An extremely rare—and cute—set of healthy twin “geep” have been born in Claremorris in County Mayo, Ireland. The pair arrived five months after a pet nanny goat had a week-long tryst with a ram in an adjoining field.
The twins’ owner, Angela Bermingham, said she knew something was up when the goat jumped a fence outside her cottage and wouldn’t return for a week from a field where a flock of ewes with a Cheviot ram grazed.
“She would not come to my call, which previously she always did,” Bermingham said.
Soon it became clear the goat, Daisy, was expecting.
Since Bermingham doesn’t own a billy goat, she immediately realized what happened. But there was still one more surprise coming.
“Came here one night and see she [the goat] comes to the car when I pulled up and this little one just pops out from behind her, just one,” she said. “So I had a look around in the band, heard something, but couldn’t see nothin'.”
Unable to find the source of the sound, Bermingham turned in.
“Got up the next day, and there’s two of them,” she said. “It was a shock.”
“These little geeps are very unusual. I have never seen twins before and I have seen a lot of sheep all over Ireland and all over the world,” said Mayo County Councillor Michael Holmes, a long-time livestock farmer and a former chairman of The Irish Farmers’ Association’s National Sheep Committee.
Bermingham hasn’t had any genetic tests done on the twins, but she’s convinced of their parentage.
“It was the legs. They were like tree trunks. And they was high, very high. Three-quarters of the mother’s leg,” Bermingham said. “And then the razor-sharp teeth, ‘cause one started to nibble at me.”
Also, the twins were born with no horns, while baby goats have budding horns since birth.
Bermingham named the geep This and That, “because they come from this,” she said, nodding at her field, “and they come from that, from the adjoining field.”
“One’s lighter—that’s This. And the other one’s a bit darker—that’s That,” she said.
Bermingham plans to keep them as pets.
“They’re just like little kids,” she said. “They like playing and jumping up and down. They’re like a deer though and they’re very, very fast.”
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