Regarding certain animal feature tags

With the surge of Kemono Friends pictures over the past month or two, many new incredibly specific animal feature tags have been floating around on them.

For the most part I understand, such as serval_ears, as they're quite distinct enough to not simply be considered cat ears.
However, many of the other less unique features have been made into new tags as well (or if they existed before, have vastly dominated these tags), a few I can think of off the top of my head being ocelot_ears, ocelot_tail, ocelot_print, african_wild_dog_ears, african_wild_dog_tail, prairie_dog_ears, and prairie_dog_tail. So on so forth if applicable.
This leaves tags such as beaver_ears and penguin_tail that I'm in a sort of middle understanding on.

This isn't to say I think any of these should be removed or replaced, moreso that I'm curious about how much detail these very uncommon features should be represented with, for the sake of making tagging them a bit less confusing.

EDIT: I just realized this likely belongs in the tag advice thread. I apologize for this.

Actually, no you had it right. The "How do I tag this?" thread are for quick clear answers. Longer debates on tags go in their own thread. I don't really have an opinion about the above, although I believe that the characteristics of the tag should be unique enough so that they could be identified on their own without the character in question being present.

I.e. tag what you can see and identify, not what you know.

There was some brief discussion of this in topic #13734. I'm against these tags. Just because one can draw a distinction between two things doesn't mean that distinction is useful to have. The purpose of tags is to facilitate searching. If a tag is exclusive to one character and is always present with that character, then it's not useful for searching purposes, it just duplicates the character tag.

I don't see these tags as providing anything more than noise and fragmentation to our already bloated tag lists. "Tag what you see, not what you know" is supposed to mean "don't tag what you can't see" not "invent hyperspecific tags for every last thing in the image".

In full agreement with @evazion here. I've been feeling burned out on tags for particular types of animal ears and tails ever since topic #13048, where it became clear that these tags are often added without regard for what a character's ears and tail actually look like. Creating needlessly specific tags is undesirable in any case, and when those tags don't even accurately reflect what is visible in the image, we're breaking the cardinal rule of tagging. Splitting up cat_ears and serval_ears is bad enough, given that the latter is essentially used for only one character, but going a step further with tags like cheetah_ears and ocelot_ears is simply ridiculous, as these look barely any different from ordinary cat ears. The same goes for tags like african_wild_dog_ears versus dog_ears, chameleon_tail versus lizard_tail, narwhal_tail versus dolphin_tail, and so on.

As an extreme example, I have to say that post #2645771 is one of the most gratuitously tagged posts I've ever seen on this site, and that's coming from someone who generally believes in comprehensively tagging small details. It's nothing but dozens of chibis with heavily stylized animal features that barely resemble any particular species, yet it is stuffed with the sort of tags we're discussing. If, for instance, I wanted to search for quagga_ears for some insane reason instead of the marginally more sensible zebra_ears (which itself is practically no different from horse_ears), I would be pretty annoyed to find this in my search results instead of ears that actually look like those of a quagga, and the same could be said for many more of the tags on this post.

We have to draw the line somewhere and insist that users stick to tagging only what can be identified on sight. Otherwise we encourage the proliferation of overly narrow tags that are of no use to anyone.

In agreement with two above. It feels like that, pretty much.

As of late I've been ever more feeling the dread of having to tag way too much on an image that is way too specific to any one character, copyright, or general article. The <color>_<article> tags are somewhat acceptable for lesser known articles of interest, but for things that are only really ever so specifically present on a single character, I think it's much better just to tag the superset tag and leave it. Things like <theme>_hair_ornament are necessary because hair ornament is so incredibly populated, but tagging something like penguin_bag_charm or bunny_bag_charm is overly pedantic because the bag charm tag is so sparsely populated to begin with.

At a more general standpoint, currently there's this difference of paradigm between taggers/uploaders regarding how specific tags can be. On one hand, tagging tons of tags is nice and all, but at some point tagging so many things on an image diminishes the value of all of those tags for searching. Tagging things too specifically increases the likelihood of more general tags going missing, which then necessitates more work and cost to apply the implications needed for these tags. Not only that, but the rest of the taggers (especially those that don't tag much) have to accommodate for those changes.

Besides, a tag is really only as useful as its adoption, which is why it's recommended to discuss new tags that might see fairly popular use before a few users start rampantly tagging literally everything they see and perhaps don't see. day or medium breasts for example. Alternatively one could 'push' adoption for a tag by gardening its' presence, but the tag at least needs to see some well-known usage at another place. Something like enpera comes to mind.

The problem with this is how to deal with it, and where to draw the line.

Obviously one way to do it would be to list out all the tags and then discuss what is worth keeping and what isn't, but that leaves a lot to take in in order to even take part in the discussion. Another way to do it is to discuss each tag before scrapping it...

With regards to where to draw the line, this obviously needs discussion for each and every thing, and some of the tags being argued for deletion above are things that I would argue strongly for keeping, such as chameleon tail, which is a completely different shape from your typical lizard tail.

The things that need to be kept are tags that will serve a purpose outside of just one copyright. I wouldn't mind seeing white_tiger_print populated, for instance, since it's something that's rather difficult to search right now.