When it comes to domesticated animals that are farmed on a large scale, castration of males is almost always used somewhere.
Especially with animals like goats, they are very likely to develop a boisterous and aggressive temperament if they aren’t castrated.
Let’s find out more.
Why is a goat called a wether?
A wether refers to a male goat that has been castrated.
This is generally done when the goat is young, in order to halt its ordinary development and puberty.
A wether is one kind of male goat, in particular, the kind that you want to avoid breeding or you want to more closely control its temperament as it ages.
This is very common practice for male goats, as it is for many other species like sheep and even horses.
In terms of where the actual name wether comes from, it simply derives directly from an Old English cognate.
During that period, the word wether referred specifically to a castrated ram, or male sheep.
However, it eventually came to be applied only to goats, instead.
In some places, it can still be used to refer to a ram rather than a goat, but for the most part, it is understood to mean a goat nowadays.
As you may know, there are many different names for different kinds of goat, depending on the sex and age.
They may be a buck, a wether, a nanny, a doe, a buckling, and so on.
Careful control of goat behavior is needed to achieve certain desired outcomes, especially in farming contexts, and this really is where the wethers come in.
That said, there are also many reasons to castrate male goats even if you have no intention of farming them in any way.
Given that, as I said, the word itself derives from Old English, this is not a new idea, either.
For perhaps as long as we have farmed them, we have seen one reason or another to castrate male goats before they come of age.
Can these goats still breed, then?
Can a wether goat still breed?
No, wethers cannot breed.
When you remove a goat’s testicles, you take away its ability to breed.
This may seem odd, then, since in a farming context you might assume that any farmer would want simply to maximize the number of goats born so they can sell them, if nothing else.
But in fact, you want to carefully control every aspect of the goat’s lives in order to get the desired outcomes.
For one thing, you certainly do not want breeding to happen by chance.
If you are breeding your goats, you want to be sure that the right doe is bred, at the right time, and by the right buck.
Unless you have your males and females living separately, you’ll never have this guarantee if you have uncastrated males around.
The other problem is that, given their natural tendency to compete with other males for the attention of females, bucks tend to be aggressive and boisterous as they get older.
If you castrate them before they hit puberty, then you curb the development of this temperament.
So, what good is a wether goat, then, if they can’t breed?
What good is a wether goat?
There are many things that a wether goat is good for, and it’s important to remember the variety of reasons goats are farmed, and not just as meat goats or breeders.
Again, male goats almost without exception are very aggressive as they develop through puberty.
There’s always a chance you’ll end up with a docile male that hasn’t been castrated, but it’s very unlikely.
Wethers are less aggressive and don’t smell as bad as bucks.
This makes them great for shows and community events, such as the farmer’s market or even goat shows.
For farmers, having a single wether in a herd of females can make the herd much easier to manage.
They can hold peace among the does and keep them happier and more comfortable since they’re used to having a male with them in the wild.
Are wethers good pets?
Wethers are great pets, and this is perhaps one of the main reasons goats are castrated.
If you are keeping the goats as pets, then you’ll have a much easier time handling a wether than you will a buck.
They will be much friendlier and open to human contact, and less likely to be territorial.
Wethers are not only good pets, it’s really the only way to reliably rear male goats as pets.
If you do not castrate them, you will not really end up with much of a pet—just an animal that lives on your property that won’t really let you near it.
Ultimately, then, there are quite a few reasons you might want to have a male goat that is incapable of breeding.
For many, it’s simply about keeping the goat as a pet.
It makes them far easier to manage if they have been castrated at an early age, as ordinary bucks can get very aggressive as they age.
Even in a farm scenario, though, a wether can prove useful in a variety of ways, so there are many reasons you might do it.