'Shoat' or 'geep' just acting the goat

The geep (front) has a lamb's body and a goat's head, legs and bleat. Photo / Otago Daily Times

Tests on an animal found on a Taieri farm, believed to be the offspring of a goat and sheep, have revealed that it was just playing the goat.

The male lamb was discovered by Graeme Wallace last month when he brought a mob of ewes and lambs in for tailing.

With the body of a lamb, but the head, legs and bleat of a goat and fibre that was not like wool, he was convinced it was a cross between the two, sired by one of the many feral goats on the property near Allanton.

A scientist from AgResearch at Invermay took samples from both the ewe and the lamb and while the results proved it was not unique, it was still very rare - it had a lustre mutation, Mr Wallace said.

An article in Oxford University's Journal of Heredity said the occurrence of a dominant gene that caused excessively lustrous fleeces in sheep was noted in Australia and the United States in the 1930s and 1950s.

Evidence was reported of several independent lustre mutations in New Zealand during the 1980s.

The lustre mutation resulted in a major reduction in fleece weight to 40 per cent to 60 per cent of the production of normal sheep.

Everything had pointed towards the lamb being a geep until the test results were received, Mr Wallace said.

The animal attracted plenty of attention and he had a call from a man in the North Island who found what he thought was a geep in 1954, that looked "exactly the same'', but he never got it tested.