Our Right to Self Reliance

     No matter how many does you have—two or twelve—your buck is half your herd.  That might sound funny, but it’s true.  One buck can sire many more kids than one doe can birth, and if you have a fine buck you can breed up from does who may not be exactly what you’re looking for.  That’s a long process, and you must have a plan beforehand for what you’ll do with the kids that don’t fit what you’re looking for.  If you plan on keeping the kids, even any of the kids, you’ll also need to have found a completely unrelated buck for the doelings and completely unrelated does for any bucklings that you leave intact.  People do employ line breeding, but I personally think it’s a questionable practice, especially when you are building a line based on a cross as I am doing with my Kinder lines.  It’s also something best left up to people who have already been breeding for many years.  It’s a tough thing to have fed a doe for two years and have her birth kids that die or can only be put down because they are malformed.

     Most people won’t keep a buck.  Usually the first complaint is that he’ll stink.  Yes, unneutered male goats do have a scent; it’s part of who they are, like knowing that a dog barks.  Different bucks smell differently and to different degrees.  While my buck does certainly smell like a buck, there are overtones of hazelnut to his particular scent; I wouldn’t try to make a cologne out of it, but I don’t mind it.  I far prefer it to the smell of a wet dog!  I’ve also met a beautiful Nubian buck that caused involuntary gagging from about a hundred and fifty feet away.  He had great breeding lines—but we didn’t put him to our doe.

     Another concern is space; he needs his own pen and pasture, or you’ll have kids at any time of the year, kind of like finding furry little Easter eggs.  He will go into rut, during which he will be even more odoriferous than he normally is and his behavior will change.  Rut is triggered by day length and temperature; there’s not much you can do to avoid it.  Even my sweet bottle raised momma’s boy buck, who is a lap goat most of the time, will lose his mind in the late summer and fall particularly if he can smell a doe that’s in heat—and I’m pretty sure he can smell anything within a square mile.  When a buck’s in rut, there is no one behind those red-rimmed eyes to reason with; it’s not his fault and you actually wouldn’t want him any other way.  Usually effeminate bucks have lower testosterone and lower sperm count.  Handling a buck in rut is kind of like moving nitro glycerin; you just have to be careful—oh, and wear old clothes.  Fels Naphtha soap is your best bet for getting buck scent out of those clothes later.  You can also use a good handful of that lovely orange scented waterless hand cleaner when you throw it in the washer. 

Basic manners training is even more important for a buck, by the way.  They are usually powerful animals and any handle you can get on them is a good idea.  My buck has been trained for draft, and he knows as many or more commands as the average dog.  Generally speaking he’s better behaved than most dogs, too—except when he’s suffering from testosterone poisoning.  Even then, a good brisk walk on a leash or hitched up for some distance takes a little starch out of him.  Frankly, if I had to place my goats permanently I’d place the does first.  People seem to be more likely to take care of a milking doe, and more likely to neglect and even abuse a buck.  Shameful, but in my experience all too true.

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