Topic: Why exactly do we still have a Ram tag?

Posted under Tag/Wiki Projects and Questions

You know, since every other gender-specific species term has been removed in favor of "species + gender". But ram is still frequently being used over things like sheep or goat, which doesn't really seem to make sense.

It sadly also means it's going be a bit of a pita to retag everything under it, should we remove it. At least those that don't have an additional species tag ATM, but that appears to be most of them.

If I'm going to have to guess as to why it's still around, that'd be because the various caprine species can be somewhat difficult to distinguish, at least in anthro form. But then again, there's usually some kind of source that should (even if it doesn't always) tell you what you're dealing with.

Does anyone know what's the deal here?

Updated by user 59725

Hadn't thought of that.

Yeah, that sounds like it'd work well. Everything that doesn't already have a species tag at least gets a more general caprine tag, giving me or other people time to add the more accurate ones (where that's possible) while still being searchable in the meantime. And the gender tags should already be there too, regardless.

Yup, +1 to that.

Updated by anonymous

Jugofthat said:
... And the gender tags should already be there too, regardless.

About that, maybe slightly off topic but, there are a few non-males in ram as well (see e.g. ram -male), unless the other genders are suddenly rams? Though I guess I can understand why the dickgirls get it... Just found it interesting that people seem to think having horns means a sheep or a goat is a ram.

Updated by anonymous

Oh, there are? That's... actually rather stupid. =/

No choice but to change those by hand. Can't be too many. Wait, we actually wouldn't have to change those since they'd get aliased to caprine, and that's fine. Actually better than before.

Updated by anonymous

Ram looks like it's used for caprines with prominent curved horns, even though the definition of ram is a male sheep, which is far more encompassing.

Its female counterpart, ewe, is used far less often. Looks like taggers opt to use sheep instead.

Maybe we could clear any confusion by fixing the sheep and goat wikis so that they have relevant tagging info, rather than copypasted wikipedia excerpts.

I wish the differences between male sheep and goats were clear enough so we could alias the gender specific tags ram & ewe to sheep. Because taggers will continue to confuse them, Peekaboo's idea to alias ram -> caprine is definitely the only solution.

Similar precedents were set by oxen & ox -> bovine, and more recently hog -> porcine.

But we should definitely clean ram before aliasing anything.

Updated by anonymous

Huh, I thought it was just a subspecies. /cityfolk

Yeah +1 to an alias to sheep/caprine. Caprine will still probably be the cleaner solution though.

Updated by anonymous

Much cleaner, a sheep alias would cause you to get goats labelled sheep, which would be the same as calling a zebra a horse instead of equine.

Updated by anonymous

-1 for aliasing ram to sheep
+1 for aliasing ram to caprine

I personally think gender/age/given birth/castrated based animal names suck because they're just too often ambiguous and ill defined even in the real world (with notable exceptions of course). It doesn't get any better when those animals are depicted in art.

Updated by anonymous

I was about to complain that there are people who can tag ram when tagging battering ram, but then I checked that there are probably no battering ram in pictures tagged with ram. There's no battering_ram tag either. So probably it doesn't matter.

Updated by anonymous

First thing that hit me was what would happen with the memory modules, after searching, however, my fears were realized as no one seems to share this mild interest. At least I found a real DIMM in ddr_ram being put to "proper" use.

Also found ram_horns I guess curled_horns isn't specific enough for the caprine connoisseur.

And calm down, that Dodge is even tagged so you can find it easily...
Edit: meh, was just the specific model, well dodge would be your friend I guess

Updated by anonymous

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