What is a “dogie,” and how did the term come about?

 

What is a “dogie,” and how did the term come about?

Robert “Curly” Flanagan
Phoenix, Arizona

Historian Ramon Adams has a couple of versions. In one, dogies were calf yearlings that weren’t fat enough to drive to market. The other: the word originated during a severe winter in the late 1880s when a large number of mother cows died off, leaving a bunch of skinny orphans. With their bellies resembling a batch of sourdough stored in a sack, cowboys called them “dough-guts,” and it was later shortened to dogie.