thin extended neck. This was done to make the animal look longer. As these wethers started to win in the ring and their prices sky rocketed, breeders of fullblood Boers changed the style of animals they were raising to follow the look of the wethers, especially the does. The extended neck length became very important to them.

The judges justified the look in the does by saying a feminine look was an indication of good fertility. Then some judges started looking for a more feminine does because if a feminine looking doe was fertile then an ultra feminine doe would be that much more fertile. Originally, the standards only called for a doe to not look “bucky” and did not mention looking feminine. A bucky look is an indication of excessive buck hormones  in a doe and is a signal the doe may have fertility problems.

The serious standards call for “Body should be boldly three-dimensional: long, deep and wide” in the body and the standard for the neck is “Neck of moderate length and in proportion with body length”. The South African standards state that it is a cull to have a neck to short or too long. Unfortunately many of the judges ignore the standards when it gets in the way of their being able to select the animal they want to.

Another problem with the tubular body in does is it goes against the standard requiring a doe to have a wedge shape to her body that allows more room in the back for carrying kids during pregnancy. We also believe that the body needs to have more depth from the depth to help give the longer length more support.

 

In the meat goat industry, it is important to be able to breed a young doe as soon as she is able to safely be bred in order for her to start producing kids. Many Boer does are not bred until they are around 18 months old so they can look their best in the show ring longer. The South African breeders that taught the ABGA judges training class I attended said does could be bred around 9 months old. If you have genetics that focus on Highly Feminine does, they may not be ready to breed at 9 months old because they would not be able to hold up the weight of a buck. That may not be important to breeders that only raise show animals or breeding stock but eventually those genetics work their way to commercial herds and that is not good.

 

We always consider how our genetics will work in a commercial herd because that is the real goal of any meat goats. We have always believed the commercial herd is to produce the goat meat for the world and the breeding herd is to develop genetics that can make better producing commercial herds. That is the case in all of the other countries across the world other than the US. The US is the only country that has a major focus on mainly on show quality animals that may not have the quality to improve commercial herds.

 

The last we heard, the style of show wethers was changing again in certain areas. They are going back to the fact that meat goats are actually expected to produce lots of goat meat rather than just look long. This in turn is changing some Boer breeders to also switch back to the original style of having a heavily muscled look in the Boer that can survive in the pastures on their own. That has always been our opinion. It is a shame that judges can change their opinion about what a Boer goat should look like and ignore the standards set out by the Boer associations and more importantly, the South African breeders that developed the Boer breed.