I’ve had a rough version of this sitting on my hard drive for years, but discussion with  baroncoon about the oddities of the Fur Affinity drop-down menu choices inspired me to polish it up. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that the species list should be based (more rigorously) on taxonomic practice—why reinvent the wheel when biologists have done the work for you?

The beauty of it is that the menu choices can be set at whatever level of detail seems appropriate. People concentrate pretty hard on Carnivora, so maybe that should go down to the family or subfamily level. On the other hand, with seventeen hundred species in thirty families, maybe Rodentia should only be broken into several groups of families. People like bats, but don’t seem to be real specific about them, so maybe just one listing for all of Chiroptera would be enough. And so on.

No, I’m not advocating using the scientific names—just the organizational structure.