What annotations would you add to an observation of a bone from an animal which may still be alive? When it’s more ambiguous, I mean – like finding the foot-bones of a cat, which can survive without a foot (unlikely as it is in the wild). If you found ribs, the cat is certainly dead. But a foot? par…

I mean, the bone is part of an animal that is dead, perhaps the other part of the animal is alive somewhere, but barring super gruesome scenarios, if you find a cat foot bone, that part of the cat is dead. I say just mark it dead. If you see a three legged cat running around that would be marked as …

I wouldn’t care about those very rare cases, it’s 99.9% from a dead animal, and what you meet is a dead animal part, as cats can’t shed their limbs as lizards, you can safely assume cat is gone. I saw tons of dead cats and especially in open space they’re pretty fast separated, so you can find a sep…

The obs is for the bit you found. Which is. Very dead. We cannot know if the invisible rest of the animal is walking wounded or also dead.

yes, I forgot to add that in the start – if the observation is for the part which I found, then the status of the rest of the animal is irrelevant.

Your initial question makes me think of vivisection or torture. Extracting a ‘bone from a living animal’

Ouch. I wouldn’t, but I don’t think a carnivorous predator has such qualms.

A found bone is ‘evidence of presence’. In the same way I cannot know if the creature that left tracks or scat, is living as I put that obs on iNat. It WAS living when the evidence was made, but now? If a carnivorous predator only managed to catch a foot, then a scavenger has claimed the walking wo…

I consulted my three-legged dog and she said that seemed like a reasonable interpretation.

if a coyote bites off a pet’s leg and spits it out, does the leg become wild even though the rest of the pet is not, because a human did not put it there?

I majored in biology, not philosophy.

I’d say it’s reasonable for cats, but not always, you find a lizard tail and can’t really say (if it’s damaged) if lizard is dead, because most likely it’s alive.

Bones from a living animal?

General

sedgequeen October 15, 2021, 8:40pm 15

I think that if any bones are found for a vertebrate animals (except maybe tail bones of lizards), that vertebrate should be assumed to be dead unless proven otherwise. Dead should be the default.

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Bones from a living animal?

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