The topic has come up in chat, so a meta discussion seems to be in order.
Should we actively disallow questions asking for identification of a specific breed, or even species?
Presumably users would upload pictures of their pets, and request identification of their dog/cat/lizard/snake/whatever.
While other sites have variations on identification questions (scifi.se allows story identification questions, biology.se seems to allow some species identification questions, graphicdesign.se allows font identification, etc.), I do not feel that this is a good fit for pets.se.
Particularly problematic is how many cross-breeds there are out there. There are a multitude of dogs and cats out there that can't positively be identified as any one (or even two, or three!) breeds due to interbreeding.
These questions are also not really searchable, making them of incredibly limited value for our site.
Questions on pets that are less subject to cross breeding, such as reptiles or birds, would probably be on topic for biology given their current acceptance and use of their species-identification tag, so making them on-topic here seems redundant and unnecessary (especially given the problems with identifying dog or cats breeds).
Anyone looking for help in identifying their pet should be encouraged to ask in The Litter Box, however.
I'm with @Beofett here. Just adding links and an example.
Biology StackExchange: https://biology.stackexchange.com/
[Species-identification] tag in Biology SE has this info text:
Questions looking to find the name of a specific species of organism. Please include as much information as possible on habitat (esp. where in the world you found the organism) and behavior, and ideally provide images.
My suggestion is that we let the biologists handle indentifying questions.
An example case:
Identifying dog breeds is easy, rigth? Just for an example of what kind of difference three years in age can do. It is the same dog in both of pictures below. Identifying his breed is not difficult if you happen to know what other dogs of that same breed typically look like.
Also these above pictures are of the best kind for identifying purposes, I say.
My point is; let's assume this was some exotic animal that has even greater level of variation in how it looks in different ages. Add to that the (often) lesser picture quality. The identifying task quickly becomes very challenging and a many such question will be left unanswered in Pets SE.
I still think that "what breed is this?" questions are not a good fit for Pets. I have upvotes on both the existing answers.
But the recent question Why did this fish kill my Kissing Gouramis? wants to know what species an animal is. I am leaning towards this being a good fit on pets.
I recognize that the line between species and breed can be thin (i.e. wolf vs malamute) and this may cause some difficulty. But over all if a person does not know the species of the animal they are caring for it can have a huge negative impact on the animals (and others) lives and wellbeing. I think we should try to answer "what species is this?" questions.
The big difference between the two types of questions is that:
"What breed is my pet?" is a foundling asking for the names and heritage of its parents. That is not a question that can be answered on the internet from a picture and/or description
"What species is my pet?" is asking about a biological group, the question is not about who are my parents, it is about what group of animals can I interbreed with. This can be answered by a picture and/or complete description.
Example of open species question from our main site.
