Hi Kurt!
I didn't do much research before I got my first goats, so I had no idea that
dairy goats were disbudded, and I was NOT happy when I learned about it. Because of what you said in terms of selling goats, I decided that I would initially disbud kids to make it easier to sell and also because dehorning is a horrible procedure and leaves holes in the head to the sinus cavity until it is healed over, and I did NOT want someone buying a horned kid and then having it dehorned. Basically I viewed disbudding as the lesser of two evils.
Then someone gave me two pygoras with horns. They were a menace! They were always beating up my disbudded Nigerians, and it was obvious that they had the upper hand. One day when my husband picked up one of the pygoras, it moved its head just right so that it stabbed my husband in the face about an inch away from his eye. That was rather unnerving, but the final
straw came when I looked out the window and saw one of the pygoras hook his horns under the belly of a pregnant doe and pick up her back end off the ground. I yelled at my children to go get the pygoras out of the pasture, and I emailed the person who gave them to me and asked her to please come take them back because I was afraid they were going to kill my other goats.
I also have Shetland sheep, and the rams are naturally horned, and as far as I know, no one disbuds them at all. They are born with such huge horn buds, I'm not even sure how practical it would be to try. Anyway, all of our Shetland rams and wethers have horns. One day we found a dead wether with his horns stuck in a
fence. We didn't have a necropsy done, but we're assuming he got his horns stuck, panicked, and broke his neck. We also had a ram lamb who broke off one of his horns. And we had one little ram lamb who was not very smart. He got his horns caught in the
fence well over a dozen times. We would hear him screaming and go out there and get him out of the fence, but one day we weren't home, and a coyote got him. I'll also add that polled Shetland rams are getting VERY popular now because the horned rams are also notorious for destroying pipe gates, fences, and buildings. One of our rams busted through the wall of a
shelter to get to a 10-year-old ewe and breed her. It looked like a car had busted through the wall! Sadly the ewe died when her lambs were only one month old because she simply was not hardy
enough to have been bred at that age, which was why I had her separated from the ram. Somehow the horns make their heads much more durable when it comes to banging things, which we also saw in the head butting between the horned pygoras and the disbudded Nigerians. The Nigerians always seemed like they were being smacked in the head with a 2X4 and would stagger backwards.
So, after all of that, I'm pretty much in the pro-disbudding camp. But if someone has a horned herd, and they want a horned goat, I will sell them one. I am nervous about people buying horned goats if they have small children, and I'll tell them about my reservations, but in the end, the decision is theirs. If someone simply says they want horned goats because the horns look cool, they need to know that this is not simply a cosmetic decision like cropping a dog's ears. The reason meat and fiber goats are not disbudded is because they are not handled hardly at all, so the odds of a human injury are quite small compared to dairy goats, which are handled twice a day, on average 305 days a year, so more than 600 opportunities for an injury with one goat yearly. I will not sell a horned goat to someone with disbudded or polled goats and vice versa. People really need to have all horned or not in their herd so that all the goats are on a level playing field. Mixing them is not fair to the goats without horns.
Our goats are able to do all the thing you mentioned, such as scratch their backs, grab saplings, and determine seniority without their horns. The only important reason I've ever heard for keeping horns is that they act as radiators to keep them cooler in summer, so perhaps if you live in a desert, they would be useful for that reason. Once temperatures start to climb over 90, a lot of our goats don't look very happy, but not having horned goats any longer, I'm not sure that they would look happier in the heat. The Shetland ewes are naturally polled, and they don't seem to have any more or less problems with the heat than the rams do.
So, that's my very long
answer to your question!

It was definitely not a decision that I came to quickly or easily!