# Breeding Goat Siblings



## Kiera (Apr 28, 2017)

Can you breed goats that are brother and sister? What are the good and bad things about that?


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

You can, most people don't. It's not like the buck will say "Ew, she's my sister". Chances are you aren't going to have a three headed baby. The thing to keep in mind is that some of these things are already heavily linebred, for instance a particular sire showing up many times in an extended pedigree. There could be a genetic defect hiding somewhere, brother x sister could tip the odds in your favor of matching up two defect carriers and seeing the defect show up. 

It all depends on what you want to do. If you are keeping pedigreed animals, people will look at the pedigree funny at some point, if there was any reason to study the pedigree. If you just want a fresh doe, and to keep a milk doe or a meat whether out of her, go for it. If you want to sell offspring, there is a lot of stigma attached to it, and you might have a hard time marketing the results of such a cross. I personally would rather have a good brother sister cross than a bad complete outcross.

If they are just meat/brush goats, I wouldn't worry about it in the least. If they were crossbred, I wouldn't worry about it in the least, if they were like alpine/nubian cross, the kids resulting from a brother x sister mating would be less inbred than some show stock that is running around. If they were purebred animals, and your goal is to produce top qulality purebred animals, I would only do it if they were really top quality. Inbreeding will reproduce what you have, and if you have junk, you will reproduce junk, without a doubt.

But if it is just a matter of convenience, it's not likely to cause three headed mutant goats like some people evidently believe it will. In theory, you could breed a brother to a sister, and breed resulting males back to the mother, and resulting females back to the father, grandfather and so-on as long as the original goats were alive, and then when they started getting small and having trouble reproducing, you could cross the two lines and start over. If you were on a desert island, and if the original parent stock was high quality. 

Chances are there are better options out there.

If you are asking because you now have two kids, brother and sister, and you are wondering about leaving the male intact and solving your quandary of what to breed the doe to, know this. There is a very good chance that if you house them together, he will breed her far before it is optimal to breed her. I hope I have answered your question, but it would have been much easier if I would have asked you why you asked. There are a lot of variables.


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## ShannonR (Nov 28, 2012)

Listen to Barnbilder, he always has good advice.

Aside from what has already been explained (and Barnbilder touched on this briefly), it's possible you could have some fertility problems with inbreeding.


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## Caprice Acres (Mar 6, 2005)

I just went to ADGA genetics and plugged in two siblings of mine to see what it spat out. 34% inbred. That is a very high inbreeding coefficient.

There is something called inbreeding depression which affects not just fertility, but can also strongly affect health and production. 

Any poor or excellent traits have chances of being exemplified. Linebreeding on excellent animals, when it works, can help create very prepotent animals that pass their good genetics on more often to their offspring - because they have more consistent genetics. But, the same can be said with poor genetics being passed on. 

IMO, when breeding quality stock there is very little reason to breed siblings. If you're just wanting to freshen the doe and meat out the resultant kids, then it can work. There are too many good bucks available out there that finding one shouldn't be too much of a challenge and is more likely to fix trait problems in your animals.


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## dyrne (Feb 22, 2015)

Yeah those recessive genes that mother nature doesn't need to sort out in the larger population because they are recessive and not common in both parents _may _start to cause problems. How those genes are expressed would be a crap shoot. Typically just a small overall decline in physical and mental health that is statistically significant but not concerning to you if eating them. You might get dwarves or goats that taste like banana...

That last one is unlikely I suppose.


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

Anything bad that you are worried about seeing from inbreeding, you are not going to see in a brother sister cross UNLESS they are already very closely bred. Most anything that is an actual breed was "linebred" at one point, to establish the traits that make that breed unique. The inbreeding depression that is talked about is usually a result of improper culling. Not every kid, chick, etc. is breeder quality. The problem when you get into things like goats, cows, etc. Is that you have a large pool of breeding females, and one male. The male should be held to a much higher standard. He is going to contribute 50% to your entire crop of young. Each individual doe in a ten goat herd is going to contribute maybe 5% to that years crop of young. The advent of the semen tank has magnified the contribution ratio of some males, good and bad.

Too many times, the male is not held to a high standard, look on craigslist and it is full of herdsires that could have really used a band. If he is scrawny, linebreed on him and you will get a herd of scrawny goats. If he was learning impaired or his mom didn't take the first three times she was bred, that is what you can expect. Actual inbreeding depression is real, and can happen, but in most cases it will take more than most of our lifetimes to ever get close to that imbred on a line. That is if we are starting from scratch.

In the end, they either need to be that good, or you need to be OK with resulting offspring being considered terminal. Either good enough that you want to reproduce the traits that they possess, or just possessing the needed equipment to make freezer filler. 

All this being said, there are better ways to homogenize traits than going brother/sister. Brother sister is too much of a crapshoot, you can get copies of all four grandparents potentially. And normally never a reproduction of the brother or sister. Usually when we linebreed on purpose, we do it on one animal, say an exemplary doe bred back to her son, or a buck that had exemplary daughters bred back to one of those daughters.


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## sonya123 (Dec 4, 2016)

We are now wondering sort of the same thing. We have one good buck that sired our 7 goat kids. They are all large and healthy ( so far) and 5 are males. We would like to keep at least one to breed more, but wondering if it is ok for this new billy to breed his half sisters ( same mother different father) . We are also wondering if we can use the original billy to breed his daughter. Are certain relations worse than others? I really hate to castrate all those awesome goat boys. What are the chances of trading one for one that is not related? Does anyone want to trade a Kiko buckling for another?


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## Ziptie (May 16, 2013)

Good thread. I was pondering the same thing is it better/safer to breed brother to sister or father to daughter. I would like to end up with a non terminal female from the mating.


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## Ziptie (May 16, 2013)

BTW the mother of the daughter and father are from completely different lines(no I did not go back past Great,Great Grands).


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

You are probably better off with father daughter than brother sister. There will be no reason not to keep a daughter from that mating. Her kids, bred back to her sire, should probably be treated as terminal at that point. If the sire has any issues or weaknesses though, you can expect them to be magnified.

Here is a tip, if you are looking for a buck. Right now, everybody has buck kids for sale. Sometimes they are asking a lot of money for something that may or may not be suitable for breeding anything. Hard for a beginner to weed out "great herd sire" from "has testicles". When they get bigger and start eating feed and trying to breed the crop of doe kids they are being housed with, in some cases the price might drop a little, but a lot of them do get wethered as time goes on. The better ones will still be intact. But if you really want a good deal on a buck, wait until breeding season is over. Nobody wants to have an extra mouth through the winter. Especially not a stinky one that is going to pester the does. Plus, you might get a chance to see a kid out of him on the premises. And, you have the assurance that someone actually thought enough of him to breed to their own does, which is not the case with some of the buck kids that are on the market right now.

The trouble with starting out doing tight line breeding, is if you run into a situation that you have to keep a buck out of your own stock, budget, availability, poor planning or whatever, at that point, you are already tight. Options are nice, and you might not want to play that card right out of the gate.


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## Ziptie (May 16, 2013)

Ideal plan is to get a new buck every other year, but hubby is tired of going all over Iowa to get one of these pests(plus the cost is high).Right now we have 5 Nubian Doe's, one Alpine mutt, that our Nubian buck is completely unrelated to. Then we have two of his daughters from this year to bread to this fall. I am keeping one of the bucks fromthis year as the little guy was up and running around within mins of being born. Haven't seen a whole lot of births but I was impressed with how fast he was on his game.


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