I know from having raised dairy goats that they are related to deer, not sheep.
Can goats and deer inter-breed like horses and donkeys, or are they further apart genetically?
Goats are far. far more closely related to sheep than deer. They are more closely wildebeest than they are to deer, but goats are most closely related to sheep amongst all the domestic animal species.
Deer are cervids, they have light, disposable, branching horns Sheep and goats are bovids, they have heavy, bony, permanent unbranched horns (mostly).
Goats and deer could never interbreed, they are far to distantly related.
Sheep and goats on the other hand are closely enough related that a very occasional hybrid offspring is produced.
Sheep and goats are both members of the Family Bovidae, while deer are Cervidae. Sheep are of the genus Ovis, while goats are of the genus Capra (this makes sheep and deer theoretically more closely related than either are to deer). So, the short answer is, none of the above should be able to interbreed.
“>>>none of the above should be able to interbreed.”
But they do anyway.
True, but only rarely, and only then between the sheep and goats (no deer-sheep or deer-goat hybrids). More rarely, in fact, than with other hybrids, such as horse/donkey. This would indicate a fairly recent split between Capra and Ovis, relative to the cervid-bovid split (obviously) – on the order of a couple hundred thousand years – but a more distant split than with many other hybrid-producers.
Cervids in general first appear as early as ~30 million years ago (late Oligocene), while bovids don’t arrive until about 20 million years ago (early Miocene).
Do they? I’ve had dogs… become affectionate with cats, legs, furniture, etc., but whatever their intentions, there wasn’t any breeding.
I too have often heard that goats are more closely related to deer than to sheep. I don’t know where this story originated.
‘Geep’
(the term apparently can refer to either a true goat/sheep hybrid, or a chimæra created by artificially fusing goat and sheep embryos).
If you read the link in my first post you will see an irrefutable example of a goat and sheep breeding.