Talk:Wether

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. You can locate your hook here. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:33, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

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• Comment or view
• Article history

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• ... that creation of wethers, castrated male sheep or goats, is recorded as far back as the Minoan civilization in the Bronze Age?

• Source: Ryder, Michael Lawson (2007). Sheep & Man. p. 85. "wool production was even more important in

the Minoan civilisation of Crete at about the same time. Wether flocks with a fleece weight of about 0.73 kg are recorded." (where "about the same time" refers back to 1500 BC in an earlier sentence, definitely the Bronze Age)

• • ALT1: ... that the meat of a wether, a castrated male sheep or goat, is generally worth more than the meat of an intact ram or buck? Source: Storey's Guide to Raising Sheep, pp=308-309; Storey's Guide to Raising Dairy Goats. pp=187-189 (see article for full citation). If you want something online checkable if obsolete (~1915 for the first edition), see https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2016/aac-aafc/agrhist/A12-8-30-1937-eng.pdf p. 69 (71 in the PDF).
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Mind control in popular culture
  • Comment: usually there are too many DYK hooks with images and not enough without, but if for some reason there's a shortage, it's easy to dig up a wealth of free images on this topic.

Created by SnowFire (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 21 past nominations.

SnowFire (talk) 08:10, 27 December 2025 (UTC).

• New enough, long enough, no other eligibility concerns. Good sourcing, nothing lacking. No concerns about NPOV or CV, or other policy concerns. QPQ complete. Hook present and cited in article. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 07:59, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Requested move 19 January 2026

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) - 🔥𝑰𝒍𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑭𝒍𝒂𝒎𝒆 (𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒌)🔥 20:01, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

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Wether (ruminant) → Wether – This is the only topic on Wikipedia known as simply 'wether' other topics are partial matches e.g. Wether Down. Traumnovelle (talk) 19:29, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

• Support per nom. This article is only a few weeks old, but there's no other article using the title, so it's not ambiguous. The current dab page could be deleted or moved to Wether (disambiguation). - Station1 (talk) 06:59, 20 January 2026 (UTC)
• Support per nom. The parenthetical disambiguation isn't necessary here. Wether (ruminant) also seems to be the primary topic (WP:PTOPIC). External search results for wether bring up primarily results related to Wether (ruminant) rather than the locations at the disambiguation page, and here on Wikipedia, though not a very old article, Wether (ruminant) already gets many more page views than the places do, which was true even before it was listed for a requested move (which probably bumped the traffic up a bit more). – Scyrme (talk) 19:35, 20 January 2026 (UTC)
• Comment / Support (as article creator). I didn't want to do a "primary topic grab", but checking, the other entries on the disambig page have truly tiny daily pageview counts (0-3) and are already overwhelmed by this article's views, even ignoring the partial title match issue. Move the original Wether article to Wether (disambiguation). SnowFire (talk) 19:50, 20 January 2026 (UTC)
• Support but keep the DAB per above. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:10, 20 January 2026 (UTC)
• Support The other topics in Wether (disambiguation) are not PTM's because down, hill, and holm are names for types of landforms. However, Wether Holm qualifies for G14. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 06:53, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

  Wether Holm does have four blue links, but only one of those articles mentions a "Wether Holm". —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 06:58, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

• Support per nom, but keep the DAB.--Ortizesp (talk) 20:03, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Growth rates

@SnowFire: You acknowledge the differing reports as to weight gains in rams and wethers. While (as you acknowledge) diet (and probably breed) likely makes a difference, it also appears to vary with what constitutes weight gain. Most of the reports I have seen are to the effect that rams become more muscular (have more muscle weight), while wethers put on more fat--enough more to account for more overall weight. As with so much of human endeavor, it seems to depend on definitions. Minturn (talk) 18:06, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that sounds about right.

To be clear, it's great that you found a source, thanks. I'll read your journal article tonight. As I mentioned in the edit summary, this matter was left out for a reason originally - I was seeing straight-up conflicting claims in literature on growth rates. A recent source to clarify the matter sounds good. (Also, I'm happy to go fix it up, but I will probably switch your citation over to use Template:Cite journal as a heads-up, to match the other journal cites later in the article.) SnowFire (talk) 18:24, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

@Minturn: I looked at the article, and... it's not clear that this really fits in "Purpose." It does say that they're fatter, yes, but in the sense of fat the chemical substance, not in the sense of total weight. It says the intact rams had higher BW (=body weight I presume). More generally, the article closes with "For the second year in a row, RAM and SS lambs demonstrated superior growth and carcass composition compared to WETHER lambs", i.e. it thinks that fat on the carcass drags down the price of the meat compared to more muscled rams. So I don't think this is a great article in explaining "why do farmers create wethers". It really does seem more like control - Ensminger mentions how if you want to sell excess lambs to a feedlot, they won't take rams at any price, but will take wethers, since this involves transport and putting unknown sheep in a new location. SnowFire (talk) 05:50, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

The underlying theme I got from the article is that there's a lingering belief that wethers grow bigger, and (it seems) this belief is not well-grounded in fact, at least under modern conditions. Minturn (talk) 19:33, 5 February 2026 (UTC)