Are questions about horses, or in some cases farm animals, such as pigs, sheep, and cows (which, believe is or not I have known individual cases where they have been kept as pets, rather than livestock) on topic?
I have posted this question:
I am happy to delete it and the tag with it, if the community so wishes.
I can't think of why they should not be asked. Just because it is common to call a cat or dog "pet" and cow, sheep, ox, buffalo "cattle" does not mean they are lacking any quality of being called a pet. I say this is a serious blunder if we don't include them in pets.
I think it all depends on the question, and I think we do need to be careful about what we mark as livestock questions because some people do keep animals that are normally kept as livestock as pets.
For me, there are only a few kinds of questions that I think would be closed because it's a livestock question. Questions like:
I think what we'll see most of, is that questions about farm animals are too broad for our scope. There will be an overlap between what we can answer and what should be asked on Biology.SE.
As an example: Our sheep had too many babies and was temporarily paralyzed, what causes this? was closed (before it was edited to be more in our scope) because it was a livestock question.
I don't think it should be closed because it's about livestock, I think it should be migrated to Biology.SE because it's about the biology of sheep; What decides the number of babies one has. Similarly, if I asked what determines the number of eggs a snake lays, I think that should be migrated to Biology.SE too.
I REALLY think that excluding questions about farm animals could be excluding a huge number of people with great expertise. I'll give you an example: there is a farm near me where I and many others volunteer time. The sole purpose of this farm is being a fantastic place for dog training. We do it all... Agility, Herding, Grooming, Boarding, Nose Work, Lure Coursing, obedience training, treiball, you name it we've probably got someone who would love to teach you how to do it. The farm hosts large herding trials as well as small agility and show trials. There are a huge number of experts that hang out, volunteer, and work here but it is technically a farm because a percentage of the lamb are raised for meat. A large number of the sheep are kept for herding purposes, some retire there at the farm in their old age (one of the old ladies was just put down after a long life of 18 years). The sheep we use for puppy training are very well loved, named, etc. But there are also many lambs who are raised on open grassy fields, given everything they need to be healthy including kelp and minerals... and until the day they become grassfed, hormone and antibiotic free lamb they live very happy healthy lives. And other lambs are sold to other nearby farmers or herding enthusiasts for their hobby farms. So yes, it is a farm in the sense that some percentage of the animals are butchered for meat... it makes the farm sustainable and creates healthy local food. So should questions about raising these sheep would be "off topic"?
I get the other side... I understand that you don't want a ton of questions about how to butcher or fatten up animals. But I think that questions about how to give good care to farm animals should be very on-topic. Maybe even questions about what makes an animal "grass-fed" or antibiotic free might be on-topic? Maybe not?
This farm also "employs" several working dogs... we would consider questions about these working dogs on topic even though they "produce" a for the farm. We even consider breeding questions on topic... if people are sustaining their kennel through breeding this doesn't seem that different than a breeding question about sheep to me.
