Cats = felines
Dogs = canines
Birds = ???
Avians, from Class Aves.
- Tamerlane
By the way, properly speaking dogs are canids, cats are felids, from the families Canidae and Felidae, respectively. That’s how a zoologist would refer to them, anyway ( and then go home and reflexively use “feline” or “canine” which has become part of the popular vernacular ).
- Tamerlane
Thanks! You’ve solved this morning’s newsroom quandary!!
Actually, “canine” and “feline,” used as Anglicized technical terms, would refer to the subfamily (Caninae and Felinae) – eliminating from some outlying genera from the broader group. In the Canidae, you’d refer to Canis, Cuon, the maned wolf, and a couple of other genera, but eliminate the foxes, in using Caninae; in the Felidae, everything but the Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) would fall into the Felinae.
All birds, by the way, are Class Aves; every major subgroup belongs to an order consistently ending with -iformes, with a “familiar” form produced by dropping the final -es. So ducks, geese, and swans are anseriforms; songbirds are passeriforms; woodpeckers and their Old World allies are piciforms; and so on. Blackbirds and grackles are icterids, from the family Icteridae within the Passeriformes; cranes are gruids; etc.
Hrrmm…Good point.
- Tamerlane
Felidae is actually broken into three sub-families (::shudder::): Pantherinae (Lions and tigers and leopards and jaguars and clouded leopards and snow leopards and marbled cats, oh my!), Acinonychinae (cheetahs) and Felinae (all the other extant cats). So “feline”, using the sub-family deifnition, would also exlcude lions and tigers and leopards and . . . .
As an aside, in order to get from Class Mammalia to Family Felidae these days, you have to pass through not one classifiation group (Order), but 13(!): Class, Subclass, Infraclass, Superlegion, Legion, Sublegion, Infralegion, Supercohort, Cohort, Magnorder, Superorder, Grandorder, Order, Suborder, Family. Is it any wonder I prefer cladistics?
I propose that we recruit King Philip, after he comes over from Germany Saturday, to take out with extreme prejudice any mammalogists who attempt to impose infralegions and grandorders on mammal taxonomy! 
No serious intent to do violence is implied here.
If it’s convenient, would you care to explain the reason for the threefold subfamily grouping? I can completely grasp the significant distinctions between cheetahs and other cats, large or small, but I was under the impression that Panthera, Felis, and Neofelis (plus Lynx and anything else you accept) were all sufficiently closely related both cladistically and in terms of traditional taxonomy as to constitute a single subfamily and to scarcely constitute separate genera. So this is news to me!
Unfortunately, all of my books are packed away right now for a forthcoming move, so I don’t know offhand any of the technicalities that differentiate the three groups. I tried Googling, but couldn’t find anything substantial which breaks down the distinct characters of Pantherinae vs. Felinae. One fundamental difference that many feel justifies the splitting of Pantherinae and Felinae is that only the “big cats” (Pantherinae) roar. They also tend to have less slit-shaped pupils than their smaller feline (in the restricted sense) relatives.
From what I can tell, though I haven’t seen any molecular data for cats, the three sub-family groupings represent true clades, so all members of Pantherinae evolved from a common ancestor; likewise for Felinae, etc. Felid phylogeny is still somewhat muddled so you can probably find someone who supports just about any taxonomic arrangement, really.
To elaborate a little, family names, ending in -idae, can be converted to a general name for the group by dropping the -ae. Duck, geese, and swans, family Anatidae, are anatids; hummingbirds, family Trochilidae, are trochilids; woodpeckers, family Picidae, are picids.
It might also be noted that members of the Order Passeriformes, the perching birds or songbirds, are commonly referred to as passerines. The “true” songbirds, a group within the Passeriformes, are known as oscines.