Producing Color in Angora Goats

Adding color to angora goats (and keeping color in future generations) takes some planning and knowledge. For a few thousand years, color has been deliberately culled from most angora goat herds. White was preferred because of the ease of dyeing and predictability of color when using white mohair.  This has resulted in multiple ways to produce solid white in angora goats and made white very dominant genetically. Purposefully producing color in angoras started fairly recently and popularity has grown since the 1980s.

Two techniques are primarily used in this venture. One technique was crossbreeding white angora goats with Navajo angoras and other breeds to introduce color.  This brings in color quickly, but also produces a few generations of "Cashgora" type goats. Cashgora goats tend to have lots of guard hairs or kemp, have loose (or no) lock structure, low luster and these goats do not have full coverage.  Some breeders searched hard and were able to find goats from white angora herds that were born with some color to use in their breeding programs. These goats helped to maintain the quality of mohair in the kids, but tended to fade to near white pretty quickly. Breeding up colored goats to match the coverage, lock structure, luster, and freedom from kemp of white angoras is the ultimate goal and has begun to come to fruition in recent years.

At the genetic level, there are 3 main sites that rule color expression in angora goats. The Extension locus, the Agouti locus and the Brown locus (brown locus goats are very rare at this time.) There is detailed information on genetics and color expression in goats written in articles by Dr Phil Sponenberg.

The Pool method for breeding for color:

A practical guide to keeping color in the next generation was uncovered by the early colored angora goat breeders. They found that there are 2 main pools of colored angora goats. If goats with color genes in the same pool are bred, there is typically color in the kids. If the 2 pools are crossed, the result is often white or light tan kids (especially in the first generation.)  These 2 pools describe the primary color and pattern of the goat.

It is important to note that white spotting (frosted ears, spots, belts, etc…) over the primary color is completely separate from the primary color/pattern of the goat and is controlled by other genes that I will discuss in future posts.

Black/Pattern pool (also referred to as the "recessive pool"). This pool has solid black/gray goats and goats with distinct, predictable patterns. The patterns usually include some striping on the face. These patterns occur in many breeds of goats and have different names in the different breeds. The most common patterns (as named in angoras) are Badger, Reverse Badger, Peacock, and Mantled. The genes for this pool are located on the Agouti Locus. This pool was given the term "recessive" because even if a goat has all the genes needed to express a black/pattern pool color, it's color can be suppressed and hidden by the expression of genes in the Red/Black/Brown pool.

Red/Black/Brown pool (also referred to as the "dominant pool"). This pool has solid goats in all shades of red, brown, black and gray. There can be some variation of the shade of color in the fleece on an individual goat. Genes for this pool are located on the Extension Locus. Goats in this pool can be hiding genes from the black/pattern pool, thus the term "dominant" is associated with this pool (but this is not dominant in the usual use of the term.)

Because the color is determined by genes on different loci, both pools can hide genes from the other pool. Red/black/brown pool color goats may have a partial or full set of Black/Pattern pool genes that are not expressed. Black/Pattern pool goats can have a partial set of genes for the Red/Black/Brown pool that are not expressed.

Most colored angora goats reliably produce color in one pool or the other based on their color as described above. Solid black goats are found in both pools and pedigrees are especially important for them because it is impossible to tell which pool they are in by looking at the goat. By examining the pedigree and colors in previous generations, a educated guess can be made as to which pool that goat should produce color with. While crossing pools often initially produces white goats, after a few generations of crossing the pools, some goats can produce color with both pools and exciting, unexpected colors and patterns can appear in their kids.