ONE CLARK COUNTY WOMAN RECEIVED quite a shock when a sheep she owned for 3 years became pregnant without another sheep on the property. Now she thinks the kids may be a rare half-goat half-sheep hybrid known as a geep.
IF THE MYSTERY OFFSPRING turn out to be a pair of geep, they would be among the rarest creatures in the country. Surviving goat-sheep hybrids are exceptionally rare.
ZORRO’S UNNAMED BROTHER looks almost like the opposite of Zorro himself with a white speckled face, a wool-clad body, and long, hair-covered legs.
THE KID THEY CALL ZORRO butts heads and rubs snouts with the suspected father, Blizzard the Saanen goat.
Clark County may have a new pair of home-grown celebrities in the form of two exceedingly rare – and adorable – genetic freaks.
Readers may be familiar with a few animals that break the common biological rules protecting humans from things like “batsnakes” or “bearlephants.” Mules result from crossing a horse with a donkey, killer bees are a mix of the African and European honeybee, and everybody knows somebody who has claimed to own a wolfdog. There are cross-species pig hybrids, zebra-horses and even something called a “wholphin.”
In La Center, resident Lisa Marston thinks a ewe on her property has given birth to a pair of goat-sheep hybrids, a mix commonly called “geep” with an astronomically improbable chance to occur. Because of the distant relationship between goats and sheep, offspring from those pairings suffer more genetic complications and rarely survive gestation. In cases with a goat father and a sheep mother, like Marston's animals, surviving offspring are virtually nonexistent.
Most hybrids occur between closely related animals within the same genus. Dogs and wolves both belong to the canis genus; donkeys and horses to equus. Goats and sheep belong to the same subfamily – caprinae – but different genera. Goats belong to capra while sheep belong to ovis.
Confirmed geep births can make national and even international headlines, as was the case with a geep named Butterfly born in a Scottsdale, AZ, petting zoo in the summer of 2014. News of that birth appeared in media from the San Francisco Globe to the UK's Mirror and every on clickbait website in between. Butterfly's mother was also a sheep and her father a goat.
No one can be certain of the kids' genetic makeup until experts examine their genome, but Marston and her family are convinced. The mother, a black Welsh mountain sheep mix named Diamond after a white mark across her head, was the only sheep on the property at the time she became pregnant, Marston said. She has owned Diamond for about three years and has no other explanation for how she could have given birth.
“I was really shocked,” Marston said during a visit to the property last Wednesday afternoon. “I trained horses for 20 years and I've had livestock my whole life and I've never seen anything like that.”
The family kept Diamond in a pen with about a dozen goats including Blizzard, the Saanen billy Marston suspects to be the father. When Diamond started inexplicably gaining weight, Marston became worried and moved her into an isolated pen for observation. When her daughter, Lauren, suggested the sheep could be pregnant, Marston dismissed it.
“We joked about it but never thought it could actually happen,” she said. “I thought she was just getting fat.”
By the time Diamond gave birth one month ago, Marston was in full-blown disbelief. The kids' (or lambs') arrival did little to solve the mystery. Because of the general similarity between the animals and the wide morphological variety of their breeds, it can be difficult for the untrained eye to make sense of the details.
The two siblings, both males, display some unique characteristics and distinct differences. Wavy hair covers the body of one sibling, called Zorro for the black mask across his eyes, where his unnamed brother sports a short woolen coat with longer hair on his legs. Their ears are different shapes and textures. Both have the long, curved tails of a lamb, but their faces look different.
All of the differences together were enough that staff at one local veterinary clinic, before getting the backstory, guessed that one was a sheep and the other a goat.
“They're weird looking,” Marston said. “They're cute and everything, but they're super weird.”
At one point during the interview, Marston allowed Blizzard into the pen with Diamond and the tiny maybe-geep. After a moment, Zorro timidly approached the older goat where he sat munching a mouthful of grass and the two rubbed snouts for a moment. After, the smaller animal tensed, stood tall and the two playfully butted heads.
Anyone wishing catch a glimpse of the pair and form their own opinion might get a chance at the Clark County Fair later this year. Marston plans to have DNA tests performed and, if they turn out to be the real deal, she may put them up for sale. She hopes to show them off at the fair and said she'll have them at least through August.
