Goat Words

If you are going to be reading about goats, you should learn the lingo! Here are the meanings of the most common words used by goat owners:

Goat terms:

Buck/Billy - Mature male goat
Doe/Nanny - Mature female goat
Kid - Baby goat
Buckling - Young or baby male goat
Doeling - Young female goat
Yearling - A one year old goat
Wether - A male goat that has been "fixed" or castrated
Sire - A goat's father
Dam - A goat's mother
Freshener - Female goat that has given birth

Events:

Kidding Season - The time of the year that kids are born, usually from February to June
Kidding/Freshening - This is what it is called when a doe gives birth
Disbudding - The removal of horn buds on a kid
Lactation - The time during which a doe is producing milk

Parts of a goat:

Udder - The main part of a doe's mammary system. It is like a "bag" with two separate sides and two teats
Teat - The part of the udder that the milk is squeezed out of
Wattles - Small lobes of skin on a goats neck. If a goat has wattles there will usually have two, one on each side, but they can appear anywhere on a goats body.

Are mountain goats really goats?

The other day I saw a magazine in a gas station with a picture of a mountain goat on the front cover. I naturally wanted to know what they had to say about them, so I decided to take a peek. Just as I opened the magazine to the appropriate page, my mom called me to the car. Still, as I was closing the magazine, one sentence caught my eye: Mountain goats aren't really goats; they're a type of Antelope.

Now, that came as something of a surprise. It never had occurred to me that a mountain goat might be an antelope, not a goat! So I looked it up. Here's the information that I gathered:


Mountain goats are close relatives to goats, but they are more properly known as goat-antelopes (click here for a description of a goat-antelope.) The mountain goat belongs to the subfamily Caprinae along with 32 other species including goats, sheep, the chamois, and the musk ox. The mountain goat is not a member of Capra, the genus that includes the wild goat from which the domestic goat is derived, but he is the only species in the genus Oreamnos.