Tons of boar pictures are currently being tagged as pig because piglet is aliased to the latter, and it's year of the pig this time around so there's a lot of pictures on the subject coming in (it's a boar in the japanese zodiac, the more you know).
But that word is generic and it's also used for boar youth, so this alias is wrong, unless we want to create boar piglet or something like that.
Side note: why is this an alias in the first place if we keep kitten as a separate tag from cat? I feel we ought to have had this idea implemented as an implication in any case. I'm for unaliasing for that reason alone.
Not sure how crazy we want to get with the taxonomy here, but it seems "pig", "boar", "swine", "hog", are all largely synonymous, so adding pig to boar posts might not be entirely inaccurate. It seems "swine" is technically the least specific (though I'd never use it in everyday conversation).
From this page along with various dictionary definitions:
swine (not currently used) - covers everything in the Suidae family
pig - same as swine, but especially used for young or domesticated swine (I usually picture "pig" as a farm animal)
hog (not currently used) - same as swine, but especially either wild (e.g. warthog) or larger than 120 lb / 54 kg (meant for slaughter)
boar - either a wild swine (generally how I picture them, with tusks), or an uncastrated male domesticated pig (basically the pig version of a bull)
From this, we could implicate piglet, boar, and pig to swine as an umbrella term (or leave the umbrella tag as pig if we don't care about disambiguating domestic pigs and would rather avoid creating a new tag). Having all boar include either swine or pig is technically accurate.
In any case I think the alias is problematic, and should probably be removed for one reason or another.
We don't normally distinguish between young and old versions of animals. Kitten has 230 posts versus 29k for cat. Puppy versus dog is similar. That's not really precedent against an alias. If anything, the fact that even kitten is barely used supports aliasing them all.
Looking through pig, most of the animals I see look more like chibi moeblobs than actual piglets. How are you supposed to tell how young an animal is when it's just an abstract blob, like post #3080322 or post #2985668? Trying to categorize animals by age sounds like a mess when so many are highly stylized like this.
We don't normally distinguish between young and old versions of animals. Kitten has 230 posts versus 29k for cat. Puppy versus dog is similar. That's not really precedent against an alias. If anything, the fact that even kitten is barely used supports aliasing them all.
Looking through pig, most of the animals I see look more like chibi moeblobs than actual piglets. How are you supposed to tell how young an animal is when it's just an abstract blob, like post #3080322 or post #2985668? Trying to categorize animals by age sounds like a mess when so many are highly stylized like this.
You can distinguish a young boar from an adult boar, though. The images depict regular pics but this topic is also about boars. Young boars do have stripes while the adulti don't have them anymore.
I think in the two images provided pig is just enough.
It might be worthwhile converting pig into a catchall tag. It's not like real domestic pigs can't have similar appearances to wild pigs, as some breeds will appear much more similar to their wild counterparts. Going with that though, for tagging purposes it would probably be worthwhile to have boar specifically for images of the more stereotypical feral looking color patterns and have a "domestic_pig" tag specifically for stereotypical farm pig appearances. Both tags in turn implicating the pig tag.
I'm not particularly keen on aliasing puppy and kitten, at minimum on the most extreme ends an adult would look very different from a newborn pup and kit. On the other hand for those where it really isn't easy to tell an adult from a juvenile based on size and appearance, it might be worthwhile considering the usage of small/dwarf_*animal* tags to cover animals of a certain size that is smaller than the normally expected size for the animal. Dwarf animals are of course common amongst breeds used as pets.
As for this specific alias, I have no issues with removing it if that is where support is.
