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Notes -
Why are wolves, coyotes, and jackals still categorized as separate species? They produce fertile offspring that remain inter fertile at many subsequent generations, and this fact has been known for a while.
The short answer is probably the biological model of species distinction as "they can breed and make fertile offspring" is out of fashion. There are a few things to consider. For instance jackals and coyotes would never encounter each other in the wild so they don't hybridize. The animals also have pretty different patterns of behavior and ecological niches, at least wolves compared to the other two. Polar bears and Grizzlies can mate and make fertile offspring too, but they also rarely encounter each other in the wild to the point that we didn't know if they even could interbreed until someone saw a weird bear 20 years ago and tested its DNA. There's a bit of "the Categories were made for Man not Man for the Categories" going on here too. If I called a coyote a wolf I'd get called a dumbass in turn; they're obviously very different even just morphologically.
Actually now that I think a bit more about it it's a lot more of a historical inertia kind of thing. We gave them different names hundreds of years ago because they looked different and by the time we figured out they could make babies the names were entrenched.
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