Just ask anyone who has to deal with either Common Buckthorn (or, as we call it around here, Hostile-berry) or the grossly mis-named Tree-of-Heaven.
@tapia_fraijo, as you can tell, annotating cats is complicated. We have a lot of feral / stray / free-wandering cats in our neighborhood; as a result, we’ve done a whole bunch of rescues. (Pregnant and brand-new mamas appear to be our specialty.) Because of this experience, my personal classification system is a little idiosyncratic, based on how much work it’s going to take to get said cat / kitten into a carrier and out of danger. For the purposes of observation, though, it’s still generally applicable. Without going into too much detail
Fearful, standoffish, no collar, no nearby humans: wild.
Addendum: aaaaand The Doctor just reported that we have a roughly four scratch that; at-most-three-month-old kitten in the yard. At least we got most of this year off!
At the end of the day, when a thick carpet of kudzu covers and smothers trees and shrubs, does it really matter whether the original plant was planted by humans or grew from a dispersed propagule?
Or – if someone argues that the kudzu has spread vegetatively “out of the intended gardening area” – consider the abandoned Christmas tree farm, no longer kept trimmed to marketable size, but still planted as close together as they originally were (barring some mortality from competition) as they grow to mature size. The resulting dense shade prevents native vegetation from returning.
In spain you see wild cats, they do not belong to some one or have a home, they just live in the streets, may some times there are people who feed them with some rotten stuff, but they are still wild, its more like feeding wild birds with dry bread, just to upcycle some waste from the kitchen.
It is true that plants we have to mark as “cultivated” can have a significant effect on ecosystems. (One more reason to separate “captive/cultivated” from “Casual.”)
For cats and dogs I look at stuff like if they have a collar, do they look very well groomed, etc.
Apparently everyone disagrees with my assessment this dog is a stray because its fur looks ungroomed and it wandered up to us during the rest stop suggesting it’s a stray. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/218263718
