Should roadkill domestic dog be considered research grade?

General General - Español
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In English:

I live in Los Angeles, and I found this dog dead on the side of the road with no human around it. Obviously, this dog is not supposed to be here as it was hit by a car, so I put it on iNaturalist assuming dead animals found anywhere are research grade. I marked it “dead” on the annotations, but because of the species and the area it was found in, it’s marked automatically as casual. I will place a link to the observation below, but fair warning it is gruesome.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/256250367

Considering the rules on iNat, escaped pets do technically count as research grade quality. I believe it should qualify for research grade because it’s not where a human wanted it to be. There was no leash or any human around it that suggest that this was an escaped pet that got hit by a car.

It is also worth noting that there are feral dog populations in Los Angeles, especially poor and underserved neighborhoods like Van Nuys (where the observation was made).

I do not know how to change it from “casual” to “needs id”, other than editing it on the IOS app which doesn’t seem to change it.

Or maybe it doesn’t qualify for research grade status and should be left as casual.

Please let me know what yall think, or feel free to send a clarification of the rules.

Just some thoughts:

I do think there is value in making this observation research grade, being able to document and see where roadkill occur most can be valuable research data to someone. Roadkill also attracts loads of other organisms to the area and this observation can help paint a fuller picture of what’s happening on these streets.

En Español:

Vivo en Los Ángeles y encontré este perro muerto al costado de la carretera, sin ningún humano cerca. Obviamente, este perro no debería estar aquí, ya que fue atropellado por un auto, así que lo subí a iNaturalist, asumiendo que los animales muertos encontrados en cualquier lugar califican como de grado de investigación. Lo marqué como “muerto” en las anotaciones, pero debido a la especie y al área donde se encontró, se marcó automáticamente como “casual”. Colocaré un enlace a la observación a continuación, pero advertencia: es gráfico.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/256250367

Considerando las reglas de iNat, las mascotas que se escapan técnicamente califican como de calidad de grado de investigación. Creo que esta observación debería calificar también, porque este perro no estaba en un lugar donde un humano quisiera que estuviera. No había correa ni ningún humano cerca que sugiriera que era una mascota que escapó y fue atropellada por un auto.

También cabe mencionar que hay poblaciones de perros ferales en Los Ángeles, especialmente en barrios pobres como Van Nuys, donde se hizo esta observación.

No sé cómo cambiar el estatus de “casual” a “necesita identificación” (needs ID), aparte de intentar editarlo en la app de iOS, pero eso no parece funcionar.

O tal vez simplemente no califica para el estatus de grado de investigación y debería quedarse como “casual”.

Por favor, déjenme saber qué opinan o si alguien puede aclarar las reglas.

Unos pensamientos:

Creo que hay valor en hacer que esta observación sea de grado de investigación. Documentar y ver dónde ocurre la mayoría de los atropellamientos puede ser valioso para alguien investigando. Además, los animales muertos en la carretera atraen a muchos otros organismos al área, y esta observación puede ayudar a dar una imagen más completa de lo que está sucediendo en estas calles.

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It is or was obviously someone’s pet as it is still wearing its collar, not part of a feral population.
As a pet, it is casual.
For people looking for roadkill, they should be able to filter to find it.

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It’s casual because there are downvotes on the “organism is wild” data quality item. Inaturalist itself automatically adds a single downvote for that in certain cases*. You can add your own upvote to counteract it, although in this case other users have also downvoted it.

If you haven’t already, this help article contains some details of what organisms are considered wild vs captive/cultivated by inat terms. Feral cats and dogs are explicitly given as an example of wild organisms.

* “if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized.” - from the tooltip on the data quality assessment.

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wild / naturalized organisms exist in particular times and places because of other reasons (e.g. members of native or established non-native populations or released/escaped pets, hitchhikers, or vagrants)

Wild
• an escaped or released pet (please use the Established annotation in this case)

(text iNaturalist, emphasis mine)

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I guess I would wonder on how to quantify ‘escaped’. Does it mean an animal that has gotten out of it’s normal boundary and is living on it’s own for some period (in the past or foreseeable future)? Would a dog that got loose for an hour also qualify as escaped for iNat’s purposes? To my mind, the first would qualify as possibly escaped (and therefore not captive). For my own observations, I tend to skew cautious thus the word ‘possibly’. But I would never consider my dog or a neighbor’s dog or a random dog that got loose (aka as escaped in casual conversation) as ‘not captive’ and therefore ‘not casual’ at iNat. Getting hit by a car wouldn’t change that.

But, I am not nearly as interested in parsing out the nuances of some of this as others are or in policing it. If someone wants to quibble over one if my observations being captive rather than wild, I let it be. That’s how crowd sourcing functions and, in the scheme of life, the designation of that one observation is relatively unimportant to me.

If one keeps the primary objective of iNat in mind, to foster a person’s relationship to the natural world, a lot of this seems kind of common sense to me. Any structure needs rules and guidelines so we set them. But the primary objective can guide how we police those rules.

If I see a chicken running in a field across the street from the farmyard, it’s not wild to me and i wouldn’t upload it as as anything but captive. If someone else saw it and posted it as wild (by virtue of being escaped), then I would not mark it as captive because that was their personal interaction with nature and I’m content to let them have it their way. Not fussing over gray areas let’s me live a more relaxed life and let’s me enjoy iNat more.

That said, I’m who I am and where I’m at (old, having lived a long life and enjoying the relaxed nature of retirement). Other personalities will certainly differ in their approach to rule parsing and there’s nothing wrong with that. I likely would have been happily trying to sort out the nuances of rules at another stage of my life. :-)

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My mastering of English may not be the bestest, but I take ‘escaped [from…]’ as meaning ‘no longer held captive’ or ‘no longer in captivity’ without further consideration of duration, distance, collar/uniform, or type of boundary trespassed :) Like a prisoner escapes – be it unintentionally – if you will.

As for iNaturalist’s stance – engaging with the natural world, preferably not captive-cultivated etc. – I find their peculiar choice of criteria for ‘captive’ quite clever because it is straightforward most of the time, and only rarely requires hazardous guesses or deep knowledge from the average layperson.
By contrast, the ‘not captive’ counterpart leaning towards tolerance and leniency makes iNaturalist very welcoming to many events and sorts of engaging-with-nature. As stray/escaped/released beasts are also a topic in natural sciences, so people observing these will find a rightful place here.

I have a feeling that without the disastrous choice of wording (‘wild’ being such a terrible misnomer for ‘a creature obviously not currently held captive’!), and a mild reluctance to actively disambiguate guidelines further (plus, no consequence to whoever scorns them), such endless yet interesting debates about potential feralization, stray collared pet tamed wildboar abandoned then roadkilled, and other what-if corner cases… would largely be a thing of the past.
Sorry, staff has disambiguated below: the help pages can be scorned, as the wild or captive status of observations is ultimately to be determined by voters. Seems like the majority is always right at least in certain matters :)

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I´m from Mexico and we have many issues with both cats and dogs (ferals). There are even large populations of feral dogs living in some mountains that are killing wildlife.
In your observation, as the dog has collar, the community marked it as “not wild” and that´s why it´s casual.
I think this filter is very useful, as there are many dogs in my country, but not all of them are feral. That way, we can mark the dogs from the cities as “casual” and the feral dogs as research grade and introduced, therefore, invasive.
Sorry if my English is not correct, I hope I expressed my opinion.

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This is a gray area, and there are extensive other threads on the forum about captive/escaped pets. In my opinion, since the dog has a collar and is obviously someone’s pet, it’s pretty reasonable to consider it captive. Many cats and dogs are allowed to wander somewhat freely around their home, but still live at a human’s home most of the time, return to it, are fed there, given vet care, etc. This is more important to my mind in determining wild/not wild than the exact location. This is somewhat analogous to ranched cattle which wander widely in given areas, but are still captive. Really, situations like this are probably up to the community to sort out via voting in the DQA. If enough people think the individual is wild and vote so, it would be wild, and vice versa.

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Is it time to amend the iNaturalist help page and be done with debates? Keeping only the first and last sentence should be enough, that way it is up to voters to judge without a nudge.

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We will never be done with debates. Just look at the sheer number of threads covering “wild vs. cultivated” for plants – most of which give the impression that someone really wants to find a way for a cultivated plant to count for their “wild” life list (someone actually referred to “semi-cultivated plants”). Every possible edge case has to have its own thread.

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Let’s just have all such threads closed right from the start, maybe with a referral to the (amended) help page simply stating “There are no rules, only opinions: use your best judgment, vote as you like, the community will decide.” :-)

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Can always add it to appropriate ‘Roadkill’ project/s.

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/search?utf8=✓&q=roadkill

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Then what is the point of having a forum?

In my opinion, if you can’t stand debate, take a break.

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It has a collar on it. It looks like it was somebody’s pet.

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there are plenty of grey areas in these questions but i think this one lands squarely on captive. Otherwise anyone out on a walk with their off leash dog, which is common in rural areas, can tag their dog as wild, even though it stays with the human and has no intention of running away. Domestic dogs are a different case than most animals in that most of them like being with their humans, so in a way they need to be treated as having intent like humans, and if a trained dog wants to be with the human, it’s not a wild animal. Or something.

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Fun tangential fact, learnt the hard way: in some countries there are well-defined legal criteria for a pet dog to be considered vagrant: as soon as it is not controlled (by leash, chain, cage, fence, walls, orders…) and not under the effective surveillance by a person in charge (beyond voice/whistle range OR farther than e.g.100m), with few exceptions for shepherd/hunting dogs in active duty. Liability for the owner or mayor follows, whether vagrancy stemmed from an accident (escapee) or human will (release, abandonment, forfeiting control…), and even more so if harm or damage results. Vagrant or feral, once it comes freely after your trousers, things get equally… wild. :sweat_smile:

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Este posteo no deberia estar en alguna otra seccion del foro que no sea ‘General - Español’? Más allá de estar traducido, el post original esta en inglés y todas las respuestas estan en inglés…

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The OP chose to place their post in both the General and General-Espanol categories and included both languages in their original post. I don’t think there is any problem with their choice.

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There are rules (or at least guidelines) for deciding what counts as captive/not wild. They are on the help page. But there is room for reasonable people to disagree about how to apply the rules, and that is where the voting comes in.

People are supposed to be voting based on the guidelines, in other words.

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Rule/guideline: on this site escaped pets are deemed not captive
Applying it: this escaped pet is escaped and a pet but not really because [duration, species, ownership, distance, sounds odd, etc.] and therefore this escaped pet is captive
Rule/guideline: uh, ok then, it’s up to you to judge

I still can’t see a practical difference with “there’s no rule/guideline”, whenever “applying” said rules is allowing not to apply them, thanks to a “best judgment” clause (~ follow one’s heart) :) Hence the suggestion to get rid of rules which are either free to ignore, or self-defeating.

Won’t lose sleep over it anyway - I no longer share obs of ferals, it’s an uphill battle.