If there’s one thing that’s true of almost all widely farmed and raised animals like goats, sheep, and horses, it’s that you need a lot of different nomenclatures to refer to these animals in different stages of their lives.
Time frames on certain things, such as castration or certain types of training, are often very narrow, and so you need to be able to easily refer to, say, a male horse that is younger than 5.
If you want the simple answer, it’s buck.
Buck is accepted by pretty much everyone as the proper name to specify a mature, male goat.
Regional differences will, of course, prevail, and in some areas, you may find other names in much more common use than buck.
Let’s look further into this.
What is a mature male goat called?
A mature, sexually active male goat is a buck.
They may also be referred to as billy goats, but this does not indicate there is anything different about the goat.
A billy goat and a buck are the same thing.
The term is Germanic in origin, and in fact the original use of the term goes to show part of how they came to be called bucks.
In Old English, buc meant a male deer, similarly in the contemporary Dutch and German languages.
Later, the term bucca came into wide use for male goat, before buck was settled on.
Deer and goats are both ruminants, and so even at this early stage that was recognized and they were named accordingly.
Similar names apply to reindeer and antelope.
It is not at all clear how these names came to be, as indeed it isn’t with virtually any name which arose so far back in time.
It is important to stress, though, that we typically use buck to describe a mature goat—there is another name for a juvenile.
What is a juvenile male goat called?
A juvenile male goat is a kid—indeed, there are no sex specific terms for infant and juvenile goats.
In fact, you often can’t even tell the sex of the goat before it is about six months old.
That said, juvenile males are also often referred to simply as bucks.
You might say a ‘kid buck’, but this only to distinguish the sex as there aren’t terms for male infants.
The difficulty is in the fact that many male goats are castrated at a young age, in order to curb aggressive tendencies later in life.
Just like with cows, horses, and sheep, there is another, more specific term for a male goat that has been castrated.
What is a wether?
A wether refers to a castrated male goat.
Unless the male is intended to be used for breeding, then in virtually all cases on large farms males will be castrated when they are still young.
As I said, this curbs aggression, and makes them more manageable.
It also makes them better able to interact with other males.
What the variety of terms often comes down to is simply the fact of the complexity of livestock auctions over the years.
As I said, there are many different things you might use a goat for, and having terms to describe not only their sex and age but also certain physical features, such as whether or not they are castrated, makes bartering easier.
If you know you’re looking for a wether, there’s no confusion when you get a castrated goat.
A castrated male, then, is technically not a buck.
It is a wether.
Is a male goat a ram?
While it is unlikely that many would correct you on this point, it is not quite technically correct to call a male goat a ram.
Ram refers to a male sheep—again, a sexually mature and uncastrated male sheep.
This is easy to forget, since to look at a male sheep and a male goat you might often mistake one for the other.
And, they are very closely related—they only differ in genus, and up to that point all fit into all the same subgroups.
Where goats are Capra, sheep are Ovis.
Despite this, a male goat really is not a ram.
Certainly, in any space in which this terminology is vitally important—like, as I said, livestock auctions—then male sheep will always be referred to exclusively as rams, and male goats exclusively as bucks.
So, no, a male goat is not a ram.
A male goat is a buck.
Naturally, though, most people in a non-formal setting will understand what you mean.
So, though it will naturally depend where you are in the world, the most common and widely accepted term for a male goat is buck.
Indeed, the males of many ruminant species, such as deer, are also referred to as bucks.
There are other names to which they are commonly referred, like billy goat, but this isn’t an indication of anything different about the goat—simply where you are in the world.
Whether, meaning the goat is castrated, is the only term you need to look out for.