Talk:Suinae

Proposed Move

Most, but not all sources agree that this is the only subfamily in the Suidae. Chrisrus (talk) 19:00, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

• No. There are other subfamilies, but they are extinct. Ucucha 19:07, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose As Ucucha states, there are other subfamilies (Tetraconodontine for example). Which sources do you have that say only one subfamily?. --Kevmin § 19:57, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Isn't that always the case, even when no extinct other subfamily is known, aren't they assumed to have existed, and that at any time might show up in the fossil record? Is it standard to leave an empty article in such cases? Chrisrus (talk) 20:35, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

This one http://www.bucknell.edu/MSW3/browse.asp?id=14200001 says it's the only one, and we usually go with them. This one has puts the warthogs and babirusas into separate subfamilies. http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=180720 There are more. Chrisrus (talk) 20:35, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

MSW 3 only treats Recent species, so it can hardly be evidence for the classification of extinct mammals. Their comments indicate they are following McKenna and Bell (1997), who list seven subfamilies: Suinae and six that are extinct. (However, the classification of fossil suids and related animals is very complex, and there is a variety of other schemes.)

One subfamily is no subfamily: any family with subfamilies necessarily has at least two. Ucucha 20:42, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I'll remove the request, but could you or someone please explain this situation in the article so that readers like myself could understand? Chrisrus (talk) 20:46, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Done, I hope. It turns out that there are still classifications that place some living suids in different subfamilies, such as Van der Made (2010), who places Babyrousa and Potamochoerus in Babyrousinae. Ucucha 21:15, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, That's intersting, thank you very much for your contribution to this article.

True Pigs

If I may, I was doing some research as to which of these taxa is concidered by experts to be the "true pigs". Actually, I just went to Google Scholar and typed in "true pigs". Of those that were relevant, zero were being used in reference to the genus Sus, two were talking about the Suinae, and the other eight used the term to mean Suidae. The Wikipedia article pig, which everyone seems to want to move or merge but nobody knows where, presently uses Sus; how is that justified given this? Given this information (detailed on the pig discussion page) which of these taxa includes the true pigs and all the true pigs and nothing but the true pigs? In my most humble opinion, a taxon that includes lots of extinct species is highly likely to include lots of intermediate forms that would qualify as "pigs" to a lesser extent. Chrisrus (talk) 23:45, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

I think "pig" is probably mostly used to mean either "Suidae" or "domestic pig". I'm not sure how productive a search for "true pigs" is: "pig" is evidently an ambiguous term. Ucucha 23:55, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, in common use and for the primary referent for Wikipedia users who type "p-i-g" into the search box, Domestic Pig seems like a no-brainer. But all that aside, is it technically justified to narrow it to to Sus? Chrisrus (talk) 00:09, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

McKenna and Bell (1997) list "Pigs, wild boars" as a common name for Sus. (They also list "Pigs" for Suidae.) I might favor making "pig" a dab page, but redirecting it to "Domestic pig" is also reasonable. Ucucha 00:14, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Out of curiosity where is the term "true pig" coming form in the first place? Is a random crufty relic form the early versions of the Pig article? It seems if there is serious ambiguity about it in the literature then it prob should be avoided as a defining term. --Kevmin § 01:10, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

It's a term used by experts when they want to contrast what they see as the "true pigs" with what they, by implication, consider to be false pigs. It comes up a lot when discussing peccaries, just about every discussion of which starts out with the fact that they are not "true pigs", which I guess means that, in that context, the "true pigs" are any an all Suidae. Experts who used it for the Suinae when Warthogs and Babirusas were in their own subfamilies would have been saying they didn't view those as true pigs, which I guess they don't do anymore. Nowadays, calling Suinae "true pigs" would seem to imply that these other Suidae subfamilies of extinct pigs that Wikipedia doesn't know anything about are not fully true pigs. Personally, we'd just like to help disambiguation page users who want one article about all the real pigs but without any peccaries or such. Haven't you ever seen a taxon or group of animals refered to as the "true/false (whatever)s" before? It's a pretty common practice. Chrisrus (talk) 03:23, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I have been following the diambig. morphology changes that are happening at Pig (disambiguation). TO be honest the majority of instances where I see a "true/false" dichotomy are those where someone is trying to explain the differences within a group to a layperson or the terms are applied by laypeople themselves to groups. From your comment I think its probably will only confuse the situation by trying to shoehorn the term "true pigs" into the articles. BTW have you looked at the expansion I did to the Suidae page taxo section? As you can see I updated the listings with as much subfamily/tribe information as I was able to find so "subfamilies of extinct pigs that Wikipedia doesn't know anything about" is not a viable problem at this point. --Kevmin § 04:02, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

This is exactly the sort of angels-on-heads-of-pins situation I want to avoid by putting the disambiguation page at Pig. What someone means by "true pigs" depends on context: some are talking about species, some about genera, some about families, etc. 69.3.72.249 (talk) 04:28, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, it was worth a try to find out whether there was any general agreement among experts as to which of these taxon-based articles is the logical place to put an article called "pig". But I don't really agree that so far we've found any experts that limit their idea of what constitutes a pig to the species or genus level. When experts talk about "pigs", from what we've seen so far, they seem to be talking about "Suidae" usually and "Suinae" only sometimes and Sus never, so I don't see any support for the present situation. Also, we still don't know anything apart from what Kevin just added about most of the extinct ones, (thanks again) because most are red links. But from what I've been able to gather they're a pretty piggy bunch, but if experts in the past have disagreed whether a babyrusa is really a pig, they might possibly disagree that some of these red link pigs are really pigs, too, so there's that in favor of putting an umbrella article there. But not Sus, because, I mean, why? Why was Sus ever chosen in the first place?

I'll try to find out more about the experts who called Suinae the real true pigs and why. Maybe we'll find that that that perspective doesn't apply now that babirusas and wart hogs are Suinae. Maybe those experts were trying to argue against current taxonomy. If so they've been ruled against. I'll let you know what I learn. Chrisrus (talk) 05:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Kevmin, thank you very much, that's exactly what I was asking for when I was talking about what Wikipedia didn't know. Chrisrus (talk) 05:08, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Ok, please look at this. This scheme has been ruled against, it looks like. So one in the collumn of directing pig-in-general searchers to Suidae; it looks like only those who don't accept warthogs and such as true pigs say that Suinae are the only true pigs, and current taxonomy now lists all existant suids as suinae. Chrisrus (talk) 06:00, 28 September 2010 (UTC)