Know Your Parts

Know Your Parts

When discussing parts of a dairy goat and how they influence structure, it's important to know what parts you are talking about.  The diagram below illustrates these parts. It's difficult to understand conformation if you don't know where they are!

There are four aspects of overall conformation to consider in a functional Dairy Goat.  These are:

• General Appearance
• Dairy Character
• Body Capacity
• Mammary

These aspects consist of certain desirable characteristics of the body of the goat, and they form the basic structure necessary for the animal to fulfill it's purpose of providing lengthy high producing lactations while remaining healthy enough to do so over a long life.

Each individual body part also contributes to the overall aspects mentioned above.  These will be discussed individually in future posts.

It is beneficial to learn the correct terminology about dairy goat parts so you will be familiar with them in the future.  Do you know what the thurls are???