bestiality literally means sex between a human and an animal, but due to the implications it often gets tagged for romantic situations. i considered making a bur to change it to “zoophilia” but i worry that might get tagged on nsfw feral art without any humans or anthros. any suggestions? or should i just leave well enough alone?

but like... bestiality sex. I don't really see the point of splitting a tag like this, do you just not like the tag name or what?

cheshire3rd said:
bestiality literally means sex between a human and an animal, but due to the implications it often gets tagged for romantic situations.

In the context of this site, it means non-platonic relations between a feral and non-feral, where there are sexual/romantic overtones. You can use human_on_feral sex for "sex between a human and an animal" more specifically (or if you include anthros as "animal" as some people do, ~human_on_feral ~human_on_anthro sex).

darryus said:
do you just not like the tag name or what?

right. it’s not about the functionality, it works just fine. it’s that the meaning of the word and the meaning of the tag are different.
there’s a similar problem with incest_(lore), except that without the implications, it often doesn’t get tagged on romantic images and thus slips through the blacklist.

I don't really see this as being incorrect. I think Watsit explained it well. I would add that there's two big reasons why it works this way:

1, this is pretty much consistent with how we have most of the other tags that are like this. Other examples are tags like male/male and female/female and male/female (etc) are all tagged for the non-platonic, romantic, relationshippy, AND the explicitly sexual of that style of coupling. Because romantic kisses and dates and foreplay are all still very much that type of coupling, even if they aren't having explicit sex right that moment. So it still fits what people are looking for in searches and in blacklisting. And you can still find or exclude the more explicit/sex results fairly well if you need that too. Keeping it broader also avoids having to quibble over exactly where the line is between romantic vs foreplay vs innercourse vs outercourse vs 'actual sex' etc. So that if they're clearly non-platonic together in that image, then it can be tagged like that. Pretty much. It also avoids issues with tagging wedding pictures and romantic dates, because it's clearly that type of coupling even if they aren't in the middle of having sex together.

2, the far stricter definition of "only explicit/penetrative sex of x with y = this term" is more of a legal definition. It is mostly useful in courtrooms and legal situations. But in practical use, I think any romantic or non-platonic interactions with an animal would still be seen a 'bestiality' even if it's not explicit sex. So excluding non-platonic kissing and romance and foreplay and etc from the tag/search/blacklist wouldn't really help anything. Most searchers and most blacklisters would still expect those type of images to be tagged as it. Because on a functional level, it's still part of that type of coupling.

So for all of these reasons, it tends to function the best with this slightly broader application. Narrowing it to the absolute strictest definition possible wouldn't really improve anything but it would cause a lot of extra/unnecessary problems.

If you want to get more technical and specific about just the explicit or just the actual sex parts of the tag, then Watsit had some very good suggestions for that.

But I think trying to change it would just cause functional problems (which is no good for a function-based system), in addition to creating inconsistencies with the other tags. I know there were a lot of problems when people tried to narrow the pairing tags to be 'sex only' tags, so that isn't just a theoretical observation. But including the non-platonic and romantic seems to work consistently well for these types of tags. So that's why I don't see that broadness as being a problem at all. But that's just my perspective on it.