Using your own animal list instead of the built-in pool

The generator has two sources: the built-in pool of 7,119 species, and a text box where you paste your own list. Most visitors never open the text box. This page is about the cases where it is the better tool, and about the four things that make a pasted list fail.

How the custom list works

Choose Custom list as the animal pool, paste your animals into the box, one per line, and press Generate. The generator then picks only from your lines. It does not check whether a line is a real animal, so "dragon" and "unicorn" work exactly as well as "otter". That is a feature for games and a hazard for worksheets — more on that below.

Each line is one entry. Blank lines are ignored. If the same animal appears twice, it can be picked twice, because the list is taken literally.

Six cases where a custom list is better

1. Local species

The built-in pool is global. A lesson about the animals in your region cannot use it, because a round can mix a species from Patagonia with one from Siberia. Paste the twenty or thirty species that actually live around you and the round becomes usable for field work, tracking exercises and local ecology.

2. Farm and domestic animals

The pool is wild species with common names. It does not contain "Holstein", "Rhode Island Red" or "Border Collie" as separate entries, because those are breeds, not species. If your lesson is about farms, paste the breeds you want.

3. A zoo or aquarium trip

Paste the species list from the park's own website, then draw one animal per student before the visit. Each student has a specific animal to find, and the trip has a structure that does not depend on a worksheet.

4. A fixed vocabulary set

If the unit has twelve target words, paste those twelve. Now the draw tests the unit rather than the whole animal kingdom, and a student who gets a word wrong gets it wrong on a word you actually taught.

5. Games and fiction

Fantasy creatures, invented species, a list of monsters for an encounter table. The generator does not care what the lines mean, which makes it a general-purpose randomiser for anything you can write one per line.

6. Repeatable draws with a fixed set

If two classes need the same draw from the same set, a pasted list guarantees it. The built-in pool is fixed too, but it is 7,119 entries long and you cannot control which part of it a round touches.

What breaks a pasted list

• Commas instead of line breaks. "Otter, badger, heron" is one entry, not three. The list is line-based. If your source is a comma-separated row, replace the commas with line breaks first.
• Numbered lines. "1. Otter" becomes an animal called "1. Otter". Strip the numbering.
• Trailing spaces and tabs. Mostly harmless for reading, but they make duplicates look different: "otter" and "otter " are two entries, and both can be drawn.
• Fewer entries than you asked for. If you ask for ten animals from a list of six, you get six. With unique results on, the draw stops when the list runs out — it does not loop back.

A worked example

A primary class is doing a unit on British garden wildlife. The teacher wants ten different animals, one per pair of students. The built-in pool would produce ten species, but several would be from other continents and at least one would be an animal nobody in the room can picture.

The teacher pastes this list instead:

hedgehog
robin
blackbird
blue tit
fox
badger
grey squirrel
slow worm
common frog
garden snail
stag beetle
wood mouse

Twelve lines, ten drawn, no repeats. Every animal is one the class can plausibly see in a garden, which means the follow-up — draw it, describe where it lives, say what it eats — has an answer the students can check against their own experience rather than against a website.

Keeping lists for reuse

The text box does not save your list between visits. Keep the lists you use often in a plain text file, one list per section, and paste the section you need. Naming them by purpose rather than by date — garden-birds.txt, farm-breeds.txt, reef-fish.txt — means you can find them in a year.

If you teach several year groups, keep one file per unit. The lists are short, they cost nothing to store, and rebuilding them from memory in front of a class is the one thing that reliably goes wrong.

Related

• The 11 animal groups in this generator, explained — what the built-in pools contain, and where their edges are.
• Using a random animal generator in the classroom — six lesson formats, including the ones that need a fixed list.
• Open the generator