I’ve noticed the female cashmere goats (called does) are more likely to —
Sorry to interrupt, but. Why are goats named like deer? The females are both called does. The intact males are both called bucks. Why are goats so similar to deer that they don’t have their own names? I’m not a scientist and this isn’t an AI-generated page packaging up facts to look like content, so here are some unscientific guesses that I personally suspect, based on my experience handling goats everyday (as an adult) and dealing with deer on the property all the time. Maybe they have the same gestation period? But that wouldn’t make sense because I suspect goats and sheep have similar gestation periods, and if there are 2 things that are more like each other, it’s goats and sheep, not goats and deer.
I can’t think of any other reasons. It’s probably because, as is so often the case in science, the person who “discovered” deer got lazy or named it wrong, like the way the Native Americans were named “Indians” because some people thought they had arrived in India when they did the naming. I’m oversimplifying and ridiculizing because I can’t think of any good reasons, and I’m ambivalent about asking the internet today.
Anyway, I’ve noticed the does (goat females) do seem to make more noise than the male goats, which are called bucks and wethers. When I was in my 20s, not the case, but now that I’m middle-aged, when I hear hip hop artists say “make some noise”, I think of our fluffy white and badger-colored does mindlessly calling for no reason. I don’t know off the top of my head if they sterilize male deer and if so, whether those are also called wethers. I do know that deer babies are not called kids. Human children are called kids also, so now I’m starting to suspect that the people who named goats just wanted to recycle existing words because they did not want to give goats their own names. Again, human-based reasons for naming the goats that way, not goat-based.
Back to the subject of the noisiest goats. Sometimes they make a lot of noise for obvious reasons, like right before feeding time. If you separate them from their best friends or babies, they will make a lot of noise. I feel the does that have kidded in the past (had kids) tend to get noisy in a worrywart kind of way. And sometimes they make a lot of noise for no discernible reason — perhaps because they are feeling pain or discomfort, but not because they want to “go out” or because they are bored. Does are less likely to get bored. Our main doe is a homebody — she doesn’t like to leave her pen for bigger pens, but when she gets to the bigger pen, she often starts running around and leaping around on the logs and rocks. I guess it’s like going to the gym — you don’t want to go and someone has to drag you out of the house, but once you get there, and start working out, you could just stay and keep working out. But when goats make a lot of noise while just standing in a normal scene, with no obvious reason, it does damage to the credibility of intelligence. Yes I do anthropomorphize but that’s only because there is not another word that better describes the concept that animals have a range of emotions not so unlike humans’.
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