Mohair and cashmere, the great Swiss and American milkers, and the hardy meat goats of the brush: 17 breeds, with their origins, their fibers and their conservation status.
Conservation status is from The Livestock Conservancy’s Conservation Priority List (United States). Micron counts are typical ranges and vary from animal to animal.
White, curly, lustrous ringlets; long drooping ears.
Shorn twice a year; Texas, especially the Edwards Plateau, grows most American mohair.
Any goat with a fine downy undercoat under coarse guard hair.
Cashmere is a fiber type, not a single breed; each goat gives only a few ounces of down a year, combed out in spring.
Small, friendly, in many colors.
Bred by crossing Pygmy and Angora goats; fleeces are graded Type A, B or C.
Yarn of this kind of fiber at softlamby →
Small, fine-boned, curly or wavy coat.
Nigerian Dwarf crossed with Angora or other fiber goats: a small goat for both milk and fiber.
Yarn of this kind of fiber at softlamby →
Large and white or cream; calm.
The Holstein of goats: the highest volume of milk of any goat breed.
Upright ears, many color patterns, hardy and alert.
A strong all-weather milker that copes with heat and cold.
Long drooping ears, Roman nose, loud voice.
Lower volume but the highest butterfat of the big dairy breeds, good for cheese.
Almost no outer ear: tiny 'gopher' or 'elf' ears.
Developed by Eula Fay Frey from short-eared Spanish goats; the only dairy breed developed in the United States.
Brown with white stripes on the face and white legs.
Among the oldest registered dairy breeds in the world.
Bay with black markings, a color called 'chamoisée'.
Medium-sized, quiet, with a sweet milk.
Small (under about 23 inches), in many colors, often with blue eyes.
A favorite of homesteads and 4-H: rich milk from a goat the size of a large dog.
White body, red-brown head, long ears, heavy muscling.
Selected by South African farmers for meat; first imported to the United States in the 1990s.
Usually white, large, with wide spreading horns.
Bred by Garrick and Anne Batten from feral New Zealand goats; 'kiko' means 'meat' in Maori.
Lean, long-horned, in every color; often wild-looking.
Lived for centuries on their own in Texas brush and the Southeast, including Florida; famous for hardiness and good mothering.
Bulging eyes, small to medium build, many colors.
A gene condition, myotonia congenita, makes their muscles lock briefly when startled, so they stiffen or tip over. They do not truly faint and stay conscious.
Small, deer-like, reddish with black markings, swept-back horns.
Feral goats removed from the island in the 1970s–80s to protect native plants; a few hundred survive, cared for by breeders.
Small to medium, often multicolored, with long horns.
Possibly descended from goats left by 18th-century European sailors; kept from extinction by island conservationists.