Getting Your Goat

When Americans visit other countries around the world those crazy foreigners sometimes treat us like we’re odd.  They say Americans are rude know-it-alls who often don’t have any idea what we’re talking about.

And why do we call them foreigners when we are the foreigners in their country, anyway?

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People have always tried to find agreement between what they know and what they see.  The problem comes when they automatically assume that something is something other than what it actually is because it reminds them of…uh, something.  But it gets worse when they try to find equivalence between what they think they know with what they think they see.

I hope that was clearer to you than it sounded to me.

No?  OK, let me try to elucidate.

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When Europeans first came to the Americas, they discovered many strange animals.  Many looked kind-of like critters from back home or others they had only heard of. 

When the first Europeans saw bison, those wooly-haired giants of the plains, they knew they weren’t domestic cattle, so what were they?  They had read/heard descriptions of water buffalo being “similar” to cattle and thought, “if these aren’t cattle, they must be buffalo.”

They had evidently never heard of the American buff’s close relative that actually lives in Europe, the wisent.  If most modern Americans would see a wisent, they would automatically think it was an American buffalo.  That’s how closely they resemble one another.

Likewise, they ran across the big, beautiful members of the deer family that some Native Americans called the wapiti.  The Europeans knew of a giant member of the deer family called elk in Germany, so they named our elk that.

The problem is, the Eurasian elk is actually closely related to our moose, and looks almost identical.  The American moose got so dubbed because of similar sounding Native American names (like the Narragansett moos).

So, the poor American elk is not related directly to the German elk.  However, our elk is closely related to the European red deer.

Thus, we have American buffalo that can’t interbreed with water buffalo, but cross readily with German wisents.  Likewise, American elk can’t cross with Eurasian elk, but have often been known to mate with red deer.  And don’t forget the American moose that is a kissing cousin to the European elk.

Oh, my, gosh!  Could it get any more confusing? 

Well, as it turns out, yes!

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After what I’ve already said, if I mentioned the mountain goat, an American animal with a thick white coat, you would have to wonder if I’m going to tell you that it doesn’t even like the mountains.

Well, no.  It loves the mountains.  However, despite the fact that both male and female mountain goats have beards and horns, they are not related to goats at all.  If I told you they have a thick undercoat of wool, what would you think?  Why, they must be sheep then. 

Nope.  Sorry.

These ungainly looking, yet surprising beautiful critters are actually members of the family Bovidae, which includes antelopes, gazelles, and cattle.  OK, if it makes you feel any better, they are part of the same subfamily, Caprinae, that true goats do, but so do wild sheep, chamois, and muskox, among others.

So, mountain goats are not goats, but are closer related to antelopes, so they must be kin to the American plains animal, the speedy pronghorn antelope.

Not in this post.

No, the pronghorn is not a member of the antelope family.  Nope.  It is the only surviving member of the family Antelocapridae.  Although the family name means something along the lines of “antelope-goat” it is so distantly related to those two animals that, if they showed up at Thanksgiving dinner, everyone would be asking who they are.

Like I said, American pronghorn antelopes are the surviving members of the family Antilocapridae…and their closest living relatives are…wait for it…giraffes and okapis!

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If I haven’t confused you enough, let’s discuss the long-haired critter that lives in polar regions around the world.  The muskox is a member of the subfamily Caprinae of the family Bovidae.  Those names should tell us it is related to goats and cattle.  And the genus name, Ovibos, which is Latin for “sheep-ox” should indicate that they are kin to sheep and oxen/cattle.

Yup, they should, bu-u-u-ut they don’t.

Well, the Caprinae and the Ovi part of Ovibos are actually not too far off.  Muskox are closely related to sheep and goats, but not oxen or cattle. 

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So now you know that we have a strange way of naming things that can seem odd and confusing to others, but we don’t have a corner on that particular market.

In France, they call potatoes, pomme de terre, which means, “apple of the ground”.  So, when I was in French-speaking Belgium and wanted French fries, I had to order pomme frit, which actually means, “fried apples”.

But, now we have to wonder why the French don’t call them French fries.  Well, the earliest accounts we can find say that those crisp slivers of deep-fried ‘taters were actually created in French speaking Belgium.  So why don’t we call them Belgian fries?

Heck, I don’t know.  I’m still trying to figure out why foreigners here are not foreigners there.

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