This is probably a noob question but I've looked for an answer to it everywhere on this site and found none so I finally decided to make an account and ask here.

So, what is the tag (tags) for nonanthro animals or how do you search for animals on e621?

I normally use animal and non-anthro and these tags do get me results, but for some reason I also get a lot of posts with characters that appear to be in various stages of anthrofsomething (geez how do you say this?) I mean various stages of looking more or less humanlike in addition to actual animals. And what's really weird, none of those posts have non-anthro or animal listed among the tags on the left side of the post page. Weird. How were they even found in the first place when the searched tags dont even match?

So the question is How do you search for nonanthro animal characters? Is it even possible?

Feral

Thanks but it gives me basically the same results as the tags I mentioned above. How do you get rid f all the anthros?

Iksion said:
Thanks but it gives me basically the same results as the tags I mentioned above. How do you get rid f all the anthros?

"feral -anthro"

This is a nice read. It explains the most for searching

You've all been quite helpful but we're still not getting there.
I'd like to exclude not just the typical furry anthro, which is always drawn human bodied, but also simply anthropomorphic characters like the ones in disney cartoons and such, which this tag "feral" seems to include. All characters drawn with evident human parts actually. We could call them partial anthros or half anthros if anthro" is reserved for fully human bodied furries.

Just give me a sec to collect some examples to show you what I mean

So here's a list of posts showing what I'd like to filter.

canine animal nonanthro:
https://e621.net/post/show/113935
https://e621.net/post/show/492811
https://e621.net/post/show/467093
https://e621.net/post/show/450706

You can't search for nonanthro equines without excluding my little pony, because otherwise you get a crapload of results like these
https://e621.net/post/show/330961
https://e621.net/post/show/505711
https://e621.net/post/show/494430
https://e621.net/post/show/454105
https://e621.net/post/show/523967
https://e621.net/post/show/497422
https://e621.net/post/show/523712
https://e621.net/post/show/524953
https://e621.net/post/show/522626

digimon/pokemon
https://e621.net/post/show/110197
https://e621.net/post/show/522135
https://e621.net/post/show/363492

feline
https://e621.net/post/show/471725
https://e621.net/post/show/520991
https://e621.net/post/show/524968

dragon animal nonanthro -anthro:
https://e621.net/post/show/261559

and many more

I don't mind it when cartoony things pop up (well except for mlp because of the sheer amount of it pouring out of every search - you can't look up horse/equine without adding -mlp and not be overwhelmed by it), but many of these posts just look nothing like the species they're supposed to be. They are too far from animal on the animal-human scale yet they appear in results for "animal". It kind of looks to me that "feral" basically means "no hands, no boobs, no feet" and that's it. It's oblivious to other body parts which are allowed to look more human.

I hope its possible to do more fine grained search regarding form or body type, since the system recognizes much less substantial things like articles of clothing, eye color, etc. It'd be kind of unbalanced otherwise. At the moment looking up realistic looking animals in terms of anatomy looks to me like an impossibility.

I'd like to point out that some tags you're using are aliased. That means they directly translate to other tags. For example, both animal and nonanthro are aliased to feral. They aren't present on any posts, and when searched for, they return the same results as feral. So, searching for canine animal nonanthro is literally the same as canine feral feral.

Do note that some of these examples have just been tagged wrong, like that last one with Spike, who in his regular form can't really be called feral at all. Though in cases like this, it's a nice thing the anthrofied tag exists since he's even more anthropomorphic than usual there, making the tag serve like some sort of superlative degree. It's good that we can at least sometimes be specific like that.

Anyway, I too find drawing the line difficult sometimes, because the fandom has a lot of grey areas with all these non-anthro-yet-intelligent-and-sometimes-possessing-certain-human-qualities-to-varying-degrees creatures running about. Some people appear to divide tagging anthro and feral simply between something being bipedal or quadrupedal, but while that is perhaps the best option for TWYS since it leaves no room for ambiguity, it seems too simplistic and creates a number of problems of its own.

For example, a certain amount of pokémon walks on two legs, but the way I see it, one that's obviously just a wild (or at least standard) pokémon shouldn't be tagged as being an anthro. People searching for anthros typically aren't going to be looking for a plain-ass Charmeleon, they want one with elongated legs wearing clothes while drinking coffee at Arbucks. It's regular Lucarios in particular that get the anthro tag slapped on them a lot, and it usually makes little sense to me.

At the same time, it's a good thing regular ponies get a feral tag because that way, we can easily distinguish between their canon forms and fan-created bipedal versions, but on the other hand, you could argue that they often demonstrate so many human qualities that calling them feral seems a bit of a stretch. It creates a reversed version of the previous problem, where people looking for real ferals (like TC) encounter lots of very humanlike creatures whose only real feral trait seems being a quadruped.

Most of that can be countered by filtering MLP from your search, but then you're still stuck with various other cartoony characters. Perhaps -Disney -Pokemon -Don_Bluth could again help, but in the end there's just no failproof way to ensure you're only getting animals with at most a hint of humanity in them.

And that is where the limitations of having a mere two categories really show.

You could try adding -toony to the search, but admittedly that's not very widely tagged. But -clothed might help a lot, since 100% ferals are rarely clothed.

We currently do not have a tag to distinguish between mostly-feral animals (example) and fully-feral animals (example. Or if one exists, it's pretty much never used.

As Jugofthat mentioned, there tends to be a lot of grey area about ferals. Some people only use the tag for clearly normal animals acting like animals, some people use it for "intelligent" ferals as well (example, some people use it when the body is feral, but otherwise acts anthro (like walking on two legs, example.