@will What if the ‘wild’ cat is occasionally fed by non-owners? I’d argue that makes it only semi-feral/wild.
Pretty fraught topic, I think. Maybe cats should be in their own category, ‘free-range’ if seen outside with no humans in proximity?
If watering/weeding/pruning a wild plant makes it cultivated (as I think the definitions for iNat apply), then feeding/watering a cat would be similar, I think the idea being any subsidies are changing the organisms’ behavior/success ecologically.
To argue another side, I’d be further in favor of this idea of a ‘free-range’ category since I don’t even bother photographing cats that I suspect are at least semi-feral, since I assumed they’d be tagged as ‘casual’ and never enter into any research data. If this changed I could start adding some observations.
Cats kill billions of birds and mammals annually in the U.S. alone, so not documenting cats that have the opportunity to hunt is a large blind spot right now.
Obviously housecats wouldn’t count here, and maybe context shots would be necessary to provide evidence that at least the cat wasn’t in proximity of an unseen owner.