Practical Angora Goat Raising

Excerpt

PREFACE.

For several years beginners in the Angora goat industry were without text books, and even to-day there are very few practical treatises. From our forty years of experience in farming Angoras, and from the personal observations of our Dr. W. C. Bailey, while in the interior of Asia Minor, we have tried to select the essential points in the successful management of Angora flocks, and to present these points so that they may be used.

We have given a brief outline of the history of the Angora goat, but we have devoted several pages to consideration of detail in breeding and kidding. It has been our aim to make this a practical text book for the beginner in the Angora industry, and if it proves of value to him, it has fulfilled its mission.

The Authors.

s to the origin and early history of the Angora goat little is known. It is supposed that the Angora variety descended from one of the classes of wild goats, and different writers have contended that different genera were the foundation of the Angora species. They have based these claims upon the characteristics of the horns, the covering of the body, shape and size of the animal, and various other details. Several agree that Capra Ægagrus is the class of goat from which the Angora species has developed.

KNOWN FACTS.

Present history traces the Angora goat to the vilayet of Angora, in Asia Minor, and to the country immediately surrounding this vilayet. Some have set a date over two thousand years ago, claiming that the Angora goat was introduced into Asia Minor at that time, but the only authentic history is that given by Tournefort, a French naturalist, employed by his government, who explored Asia Minor about two hundred and fifty years ago, and who described and pictured the Angora goat about as he appears to-day and by Evliya Effendi, a Turk, who wrote in 1550 of the goats, and by a few other writers. That they have not changed more is due to the fact that the Turk is quite content as he is, and he has no ambition to breed a different goat from what he has had for at least the past three centuries.

Before we consider the migrations of the Angora goat, we will investigate the physical conditions of their native province. The interior of Asia Minor, or the Angora goat country, is from one to four thousand feet above the sea level. Low, rolling hills and broad plains, treeless and almost waterless; dry, hot and desolate in the summer, and covered with more or less snow in the winter, form the habitat of the Angora. A small fine fibered sage brush is the principal diet of the goat, both summer and winter, but in the spring this diet is supplemented with weeds and some grass, and in the summer some of the goats are driven to the higher mountains, where there are some scrub pines and other varieties of brush. There is no winter feeding. The goats make their own living on the tops of the sage brush, which protrude through the snow.

The indolent Turks do make some provision for the shelter of themselves and the goats in the winter....