Intersexed Goat Doe

On Fri­day, our awe­some vet LeeAnn vis­ited to see our goats. Our Alpine, Veron­ica, has a cough and boogery nose, and we wanted to know if we should be treat­ing her with antibi­otics or not. It’s been going on for a cou­ple of weeks, so it’s likely gone from being a virus to being bac­te­r­ial, and since we had the res­pi­ra­tory ail­ment spread from our girls Gin­ger, Lovie, and MaryAnn after bring­ing them home to Heidi and Gid­get, we were con­cerned that Veron­ica had picked it up. Sure enough, she did, and so we have her on Liquamycin now.

I also asked LeeAnn to look at our MaryAnn’s, well, ahem. “Lady­bits.” *cough*

See, I’ve noticed that her gen­i­talia are quite dif­fer­ent from the rest of the girls, and I thought it was per­haps due to her diminu­tive size. It made me con­cerned that she should not be bred at the same time as the other girls, because she won’t weigh enough, and per­haps the birthing process would be risky, because her lit­tle, ahem, “pooter” sticks out so much.

Well, LeeAnn gave us an inter­est­ing bit of infor­ma­tion — our MaryAnn is a doel­ing, but she was mas­culin­ized in the womb, receiv­ing a dose of testos­terone through the pla­centa. She is a triplet, and had two broth­ers, so it does make some sense. It also explains some other stuff, too. You may recall a cou­ple of weeks ago that I posted about her being the only one of our girls to grow a beard — it’s a com­mon trait in goats with Polled Inter­sex Syndrome.

Just to give an idea of the dif­fer­ence, here’s MaryAnn’s, uh, hiney.

Goats are not really keen on photo shots from this angle. Let’s be hon­est, I’M not fond on TAKING photo shots from this angle. But hey, man. This is for sci­ence. I’m thank­ful for a good zoom lens.

And for com­par­i­son, here’s Lovie:

Not sure if that’s a mole or a speck of poo, and I wasn’t going to go explor­ing to find out.

As you can see from the pho­tos, the girls vagi­nal open­ings are quite dif­fer­ent — MaryAnn’s pro­trudes from her, whereas Lovie’s is more flush to the rest of her booty. This is one of the iden­ti­fy­ing marks in Polled Inter­sex Syn­drome, along with some other tell­tale signs, all of which we’ve also noticed about MaryAnn:

• Dor­sal hair is more like a bucks
• Head shape is masculine
• The pre­vi­ously men­tioned beard
• Horn scurs are more com­mon in males (and she has one. Thank­fully, though, it hasn’t grown, so we won’t have to remove it unless it does start grow­ing again.)
• More buck-like behavior

Thank­fully, on that last point, she isn’t pee­ing on her beard and front legs, and hope­fully she never will. But she does like to play head-butting games a lot more than the other ladies do, and her dor­sal hair (which looks like a bad comb-over when flat) really stands up tall when she does.

Fre­quently, inter­sexed does are put down, because they are regarded as dead weight — they are gen­er­ally ster­ile, and will there­fore never bear kids or milk. How­ever, that thought doesn’t even enter my mind — she’s a sweet lit­tle goat, and we really enjoy her per­son­al­ity, so she has an accept­ing, lov­ing home here.

Of course, George has pointed out that her name should now be Mary­Man. *giggle*

Mary­Man last week, munch­ing away hap­pily dur­ing one of our walks.

I know we will use this knowl­edge in eval­u­at­ing any goat does for pos­si­ble future pur­chases, or if any of the doe kids born here on our farm have the issue. I hope that this infor­ma­tion is help­ful to any­one else who is look­ing to pur­chase a doe for milk­ing, or those who might already have an inter­sexed doe within their exist­ing herd. Per­haps it will help them iden­tify why a par­tic­u­lar doe hasn’t been able to get pregnant.

Have you come across this issue in your own herd? How have you han­dled it? I’d love to hear from you with your thoughts and comments.

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Tags: goat doe genitalia issues, goat health, polled intersex syndrome in goats, sterile goat doe