Topic: Raccoon_dogs are NOT Procyonids

Posted under Tag/Wiki Projects and Questions

The amount of times I found raccoon_dog, which is a canid, being additionally tagged with procyonid can not be overstated.
The wiki of raccoon_dog does mention the fact that it's not a raccoon, but I feel like it needs its own headliner like "DO NOT TAG". It needs to be made obnoxiously clear that it is NOT a raccoon of ANY kind. And it's NOT a hybrid either.

Looking at raccoon_dog procyonid solo makes me sad.
Even worse that it will be harder to detect on non-solo pieces.

I cleaned up a few of these a while ago, as I find it just as frustrating as you do. Sadly, some of them genuinely do look like tanuki/raccoon hybrids so there's no easy solution here.

karn said:
The amount of times I found raccoon_dog, which is a canid, being additionally tagged with procyonid can not be overstated.
The wiki of raccoon_dog does mention the fact that it's not a raccoon, but I feel like it needs its own headliner like "DO NOT TAG". It needs to be made obnoxiously clear that it is NOT a raccoon of ANY kind. And it's NOT a hybrid either.

Looking at raccoon_dog procyonid solo makes me sad.
Even worse that it will be harder to detect on non-solo pieces.

The problem here is that they're tagging raccoon alongside raccoon_dog, not that they're tagging procynoid on its own. If you take a look at your search, if you add -raccoon (raccoon_dog procyonid solo -raccoon) the number of results goes down significantly. (And if you add -tanuki (potentially because the tanuki is also known as japanese raccoon dog) it goes down to 3 posts)

snpthecat said:
The problem here is that they're tagging raccoon alongside raccoon_dog, not that they're tagging procynoid on its own. If you take a look at your search, if you add -raccoon (raccoon_dog procyonid solo -raccoon) the number of results goes down significantly. (And if you add -tanuki (potentially because the tanuki is also known as japanese raccoon dog) it goes down to 3 posts)

Tanuki is kind of an annoying tag because it's a synonym for raccoon dog.
On top of that, it's sometimes mistranslated to 'raccoon' or 'badger' under the assumption that english speakers both don't know what a raccoon dog is and are too stupid to figure it out.

Tanuki is just japanese word for raccoon dog. Only reason why it's commonly used to refer to the animal is that people do not even realize that it has an established english name, and their only contact with the animal is through japanese media, so they choose to use the japanese word.

rupikonna said:
Tanuki is just japanese word for raccoon dog. Only reason why it's commonly used to refer to the animal is that people do not even realize that it has an established english name, and their only contact with the animal is through japanese media, so they choose to use the japanese word.

Not helped by localizers of said media consistently wrongly referring to them as just "raccoons" like regsmutt pointed out, which I know is the reason a lot of people who know about the rather lazy shortcut refuse to say "raccoon dog"; it sounds fake even if it isn't.

This isn't a "nakama" type of situation where it's restricted to people obsessed with anime, it seems to me like "tanuki" has become a generally accepted loanword.

(As for being turned into badgers like regsmutt also pointed out, even Japanese gets them mixed up sometimes, because 狢 can refer to both raccoondogs and actual badgers. Heck, I joke about that with my sona...)

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