Posted by GoatWorld on December 14, 2002 at 12:38:19:
In Reply to: Polled vs nonpolled opinions anyone posted by Kerrie on December 13, 2002 at 04:55:26:
Hi Kerrie,
Sorry to hear about your toe - that can be painful. I've whacked mine a couple of times - once as a young boy (got caught in my bicycle spokes) and when I was about 32 (stubbed it running).
Anyway, on the polled goats question: what I am going by is what I have heard and what is written in Natural Goat Care. When breeding two naturally polled goats, the chance of producing an "intersex" kid is more probable. Now here is the twist on this whole polled situation:
Some goats that are naturally polled will at a later time in life produce what kind of looks like it might be horns which are of course called scurs. So in essence, there is actually a degree of being polled. The goats that produce scurs do have horns in their genetic code, just not as predominant. Mating two of these together will "probably" not cause the intersex problem although you just might end up with a goat with horns. Quite often you will see a naturally polled goat come from a horned buck and a naturally polled doe - this in my experience is the most common mating (if you think about this for a minute, quite a few people would rather disbud their does as opposed to their billies). So the offspring from that horned buck/polled doe combination is going to influence the genetic code to be less likely to produce horns.
So all in all, a person would be chancing producing hermaphroditic goats by breeding polled to polled continually. Keeping records in this case would be prudent; you certainly would want to not in-breed too much in these cases as the more you in-breed with polled goats, the higher the probability of producing hermaphrodites (my opinion of course). Great question Kerrie.
Best regards,
Gary