why do bull and cow redirect to cattle? wouldn't it make more sense to keep both separate?
Topic: question about cattle
Posted under General
watermelons said:
why do bull and cow redirect to cattle? wouldn't it make more sense to keep both separate?
they're the same animal, just gendered (female cattle are cows, male cattle are bulls usually).
having gendered species tags would be a mess for multiple reasons. but one notable one is that, in the case of "cow" and "bull", you run into the issue that these terms are also used for cetaceans.
dba_afish said:
they're the same animal, just gendered (female cattle are cows, male cattle are bulls usually).having gendered species tags would be a mess for multiple reasons. but one notable one is that, in the case of "cow" and "bull", you run into the issue that these terms are also used for cetaceans.
huh, didn't know that
thanks for the explanation
watermelons said:
why do bull and cow redirect to cattle? wouldn't it make more sense to keep both separate?
Because we're trying to keep the species tags sex neutral. Bulls are male cattle, and cows are female cattle. Cattle is our best target for the species overall.
Imagine how unwieldy the species tags would get if we used gendered tags for them, not just male and female, but also gynomorph, andromorph, herm, maleherm, and ambiguous — what do we call them? Then there's words used for multiple species. For example, does doe refer to a female deer or a female squirrel? And I sure wouldn't want to suffer the complaints about misgendering trans characters.
By keeping the species tags sex neutral, we can avoid all those ulcers and migraines. Perhaps searching male+cattle for bulls isn't perfect, but it's a lot less problematic than having gendered species tags.