Clay Thompson

The Republic | azcentral.com

Why did cowboys refer to their cattle as "dogies"? It's hard to imagine they confused bovines with canines.

First of all, some say dogies and some say doggies. I'm going with dogies.

A dogey is cowboy parlance for a motherless calf. It came into use in the 1880s. Nobody knows exactly where it came from, but there are a few ideas.

According to "Western Words" by Ramon Adams, a series of unusually hard winters left a lot of orphan calves. Why the calves survived when the adults didn't, I'm not sure.

Often these calves had not been completely weaned and their little calf tummies were not ready to digest rough range grass. This gave them sort of potbellies, or looking like a bunch of dough in a sack.

So they were called "dough-guts," which morphed into dogies.

Another idea is that they were motherless because the youngsters had been rounded up, branded and set on the trail to greener pastures or to market, leaving the mothers to produce a new generation of calves.