Topic: Why is there no "animal" species tag?

I'm sure this has already been discussed many times before but I was curios and searching didn't pull any threads that seemed relevant. I was wondering why there is no "animal" tag that lies at the root of all animal species tags. There are plant and fungus tags (but they are not species tags!), but no equivalent for the animal kingdom. Was it deemed too vague or not useful enough? Or some other reason?

I mention it because I've had a few cases where I wanted to look for non-animal characters within an existing serach but remembered there is no animal tag so I can't add -animal to the search.

eightoflakes said:
I'm sure this has already been discussed many times before but I was curios and searching didn't pull any threads that seemed relevant. I was wondering why there is no "animal" tag that lies at the root of all animal species tags. (...)

Was it deemed too vague or not useful enough? Or some other reason?

I've literally never seen it brought up, likely because everyone agrees it would see even less use than mammal, a tag which nearly 75% of all active posts have

eightoflakes said:
There are plant and fungus tags (but they are not species tags!), but no equivalent for the animal kingdom.

We aren't focused on plants and/or biology so we don't do detailed plant taxonomy
They also don't really fit the usage of species tags

most likely because almost everything would imply it, making it almost useless.

why not try -scalie -mammal -avian that should narrow down your searches!

If we were to go to this kind of level, we might as well track vertebrate and invertebrate too, the former will include a lot of the more common animal choices. This would create tag chains like the following:
border collie → collie → dog → sheepdog → herding dog → pastoral dog → domestic dog → canis → canine → canid → mammal → vertebrate → animal
"Mammal" is already mostly useless as-is, since it's so broad, and "Vertebrate" would include basically everything except fantasy creatures, various non-fish non-mammal marine animals, bugs, molluscs, etc, then animal would also include those rare exceptions.

Basically every Pokémon ever would also need lots of cleanup for this, as things like Voltorb do not meet any reasonable definition of "animal", but nearly every other Pokémon does, and a Voltorb with Pikachu patterns wouldn't magically become an animal despite looking like Pikachu.

I also see "animal" vs. "feral" being a potential point of confusion.

not_furry is for posts where no (non-human) animal-based characters exist.

manitka said:
why not try -scalie -mammal -avian that should narrow down your searches!

marine and amphibian too

mammal, marine, scalie, avian, and amphibian are present on ~87% of all posts (5,119,252/5,881,483)

• mammal is 4,377,301 (64.4%)
• marine is 182,358 (3.1%)
• scalie is 818,546 (13.9%)
• avian is 244,164 (4.2%)
• amphibian is 29,318 (0.5%)

...which actually feels too low

I'm sure most of the missing posts can be attributed to small tags like object head as well as people that just don't tag species (which is 44,429 posts or 0.8%)

lafcadio said:
Basically every Pokémon ever would also need lots of cleanup for this, as things like Voltorb do not meet any reasonable definition of "animal", but nearly every other Pokémon does, and a Voltorb with Pikachu patterns wouldn't magically become an animal despite looking like Pikachu.

I also see "animal" vs. "feral" being a potential point of confusion.

Pretty good points, I didn't think of these. But yeah it makes sense that nearly every post with properly tagged species would have the tag and render it mostly useless.

Animal would be too vague and too broad to be useful. It would make raise many questions on what constitutes as an "animal" (e.g., flora_fauna? animate_inanimate? humanoid? monster?).

thegreatwolfgang said:
Animal would be too vague and too broad to be useful. It would make raise many questions on what constitutes as an "animal" (e.g., flora_fauna? animate_inanimate? humanoid? monster?).

To be fair, we do have an animal_humanoid tag, for humanoids based on some animal species (mammal, avian, scalie, etc).