Adapted to living on high, barren, plains, rather than on mountain slopes, they do look much more 'antelope-like' than goat-like, although they're about the same size as a typical goat. Nowadays, we prefer the name for the animal in the Tibetan language - or at least, as close to the correct pronunciation of " གཙོད" as we can manage in English.Īs the other part of their name suggests, chiru live only on the Tibetan Plateau, occasionally reaching as far south as Ladakh in northern India, but rarely staying there for long. An antelope, after all, is really just any member of the cattle family that is neither caprine nor bovine (and for a suitably narrow definition of "bovine", at that) so it really gets that description by default. The chiru is often called the "Tibetan antelope", and that's a fair description. Indeed, with no close relatives of its own, it gets a subfamily all to itself - the one and only living species of pantholopine. It is the closest living relative of the goat subfamily, but most ( though not all) researchers consider it just different enough that it's over the line and into a separate subfamily. It is for this reason alone that the chiru ( Pantholops hodgsoni) is not a caprine. But where, exactly, does that subfamily end? How much are we going to include before we decide that, no, this animal is different enough from goats that we're going to call it something else entirely? It is, of necessity, a completely arbitrary decision.
So we put them all - goats, sheep, gorals, and all the rest - into one subfamily. Animals like gorals are clearly goat-like, but it turns out that goats are closer to sheep than they are to gorals. So it is with the goat subfamily, the caprines. (In fact, "apes" as a whole are considered a superfamily). We could, in other words, have an "ape family", and the only reason we don't is that we figure gibbons are sufficiently different from great apes that we ought to give them a family of their own. But that's really all there is there's no way of saying whether a particular clade should be called a "family", an "order", or not given any named ranking at all.įor instance, this rule tells us that humans must belong to the great ape family, since chimps are closer to us than they are to gorillas, but there's nothing in it to say that gibbons can't also belong. These days, there is a rule that all such groupings should also be "clades" - that is, all the animals in them are more closely related to one another than to anything outside the group.
If there's no clear and universal definition of what a species is, there's no definition at all of what the larger groupings - families, tribes, genera, and whatnot - are.
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