The title might be confusing. Long story short, I’ve encountered a fair amount of people who refuse to acknowledge feral cats as being wild animals and will mark them as “not wild” in the DQA. These will be on observations where the observer specifies that it is a feral, and there’s some people who will argue and disagree with marking them as wild because the name is “domestic cat”. The idea is that a domestic species = always captive. It would be really helpful to have a link I can easily provide that shows staff or iNaturalist specifying that yes, feral animals are to be marked as wild, even if they are a domesticated species. I know there’s been a lot of discussion as to what makes an organism wild but I’m looking for ideally something short and direct. Does anybody know of anywhere staff has made a statement regarding this? It’s gotten time consuming and frustrating to continue explaining why an animal that is feral is wild, and I’d like to just be able to reference an authority to avoid the back and forth.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#captive
Sixth example in “Wild” is literally:
“feral dog or cat”
If that doesn’t learn them, nothing will!
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Perfect lol
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If you find there are observations that continuously get marked “captive” despite your best efforts, you can add them to the project Ferals, Waifs, and Strays - Wild Observations of Domestic Species. IIRC they periodically go through the observations and mark them “yes/wild”.
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