# A question about teats.



## Mamaboid (Feb 16, 2012)

I see people posting about 1 x1 and so on when talking about teats.  What do these numbers mean?  Like 2x1 etc.  I just looked, saw two, spaced perfectly, in the right place, and figured all was well.  Is there something I am missing?


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## SuburbanFarmChic (Feb 16, 2012)

The numbers indicate how many teats per side of the udder.  So your doe would be a clean 1x1. 

On meat goats you often see  2x1 or 2x2. What you don't want to see is 2.5/7.9 etc.  Really anything over 2x2 is a pretty serious flaw. And in a dairy goat anything above 1x1 is a culling flaw and worth double checking related stock to make sure they aren't hiding a little teat nubbin somewhere.   


Sometimes even in good dairy lines it happens though.  A friend had a fish teat appear on one of her best lines of milkers out of nowhere. She'd never had anything like it before so she suspects it came from somewhere in the buck's lineage even though he was clean 1x1.


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## Mamaboid (Feb 16, 2012)

Thank you.  I guess I knew what to look for, I just didn't know how it was described.


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## Roll farms (Feb 16, 2012)

My idiot sister (as opposed to the others, 'nutjob' sister and 'drunken sister' ) once paid $300.00 for a registered boer doe that was 3x4 teated.  


When she kidded / rejected her kids, she called me to help get colostrum....that stuff was squirting out of 4 or 5 different orifices, you had to have a wide-mouthed bowl to milk her or part of it shot out to the side.

Some boer people will tell you that extra teats (2x2) are an advantage, b/c they can 'feed more kids'.  I disagree.

A) Dairy goats w/ 2 teats feed trips and quads all the time and B) If the extra teat is blind (non-producing / dummy teat), then a kid *could* latch on and starve if the producer isn't observant.

I think it's an excuse for them to continue to breed w/out concern for proper teat structure.  I do have some 4 teated does but I'm trying to improve their udders by breeding them to correct bucks.


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## 20kidsonhill (Feb 17, 2012)

ABGA teat structure chart, for Boer goats. 


http://www.abga.org/teat-structure.php


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## 20kidsonhill (Feb 17, 2012)

Roll farms said:
			
		

> My idiot sister (as opposed to the others, 'nutjob' sister and 'drunken sister' ) once paid $300.00 for a registered boer doe that was 3x4 teated.
> 
> 
> When she kidded / rejected her kids, she called me to help get colostrum....that stuff was squirting out of 4 or 5 different orifices, you had to have a wide-mouthed bowl to milk her or part of it shot out to the side.
> ...


Dummy teats are so annoying.  

We tried hard to keep our herd 1x1 and then gave up.  Every Boer goat farm we would visit, had 2x2 and 2x3's They were even trying to sell fish teated full-bloods for 100's of dollars and into the 1,000's, We are know trying to maintain, at least a good clean 2 x2, although we still give the 1x1. Clean 2x2 refers to the separation between the 2 teats on the one side,  It is acceptable for them to be right next to each other, but we prefer to see space between them.  

as the udder fills in with milk, the teats that have space between them, will spread apart even further, often times there will be the main teat(towards the back) that will continue to grow and fill, and the 2nd teat(towards the front), that will get smaller in porportion to the main teat. I haven't found this 2nd teat to be too much of a problem as long as the main teat is a nice shape.  Fish-teats are another story, and are miserable to get a kid to milk on. 

I am amazed at the number of people I have that want to buy my paint kids, regardless of teat structure. I will offer them for meat or for the kid for fair projects for the meat classes and I will always have some women calling me begging me to sell the doe to her, even though I say she is fish-teated on one side or both, ect.......


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