Should remains of captive animals be marked as "captive"?

General
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I just noticed that someone had marked one of my observations of a chicken feather as captive. The feather did come from a captive animal, but it is evidence of some bird of prey catching and eating the chicken. Should this observation be marked as captive or not?
any thoughts on this?
Alexis

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The status of the chicken will not change. However, if you add a duplicate observation of the bird of prey, this likely will not be captive.

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If you’re identifying the animal that had been captive, it should be marked as “captive” since that was its status while alive. It didn’t suddenly become wild. It looks like it was marked captive as they were identifying the prey species.

If you’re identifying the act of predation (and explicitly note that you’re identifying the predator), it probably should be noted as wild (not marked captive) as most likely the predator was a wild animal. These are less likely to be identified very far, and there may be issues if users are using the Identify tool without reading comments.

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Thanks for the info!

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i want to kind of jump off of this question. sometimes domestic animals are feral and therefore not captive (like cats and chickens) and their presence may be important to note in that case, as they are living in the wild as part of the ecosystem. im sure many of us have seen discussion about the impact of feral cats on the environment. so, if one were to find something like cat bones that show no indication of being specifically a pet, would it be appropriate to not mark it as captive?

EDIT: i ask this in part because inaturalist seems to auto-flag a lot of cat observations as captive, and i am unsure if it is appropriate to undo

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In the current system, observations can only be marked “wild” or “not wild”.* There isn’t a third option of “unknown”. In my view, if there are feral cats in the area, and you find the bones of a cat outdoors, you should feel fine checking “wild” if the iNat system voted “not wild”.

*Observation descriptions, comments, or observation fields can be used to provide more nuance, but I’m referring to the Data Quality Assessment section. Some have proposed having a third “unknown” or “contested” option, but it’s currently just a binary yes/no for wildness.

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