Unca Cec, I would agree that if I’m looking at the underside of a cattle beast and see a milk-making apparatus, that would be the seconday sex characteristic of a girl bovine mammal.
However, if I look and see a, well, a wang and balls, which are admittedly hard to miss, I don’t think I’m looking at a “secondary” sex characteristic. And I think Ferdinand would be upset with me if if did say, patronizingly, “Oh, yes, secondary - decidedly secondary.”
I seem to remember that the only primary sex characteristics are the testicles/ovaries, and that everything else is secondary. I’m not going to search for it at work, though, for obvious reasons.
Cause does don’t have antlers. In order for something to be a sex characteristic, it has to vary across genders. The size of a cow’s horns may be a sex characteristic, but the presence is not.
One in twenty thousand have spikes. This is the pertinent paragraph from your cite–
If you are reading that as saying ‘it is normal for does to have spikes’ I suggest a closer reading is in order. Else, why would it be necessary to add that “The spiked doe remains fertile and can produce young”? Surely it goes without saying that it is a normal characteristic for the female of a species to be fertile, yes?
What the author is saying is that, of antlered does, normally those antlers are spikes that remain in velvet. He is not referring to the general doe population; just this small subset.
Um, the article you quoted does not specify if it’s a male or female being inspected. You could just as easily read that as ‘checking to see if it has an udder or not.’ Which would meet your criteria of secondary sex characteristics.
