This new section called Our Most Important Goats is designed to help readers understand the background of the Boer Goats in our present-day herd. We are John and Cathie Keblinger living in West Kerr County in Texas on the ranch Cathie's grandfather homesteaded in 1896. We started raising Boer Goats the first year they were available in the United States, in 1993. Soon we began to use only goats from the Codi-PCI quarantine, mostly descendants of Kaptein. In 1998 we bought a young nanny we named Honey Girl and soon realized she would be our main foundation nanny. The next year we bought Liveoak and made him our main foundation sire.

Since that time we have focused our breeding program on genetics from those two bloodlines, both tracing back to Kaptein. Through what will soon be twenty years of working with Boer Goats we have raised thousands of meat goats, but have always tried to stay close to the ideal Boer as described by the South African ranchers who developed this outstanding breed of meat goat. We have been limited by the genetics available to us and our own skill in analyzing characteristics and matching up parents, but we think many of our present day goats follow the South African breed standards.

We have tried to set this section up to show the steps we have made through the years from those first two important parents. Nearly all the goats shown are those that have lived their entire lives here at our ranch. Naturally, with the passage of time many of the goats shown are dead now, and the photographs of goats still here on the ranch do not always reflect their age in 2011, but we hope this will help you understand the family heritage of the 7A+ Boers.

Please call us any time you have questions or just want to visit. We will be glad to talk to you. Our telephone number is 830-640-3215. E-mail boergoat@ktc.com. And you can read about our ranch and our goats in Top of The Divide, the column Cathie writes for The Goat Rancher.