Goats and genetics

I find genetics absolutely fascinating. What genes are dominant, what traits are recessive, why mixing X with Y sometimes gives you A and sometimes B. How tiny little disturbances in DNA can cause catastrophic failure in the organism. How one gene controls so many different parts of an animal. It is all so interesting.

It is breeding time for my dairy goats (Sept/Oct 2012). We have 4 intact bucks, one (Dean) is too young to breed right now but the other 3; Sultan & Max at 21 months old, and Mousse at 8 months old are ready & eager. Intact boy goats, call bucks, are very precocious and able to breed at about 5 months of age. The only limit to Mousse’s ability to breed is his height. Some does are too tall for him and we use one of the big guys.

My goal for next years’ baby girls (doelings) is for them to be more productive, to produce more milk. All three bucks have very productive dams. Mousse’s dam more so but, as I mentioned, he is not quite tall enough to breed some of the taller does.

All this kids have the same sire.

In goats, milk production is somewhat genetic (~35%), so it’s no guarantee that the daughters will be better milkers than their moms. That is where monitoring production and repeatedly choosing to keep the best milkers comes into play. The colour of my goats, the Toggenburg breed, is also a non-dominate genetic trait. White is the most dominate colour among goats, if you breed almost any colour to white, most of the babies are going to come out white.

A quick aside here. Perhaps you are familiar with Mendel and inheritance “laws”; he was the monk that experimented with peas with both colour and texture. Did you know he faked and forged a bunch of his data? The general principle is sound but genetic inheritance is in  no way as simple as he made it. There is so much more to the way genes interact and the influence of the environment on the resultant offspring.

A good example of that is in cloning. When scientists clone a cow or a dog, the baby is an exact duplicate of the parent. When they clone cats, the colour and pattern of the cat's fur varies – same genetics, different colour. Interesting, isn’t it? I wonder what influences that?

It’s kind of like with human families – same parents and all the kids come out different, even with twins. Though there is a British genetic study, (anonymous of course), showed that 25% of kids in a family have a dad that isn’t the father of the other kids. That could explain some variation, but not in the twins.

The variety of possibilities that result from the mixing of genes during reproduction is just awesome and amazing. Nature, or God’s hand if you prefer, constantly stuns me with its beauty and diversity. We live on an amazing planet – we are so fortunate to be alive in this time of discovery & exploration – from outerspace to the smallest gene, it is all just wonderful!