Goats and sheep are quite similar, so it makes sense to try and breed them. After all, they’re both farm animals, they’re both adorable, and can you imagine how cute wooly, fluffy goats would be? But as the wise chaotician, Ian Malcolm once said, “You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”
Sheep and goats can interbreed, but since they’re members of different genera and species, there is a very low chance of impregnation. The babies are usually stillborn. It is more likely for a ram and goat to reproduce successfully than a ewe and a male goat.
There are plenty of biological factors at work here, and unfortunately for us, it’s not so easy to have a bunch of little “geeps” running around. But as science has progressed, we now know how and why sheep and goats don’t mesh well together.
Zygotes and Different Species
As fun as it would be to start breeding different species together, creating a world like the one in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” full of turtle-ducks and platypus-bears, this is sadly not possible. At least, not yet.
Every living thing has a certain number of chromosomes, and that number varies based on its species. When a new human is created, the embryo is given half of their dad’s chromosomes and half of their mom’s chromosomes, so they end up with 46 chromosomes total (23 from each parent).
The number of chromosomes a person has is extremely important. If it’s more or less than 46, chances are the human body won’t work normally. A lot of genetic disorders and diseases are caused because someone was born without the right amount of chromosomes. As a common example, Down Syndrome is caused when someone has an extra chromosome (chromosome number 21), and that bumps them up from 46 to 47.
So, how does this relate to sheep-goat hybrids? Well, the scientific name for sheep is Ovid Aries, and goats are called Capra Aegagrus Hircus. Don’t let the Latin freak you out. Simply put, this means that sheep and goats are members of different genus and species (categories from the Linnaean classification hierarchy system). Sheep and goats are distantly related, which means that their genetic make-up is too far removed to mesh well together.
Goats have 60 chromosomes, and sheep have 54 chromosomes. Chromosomes are like instructions for building a new organism, and taking instructions from two totally different organisms is as crazy as throwing together the instructions for a washing machine and a blender and hoping that the final product actually works properly. Sure, they’re both fully functioning machines that work fine on their own, but put them together, and you could create anything from a clothes-shredding demon to a pile of pieces that didn’t fit quite right together.
Is it Possible?
In a word, yes. But very rarely. People have tried to breed the two species together, but when goats and sheep are bred in the wild, they rarely produce living offspring. Some of the only surviving geeps are ones that are created using modern science.
In 1984, in a lab at the Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge, England, scientists combined cells from already growing embryos from both sheep and goats and planted them in those animal wombs to grow. Only one of the six surviving babies ended up having sheep and goat genes in its blood, and it also had patches of sheep and goat hair on its skin.
Technically, this isn’t a sheep-goat hybrid. It’s called a chimera due to the fact that it is an animal created from cells of different living organisms that were formed into one living creature.
The first recorded case of a sheep-goat hybrid that actually was conceived naturally was in 2000. The news article explains how this is one of the few cases ever where the geep survives and is able to live a life, as it was six years old when the article was written.
There have been a few more cases about sheep-goat hybrids throughout the years. However, it’s important to be wary of the cases that allegedly produced a sheep-goat hybrid. Some of these cases lack evidence and just assume a mountain goat took advantage of their ewe, producing a funny-looking sheep that people mistake for a hybrid.
The interbreeding of the two species only seems to have a possibility of producing offspring if a ram (male sheep) and female goat are the ones that breed. A male goat and ewe (female sheep) have a much harder time producing offspring and conceiving at all.
If you have your heart set on interbreeding sheep and goats, make sure to stick a ram and female goat together, because, for whatever reason, that pair-up has much more success than the opposite. Research has shown that ram and female goats have a 30-50% conception rate.
However, even if the geep is successfully fertilized, more often than not, the sheep-goat hybrids don’t develop fully and die in the womb. These stillborn cases are sad, but unfortunately, with all the genetic odds stack against them, it’s not a huge surprise. The cells forming the geep embryo in the womb are working with two different sets of instructions, putting together an animal from scratch, and there are so many things that can go wrong in that process. Even with embryos formed from two parents of the same species, there are so many variables. It’s a miracle that babies are born at all without everything going wonky.
Some people claim, however, that not only do sheep-goat hybrids survive and thrive, but they can also reproduce themselves. However, this claim counteracts the proven fact that most hybrids are infertile (like mules), so until scientific evidence comes out to prove that fact, it will have to remain speculation for now. If you can manage to successfully breed a ram and goat successfully twice, and then breed those two geeps together successfully, then PLEASE let the world know.