I thought that this might be helpful to new people who are trying to decide which Kinders they keep and which they send on their way. What it gets down to is that a breeder has to make tough decisions along the way to keep their herd in an improvement mode. I try to balance out the traits that I want to see in my herd, but then my final cut comes down to ease of milking. I milk by hand and want to keep it that way, so sometimes even a doe that is near perfect in every other way will get cut because she isn’t easy enough to milk. What I often do is keep a daughter to see if I see the improvement that I want, and sometimes it works. Here’s one of the more important traits to pay attention to:
Good Mammary Attachments are extremely important for Kinder does because they are short girls, and that makes their udders more prone to injury.
Click here: Zederkamm Floribunda – this photo gives a pretty good view of Flori’s udder — notice that her foreudder extends smoothly into her belly with no pocket. Her teats had a slight curve, and that’s what kept her from having an even higher score.
Floribunda is the best doe that I have had so far, and she was a first generation, so it is hard to improve from that point. I can’t take much credit for her exceptional quality either, since all I did was choose a nice Nubian and a handsome Pygmy! What I keep trying to do is to reach those heights again. When she received her 94 mammary score from Harvey Considine, he said he had only given that score to a very few goats over his years as a livestock evaluator. She still scored 94 as a 7 year old. That year (2001) her mammary score was equaled by a younger Zederkamm doe, Penny’s Lily-of-the-Valley (3rd generation), but her overall score was a couple of points lower. She ended up producing 2080# of milk on her best lactation and broke the butterfat record for Kinders at 140#.
Maintaining the mammary attachments is the hardest thing for a Kinder doe to accomplish. Because they have smaller frames, but not necessarily smaller udders, there is less structure to attach to for support. A small goat giving a gallon or better a day carries a lot of weight in her udder, and over time, those attachments are stretched. Flori weighed about 130# at age 7, and averaged 8.1 pounds per day over her 305 day lactation. She had a daughter, Fleur, who did inherit her mother’s tight attachments and heavy milk production, but she had teats too small for my comfort, so I didn’t keep her past her 2nd lactation. On that second lactation she produced 2190# of milk in 305 days — and she weighed only 85 pounds herself. She was producing 10% of her body weight in milk daily at the peak of her lactation! Her attachments were so snug that it was not obvious that she carried so much milk.
As I continue breeding for those excellent attachments, my success has been mixed. Excellent udder attachment is still one of the more elusive traits to try to pair with heavier milk production, but it is definitely worth the challenge!
Pat Showalter
Shantell said,
February 2, 2008 @ 2:37 am
I have a strange question…. we have one kinder doe and was told that kinder bucks are sterile… is this fact or fiction? thanks for your time…