Hermaphroditism, Freemartinism, and Goat Infertility: Exploring Non-Infectious Causes

Episode 150
For the Love of Goats

Transcript

Introduction 0:02
For the love of goats. We are talking about everything goat. Whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we’ve got you covered. And now, here’s Deborah Niemann.

Deborah 00:18
Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. This is the time of year that most of you are happily welcoming new kids to your farm, but maybe you’ve got a doe that’s not kidded and you thought she was pregnant. We have previously talked about infectious causes of abortions and goats not getting pregnant. However, today we’re going to talk about noninfectious causes of reproductive failure in goats. And we are joined by Dr. Fauna Smith, Assistant Professor of Livestock Herd Health and Reproduction at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Welcome to the show today, Dr Smith.

Dr. Smith 00:55
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here to talk to you about this.

Deborah 00:59
Yeah, I’m really excited about this. I got to hear you talk about this at ADGA, and I realized that I wanted to have you on the show to talk about it, because there’s a lot of misunderstandings about goats that can’t get pregnant. And I’m sure people saw the title, a lot of them thought, Oh, are you talking about hermaphrodites? So let’s just go ahead and talk about that term right off the bat, and why it’s kind of a problem to use that term.

Dr. Smith 01:23
Yeah, so that’s kind of a great way to start this, because I do see in the goat world a lot of people that talk about females that either are first timers that are not getting pregnant, or females that start to exhibit male-like characteristics, and I hear them often referred to as hermaphrodites. And while I think that comes from our understanding mostly of one particular syndrome, which is the polled intersex syndrome, that syndrome really is not a hermaphrodite, would be referred to as a pseudo-hermaphrodite.

So hermaphrodites would be an organism that’s capable of reproducing without a male and female pair, and that is not the case with these animals. What these animals have is that they exhibit characteristics of both male and female, either anatomically or under the microscope. If you look at the reproductive tissues, you’ll have an animal that, by her chromosomes, is xx, so female, but when you look at her gonads, so her reproductive organ, she might have testicle-like gonads instead of ovarian-like gonads. So females should have ovaries, males should have testicles. Gonads would be a generic term for either of those things, or anything in between that resembles a reproductive organ. In the case of what people refer to as a hermaphrodite, they’re actually a pseudo-hermaphrodite. And in the case of the polled intersex, they are a pseudo-hermaphrodite, where they are an xx female that has male gonads. So we have testicular-like gonads.

And so I think the best thing to do when we talk about these cases, because we are describing more than one intersex condition, is to use the term intersex instead of hermaphrodite or pseudo-hermaphrodite, because really intersex captures all that we basically have a situation where the way that the animal looks, or the gonads that they have, do not match their chromosomal sex makeup. Additionally, we can have ones where there are more than two sex chromosomes, so where there might be three sex chromosomes as an error when they were made as an embryo. And so intersex conditions would be kind of the best descriptor that captures all of these most accurately. And then when we talk about each individual animal, we can describe more carefully what that animal is actually presenting as.

Deborah 04:14
Okay, and then let’s go ahead and keep going with a whole polled intersex idea. And can you talk a little bit about why that happens and what exactly that means?

Dr. Smith 04:25
Yep, so polled intersex is a condition that has been described for a very long time in the goat in particular, and the reason it’s called polled intersex syndrome is that the gene for polled happens to be on a location on a chromosome that is very close to genes that regulate sexual differentiation. And so in this case, it’s actually nothing to do with the sex chromosomes of the animal. It’s to do with genes that regulate expression, which means, basically, we take the DNA code and we are going to turn that into the physical characteristics, right, of the animal.

And in this case, because of some defects in some genes related to sexual differentiation, we end up with an animal that instead of having ovaries, even though they are xx, they end up with testicle-like gonads, and that is linked to being polled. Now polled is a dominant trait. So if you have any organism, from the parents it’s going to get two different chromosomes, right? So we all have two. In this case, it’s chromosome one. So all goats have two chromosome ones: one they got from mom and one they got from dad. And polled is something we call a dominant trait, which means you only have to have one copy of the polled gene on chromosome one in order to show up as polled.

In case of the intersex condition that is an autosomal recessive trait, which means you have to have both the defective gene on chromosome one and the defective gene on chromosome two. That only happens when you are polled/polled and so typically, what we recommend for breeding of polled animals is that you never breed polled to polled because about 25% of those animals can end up with the polled intersex condition. As long as you’re always breeding a polled animal to a horned animal, in the vast majority of those cases, you should always end up with a fertile animal, but only 50% of your animals will be polled, if that makes sense, because from the polled parent, you’re going to get one copy of the polled gene, one copy of the normal gene.

Deborah 06:55
Yeah, exactly. Because there are no goats with two polled genes for this reason, at least not in the United States.

Dr. Smith 07:02
There probably are some polled to polled animals that are male, because while there is potentially some effect on male fertility, it’s not very well described, and I do know of people breeding polled to polled animals. And so if they get a polled male from that there is a chance that that male is truly homozygous polled. But again, as long as he was only ever bred to a horned animal, he should not produce any intersex females, even though all of his offspring should be polled.

Deborah 07:41
Okay, and so why did you say only males?

Dr. Smith 07:44
Because, so what we know is, in the literature, if you are a homozygous polled female, you have the polled intersex condition, so you’re nonfertile and you don’t breed. If you are a homozygous male for the polled we have not documented problems with reproduction in the male. And so if people do perform polled to polled matings and get a polled male, we don’t know if they are homozygous or heterozygous polled. Hope that makes sense.

Deborah 08:11
Yeah, totally. And there’s not a test. We just don’t do those kind of breeding that often.

Dr. Smith 08:16
As of yet, there is not a test. It’s one of the things that as genetic technologies are moving forward, we are looking into whether or not it is something we can screen animals for. One of the really kind of on the animal welfare front that would be really exciting is that if we could screen enough polled animals to see if any of them are polled without the genetic defect that results in intersex conditions, then somehow harnessing those genetics to move towards being able to breed fertile polled goats, just because, from an animal welfare standpoint, when we talk about dairy goat animal welfare in particular, disbudding is probably one of the largest areas of concern, just because it is something that induces pain in the animals, but also is relatively necessary for safe farming of large numbers of dairy animals the way that we farm them.

And so I think that is an area that if we were able to make progress towards being able to breed fertile, polled animals would be really exciting. But, yeah, we need to start utilizing more of the rapidly evolving genetic research and availability of genetic testing to look at doing something like that.

Deborah 09:44
Yeah, I know I really had my mind blown at the conference, because there was someone there from Mexico who said that he had a breed in his herd that was all polled and that just completely blew my mind and stopped me in my tracks. And I raised my hand and asked him–I clarified, like, “Did I really understand you correctly because we don’t breed polled goats to each other in the United States?” And he said, “Yes, because of hermaphrodites.” And I just nodded, like this was such a foreign idea to me, I couldn’t even formulate another intelligent question after that, and then I remember I saw you later, and it was you and Dr. Rowe, and you’re like, oh, they probably just don’t care if they have intersex kids.

So since then, I’ve just been thinking about that. Like, I mean, I get it with dairy goat producers, like, we want lots of females, and we want productive females. We don’t want nonreproducing females because they don’t make milk. But let’s say somebody’s got Boers, or they have no problem eating their goats, even you know, their dairy goats. Is there any other reason that someone should avoid breeding polled to polled goats?

Dr. Smith 10:54
It really is about the fertility, right? And so the question becomes, you know, how important is it to you to have fertile female from this breeding or from breeding animals? And again, you can look at it in a couple ways. I grew up in a family we do eat our extra males that don’t make breeding bucks. And you know, the few intersex females that we’ve had over the years have often gone into the freezer. The question for me, like as a what I would consider a seed stock producer, where I support my goat habit by breeding goats of high genetic merit and then marketing those genetics, to me, having 25% of the potential females from a mating be infertile is not something that I am willing to do if you’re breeding for commercial dairy operation.

Goats have such high fecundity, meaning they have lots of babies, that you actually produce more replacements than you need for a big commercial operation. So in that case, does it matter? I mean, I think it still matters in terms of, if we’re trying to improve milk production and breed the very best goats. I would rather, in a commercial dairy situation, have them selecting their highest value, highest producing does to breed from, and then maybe you cross breed their lesser does to a meat buck, which those animals then might be more marketable as a meat animal than to risk having our high producing does produce hermaphrodites because of polled.

So again, it’s just kind of it depends on what situation you’re in. How, how are you making decisions about your replacement females, and how important is it to you that particular matings produce fertile females? And if that is not the most important thing for you, then breeding for polled animals so you don’t have to disbud might be a way to go, right? But you and I were also very entwined in the, like, ADGA world. And the fact of the matter is when you’re creating genetic seed stock, you don’t want infertile things.

Deborah 13:12
Exactly. And sometimes it’s obvious–well, I shouldn’t say that. I was contacted one time by somebody who wanted to know why urine was coming out of her doe’s tummy, so it was not obvious to her that her doe had a penis. But, I mean, it can be fairly simple to figure out if a doe is actually an intersex, but if it totally looks like a buck in every way, is it probably a buck then?

Dr. Smith 13:42
Yeah. So, I mean, I think again, all of these are on a spectrum, and so in the polled intersex animals, everything has been described from something that looks like a normal female, but typically, the gonads of that animal are still going to be masculinized all the way through to xx females that have a scrotum and testicles in their scrotum. Like, so again, same condition, same genetic makeup, but the actual expression of that genetic defect is hugely variable between animals.

I remember, you know, as a child growing up, that there were producers that actually kept polled intersex females as teasers, because they exhibited all the male-like characteristics. They would detect does in heat and all that kind of stuff. And those does were very masculinized. But I’ve also looked at some of the literature, and again, we have females that you would not otherwise detect as being infertile that are infertile, and it’s usually around the time of puberty that we start to notice the differences in those ones.

Obviously, if they’re born with a scrotum, or instead of a vulva they have some penile-like development, sometimes it’s like partway down their rear end. Sometimes it’s all the way to where a male’s opening would be. Those are kind of more obvious, but some of these more subtle ones where you have a female that basically looks totally normal at birth, and you’ll start to see differences often around the time of puberty when they diverge from the “normal females” in the herd.

Deborah 15:31
Yeah, and that’s the thing I think that would be frustrating for dairy goat producers, is you’ve raised this goat, she looks like a doe, and then after putting, you know, a year’s worth of food into her, you realize she’s not.

Dr. Smith 15:43
I mean, I think that really is kind of the crux of the problem, and that probably actually helps lead us a little bit into freemartinism, because I think that is a much more classical presentation of the freemartin which is another cause of hormonal and genetic infertility in the female goat. But those does are almost always born looking completely normally female, and some of them are going to remain completely normally looking female. Some of them may even cycle, and then some of them, around the age of puberty, go on to look like males.

Deborah 16:23
Yeah, it’s funny. I was just gonna lead us into freemartinism, because there was something that came across my feed on Facebook recently where somebody had really high hopes for a doe, and then realized she’s not a doe, and so she’s selling her now as a pet. So can you explain what freemartinism is?

Dr. Smith 16:44
Yeah, so what we know about freemartinism, and so the word freemartin actually comes from cattle, and the origin of the word freemartin comes from the fact that those animals are free of babies. And actually these “female cattle” that were free of babies would actually be used in a festival of Saint Martin. Like they would eat them, right, because they were nonfertile females. And so that’s kind of the history behind the freemartin word, and it is best described in cattle where 92-95% of female cows that are born twin to a male calf are infertile. And actually how that happens is there is hormonal influence of the developing male fetus on the female fetus through shared blood supply, and it causes the female reproductive tract to not form properly.

The other thing that happens, and this is one of the ways that we actually can diagnose this kind of shared blood supply, is they also end up sharing the stem cells that make their blood cells, and so that’s where we get something called XX/XY hematopoietic chimerism, which is a really big, messy way of saying that in these freemartin animals, some of their white blood cells have XX, and some of their white blood cells have XY, and that’s because the progenitor cells that make the blood cells in the body were coming from both the male and the female twin through the shared blood supply that also had the sharing of the hormones that created the infertility in the female. And now in cattle, that is such a high percentage of those females that had mixed blood supply with their brothers, that we use the test for chimerism interchangeably with a diagnosis of infertility. So we say if they have XX/XY, particularly the XY part, if they have XY blood cells, they’re going to be infertile.

What we’re discovering with the goat is that that may or may not be the case. So we have a little study that we’ve been working on here that was actually a study of serendipity, because I was doing a study for something else, and I had a cohort of females and a cohort of males that I was comparing from birth through puberty, and I just so happen that I ended up with two freemartins, two XX/XY chimeras out of eight females enrolled in that study. So one that gave me pause that maybe this condition is a lot more common than we think, but also one of those around the time of puberty really started to change. She developed a huge poll. She had a big beard, and she actually looked male. And the other one went on to cycle perfectly normally.

Now, the one that has cycled perfectly normally has not gotten pregnant, despite being bred four or five times. So by all standards, even if she does get pregnant, if we continue to try and breed her, she’s subfertile, even though you look at her–her teats, her vulva, her speculum exam–I can ultrasound her reproductive tract. We actually laparoscopically AI’d her and got to look at her ovaries and her oviducts and her uterus. It’s all there, but she’s not getting pregnant. And then the other one looks like a male and has never cycled. And actually, when we ended up euthanizing her and looking at her reproductive tract, has male-like gonads.
So again, this whole spectrum of disorder from the freemartin, similar to the spectrum of disorder that we see in the intersex, polled intersex. But the freemartin, I think there’s a lot more to come from this story, because I think that freemartinism is much more common in the goat than we think, but I’m not convinced that it has the same definitive link to infertility that it does in the cow.

Deborah 21:20
Yeah, that was my next question. Because it sounds like it’s possible for a goat to have the genetic condition but still be fertile.

Dr. Smith 21:30
So that’s our experience thus far. Like, we have this female that really, for all intents and purposes, is behaving like a normal female. Now she’s not getting pregnant, right? So that puts her into the subfertile or infertile category. So some of the questions that we have about this animal, if she was a very valuable breeding animal, can we do IVF on her and harvest oocytes from her ovaries and make babies from her that way, even if she can’t carry them herself? Like these are questions that we are still grappling with and looking at. She responds to hormone therapy. So in order to do her laparoscopic AI, we did a CIDR protocol, and she came in heat and expressed estrus and like she was behaving like a normal female, but on her blood she is SRY positive. Which SRY is the sex-determining region of the Y chromosome. So in freemartens, in cattle, that’s what we used as a screening tool to say, Oh, this female was born twin to a male. Is she going to be fertile or not fertile? And because of the high degree of correlation in the cattle, that’s okay to do.

It’s really interesting, I think, like, obviously, as we all know, I think our phones listen to us now, and so my Facebook feed, because I’ve been talking about this a lot lately, both at conferences and stuff, but because we’re working on it in my lab, my grad students and I and our collaborators are often having meetings talking about intersex conditions, and I’m just amazed at the number now in my Facebook feed of producers that all their intersex condition animals are on my page. And I actually saw one the other day where somebody posted about an SRY positive female by blood test that gave birth to a litter. So like our female that is SRY positive, that is cycling, hasn’t gotten pregnant yet, but it looks like there’s anecdotal evidence out there that some of these SRY positive females can become pregnant.

Deborah 23:34
So the blood test is something that, like, anybody’s vet could draw, and then they could send it off to UC Davis, and you guys can do the test.

Dr. Smith 23:41
Yeah, so the Veterinary Genetics Lab at UC Davis does run, call it a freemartin test. I think for the goat, that gives me a little bit of pause, because again, we don’t see the divergence in their phenotype, in the way they look until they go through puberty. But if you are taking that sample on a 10 day old, doe kid and it comes back positive, I am not 100% sure that we should be using that test in the same way that they do in cattle. I don’t think it’s as definitive, and so it’s kind of good to know if they’re chimeras, but I’m not sure that it actually correlates well with fertility. To me, waiting for them to go through puberty and seeing what they’re doing around the time of puberty is a better gauge.

If they are not cycling, if they are not developing their teats, if their vulva is small, if they develop masculine characteristics, those are more definitive. And then the other for fertility, in terms of the development of the reproductive tract, something like a speculum or pipette exam is a much more definitive way. So in young animals, I’ll do a pipette exam, where I take an AI pipette and I measure the length of the vagina with an AI pipette, very gently, and typically what I’ll do is I’ll take an age matched–if I’m suspicious of them not having a complete reproductive tract–I’ll take an age matched what I would consider to be normal female, and I’ll compare the length of the vagina to the suspected intersex, XX/XY chimera, and typically, there is a significant difference if they are lacking their vaginal vault.

Deborah 25:29
So it sounds like you could have a goat that, like, might just have trouble getting pregnant. So like, in the span of 10 years, instead of having kids every year, she might have kids three or four times, because she just doesn’t get pregnant a lot.

Dr. Smith 25:41
I mean, I think that’s an open question. One of the things could be, how many times does it take to get her pregnant, right? So we typically think about seasonal, short day breeders like the goat and the sheep that their first cycle, we should have about 80% pregnant on the first cycle, and then on the second cycle, it should be about 80% of the remaining does, and then 80 so like, basically, by the time you’re to three cycles, well over 90% of the animals that you’ve bred should be pregnant.

So when we start thinking about breeding on the fourth or fifth cycle, the two questions that come to mind are: is the buck you’re using fertile? Or if you’re doing something like AI, is there an issue with your AI technique or the quality of the semen? And then the other question is about the doe herself. So, in older does, questions about their previous reproductive history? You know, have they had problems kidding before? Do we have some reason to suspect that the uterus might not be the most hospitable place for a baby anymore. But in these nulliparous does, meaning they’ve never had a baby before, is there some congenital genetic reason why they are not getting pregnant? And I would say that the more I look at this and investigate it, like as part of poor fertility workup, this would be something to be looking into. I think it’s a much better screening tool for a doe that has been bred five times and not gotten pregnant than it is for a neonatal doe kid that you run it on just because she had three brothers in her litter.

Deborah 27:20
Yeah. As a Nigerian breeder, the idea of having doe kids born without brothers is almost foreign to me. Like it happens a lot. Like, way more than 50% of the time, because my does average a little over three kids per kidding.

Dr. Smith 27:35
Right, and I think it’s a really interesting thing, again, to me, it makes sense why goats might not have the degree of infertility. So either they don’t have the degree of chimerism–they just make chimeras less often than cattle–or they make chimeras at the same rate, but they don’t become infertile like those are the two options, right? If we don’t see the same degree of infertility in females that are co-twin or triplet or quad to a male. I do believe that there is something about litter size that does maybe increase the chances of this happening.

And so that’s actually an experimental question that we have in our hypothesis is that the higher fecundity, meaning the more babies they have, the more likely you are to have chimeras within that litter. Now remember, the chimera does not have to be between a male and a female. You could also have male/male chimerism, or female/female chimerism, because all that is is sharing blood supply in utero. And so it’s one of these questions, like, with what frequency do we see chimeras?

And so we’re going to actually do a trial this spring to look at that like triplet or larger versus twin versus single. How many chimeras do we identify in the total population, male or female, male to male, female to male or female to female chimeras, and we can use genetic testing to identify that. And then downstream from that, we’re going to look at whether or not the XX/XY female chimeras. So the ones that were chimeric to a brother, we’re going to look at their downstream fertility. And our plan is to enroll, I think approximately 200 and something kids in that trial.

Deborah 29:24
Okay, oh, that’s exciting. So what happens then if you’ve got a goat that’s been pregnant before, and she’s not getting pregnant now, and she doesn’t have an infection in her, the nutrition is good, she doesn’t have any nutritional deficiencies. What are some other reasons that a goat might have reproductive failure if she has previously kidded in the past?

Dr. Smith 29:50
So in that case, infectious causes would actually be the most common, and we won’t get into it, but the most common is what I would call subclinical chronic endometritis, and so that’s like inflammation/infection of the lining of the uterus. I think that’s probably one of the most common reasons. However, that said, there are noninfectious reasons for what we call multiparous, does that have had babies before having infertility problems.

One, we aren’t 100% sure of the cause, so you could have early embryonic loss where they actually did get pregnant, but then the baby died, or they resorbed it. Or you can also just have this–we see this develop in does that have never been bred at all, and that’s hydrometra or false pregnancy. So especially if you do out of season breeding, we see this with greater frequency than we do in-season breeding. But if you have a doe that, say, had a heat cycle and then you just never saw come back in heat and was not bred on our first heat cycle, that would be one of the differentials for a doe not cycling. The diagnosis, obviously, is by ultrasound. And so what you have is a uterus that’s filled with fluid that does not have a baby in it. And so we see those with relative regularity. It seems to be a small ruminant thing. Goats, very commonly, but we also see them in sheep. So that would be, like, quite common. It can happen in does that have never had babies before, too, but we will see it in does that have had previous babies.

The other thing is is keeping really good reproductive records for yourself can be super helpful. So things like problem kidding. I regularly see does that have evidence of where they’ve, like, torn their cervix or lacerated their vagina during kidding, and then it’s healed with a stricture, or, you know, some sort of abnormality that then prevents either the uterus from cleaning properly or for semen from getting where it needs to go.

We can see other things on occasion, you know, we deal with a doe that’s had four babies, and then they think she’s done, and then come back a couple of days later and there’s another fetus trying to come out. When those types of things happen, we get this inflammatory process going on in the uterus. And you can get things like inflammation of the oviducts. Well, the oviduct is what moves the egg from the ovary to the uterus. It’s where fertilization takes place. So if you get oviductal inflammation or obstruction, then you’re not going to be able to get pregnant.

So there are all these other things that often are related to the process of giving birth and then things not going right, that really the reason for them not getting pregnant are not primarily because of infection. Infection might be there, but the primary reason is we now have some sort of anatomic abnormality due to a kidding problem that then is resulting in them not being able to conceive. And those are not always overtly obvious from the outside of the animal as to like, oh, you know, she’s got this problem, and that’s why she’s not getting pregnant. Sometimes we don’t find those until we look either by laparoscopy or by necropsy.

Deborah Niemann 33:13
Yeah. And I think I want to make a distinction here, because, like, we did the whole episode on infectious causes of abortion and stuff before was really all about, like, contagious diseases and beyond that now, does can have infections from previous kiddings, which are not contagious. It’s just a specific problem that that one doe has. And I think a lot of people assume that if a doe had an infection, that she would be obviously ill, but that’s not always the case.

Dr. Smith 33:40
Yeah, no, I would say that’s not always the case, particularly when it comes to the reproductive tract. So the reproductive tract is what we would call immune privilege site. So, because the goat grows babies and placenta in her uterus, that is very different genetically to her, correct? Like only 50% of the DNA in a placenta or in a fetus is hers, and the other 50% comes from another animal. Now with humans, where we do organ transplant, you have to match all of the different components of the immune system with your donor, and then you often have to be on immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of your life in order to not reject an organ transplant, right?

But if you think about it, we are doing that same thing over and over and over again in the uterus. We have a foreign organ, in this case, the pregnancy that develops, and she does not attack it. She does not try to reject it, and that’s because that site is protected from the immune system itself. So we don’t allow during pregnancy lots of cells and stuff to move into the uterus. And so that whole process also means that we can have low grade infection in there that does not get taken care of, right? So it’s kind of an isolated event, and it’s not going to cause systemic inflammation, especially if it’s a low grade infection.

Deborah 35:08
Yeah, one of the other professors I interviewed one time talked about a doe that had a retained kid for years that was found, which, of course, kept her from getting pregnant for all those years, and was discovered on necropsy like four years after the last time she kidded.

Dr. Smith 35:25
So there’s two ways that you can get retained fetuses. One is retention of a fetus at kidding, and because it’s open kidding, those tend to become infected. Their bacteria gets in there, because there’s babies coming in and out, it’s open to the environment. But we have another process that can happen during pregnancy, called mummification. And when you have fetal mummification, the whole fetus just desiccates, and there’s no water content left in it. And those ones can be really hard for the does to pass sometimes, and sometimes they will pass everything, but there’s no real material for bacteria to infect and create infection, and so they just stay this dried little lump of fetus in the uterus.

And then we actually have a doe right now that we’re following in our practice, who we are probably going to do IVF on, because she’s quite valuable, but she has some fetal bones in her uterus, so she must have had a very small baby that didn’t pass when she kidded the last time, because we have a record of her having two or three live, healthy fetuses. But when we ultrasound her, we can see small pieces of bone in her uterus, which means to me, she probably had an early mummification of a fetus that then just stayed in there. And now the uterus is not a hospitable environment. She’s not going to get pregnant. But the good thing is is that her ovaries are still cycling. She can still cycle. And so we can actually do some advanced reproductive technologies to get babies from really valuable does that might have some sort of intrauterine pathology.

Deborah 37:04
Okay, and just to be clear, when we’re talking about mummified fetuses, we’re not just necessarily talking about a kid that was born dead, maybe died, like a week or two ago. It is typically one that died early in pregnancy and is like the size of a hot dog?

Dr. Smith 37:20
So they can be variable. Basically, the process of mummification is removal of all of the water content from the fetus, so all you have left are cartilage, bone, and skin tends to be intact. And it’s very hard, and even the placenta of those fetuses becomes very leather-like, and so that process takes some time. I do think we get some that die, that are on their way to becoming mummies by the time the doe kids, where you’ll see like the sunken eyes, but there’s still some amount of hydration to the fetus. They were probably on their way to being mummified.

I do think that those middle term to early third trimester mummies are the ones that are higher risk for being retained without major consequences to the systemic health of the doe. Because they are small, they tend to be super dried out, so there’s not a substrate, a matter, for bacteria to latch on to and create an infected environment. And so again, mummification can kind of happen anywhere along the way, and it can be on its way to happening when animals are born, but it’s those truly desiccated mummies that I think often can be retained without consequence to the systemic health of the doe.

Deborah 38:48
Okay. This has been so fascinating. Is there anything else that you think people need to know about this topic?

Dr. Smith 38:57
I mean, the only other one that I would mention for the multiparous does would be uterine neoplasia, where we can get cancers of the uterus. Now I will say that regularly breeding your does seems to be protective. So we most often clinically see this in does that have never been bred or have not been bred for many years. But I do think if you are somebody that milks does, one of the things we’re seeing now is people that are milking does for a long period of time, that could be something that you started to see vaginal discharge or blood coming from the vulva.

If you are somebody that retires your aged-out does, it would just be something to be aware of. I have not seen very many in young or middle-aged does that are regularly reproducing, but older does that are either still reproducing or that have had a couple of years off. This would be something just to watch out for and think of, especially if you see any sort of abnormal vaginal discharge.

Deborah 40:00
That’s really good to know. I know cancer is usually like the last thing on people’s minds with their goats, but it happens, so it’s really good to know. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been incredibly informative, and I know people are going to find it really helpful.

Dr. Smith 40:17
No worries. It was a pleasure to talk to you about the subject. It’s one of my favorite subjects to talk about, if you couldn’t tell.

Deborah 40:23
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