Caprines: Telling the Sheep from the Goats

Transcaspian urials
(Note that the rams of this species/subspecies have
particularly argali-like horns)

To most people, especially in the West, the most familiar member of the goat subfamily is probably... the sheep. Worldwide, domestic sheep are more common than goats, although not necessarily by as much as you might think. Goats are more popular than sheep as farm animals in places like India and Africa, but overall, sheep have the edge in numbers. That's probably no great surprise to those of you in most parts of Europe or America, and even less so if you're in Australia or New Zealand.

But perhaps I should back up there. Did I really just say that sheep are a kind of goat?

Well, yes I did. Kind of. Sheep are members of the goat subfamily, but really, they're goats only in the sense that ferrets are a kind of weasel. But why is it that way round at all?

The goat subfamily, or Caprinae, was given its name by the great Victorian zoologist John Edward Gray, quite early in his career, in 1821. From a scientific standpoint, there was absolutely no reason why he couldn't have named it the sheep subfamily, but instead, he chose goats as the best example of the group. I don't know his actual reasoning, but it certainly makes sense: far more members of the group resemble goats than resemble sheep. And so, from this, admittedly arbitrary, standpoint sheep are an odd kind of goat, and not the other way round.