What do you mean by Russia? There’s no wild American bison in Europe, just European bison helped with hybridisation, there’re both captive herds and wild ones, managed, but still pretty wild, e.g. in Belarus.
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There is a large American Bison herd in Yakutia, Siberia. All of the sources on it suggest that they are wild bison but that doesn’t mean much, given how many placed claim to have wild bison that are actually fenced. I’ve yet to confirm what their status is.
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Oh, found it, there’s a 80-head herd that were set free, but they come back for winter food, all others are fenced.
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@raymie - why should a fence be the one thing that makes an organism wild or not?
Many reserves here in South Africa are fenced (including the massive Kruger National Park, which is the size of Israel). That is for the sake of both people and the wildlife. Fences drastically reduce human-wildlife conflict (lions killing cattle, elephants raiding crops). Yet nobody would claim that Kruger lions or elephants are anything but wild.
For me, the other conditions that make an individual or population as captive would be other clear signs of husbandry: intentional and regular feeding by humans, breeding is controlled by humans, are socialised to humans, raised by humans from youth, etc. In my view, an animal has to meet these other conditions to be marked as “not wild”. The mere presence of fences, especially over an area large enough for ecological processes to take place, is not enough to make such populations as not wild.
I don’t see why bison, especially those in national parks where they are free to roam and do as they please, should be any different.
Please note that this is not a personal attack on you. I don’t know much about how bison are managed in the USA. For bison raised on ranches for meat, I agree would meet the definition of ‘captive’ as they are intentionally controlled by humans for a specific agenda, and I’m sure are given supplemental feeding in many cases.
However, bison in nature reserves and national parks, as far as I know, are not socialised to humans, are not fed by humans, do not receive veterinary treatment, and the only human element influencing them in some way is the fact that they/their ancestors were reintroduced into areas (where they had been extirpated) in the name of ecological restoration, and/or fences restricting their movement into non-protected areas. In the same way as African megafauna and in the sense just described, I would declare these bison as wild.
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Wild for iNat includes that movement of animal is not contrlled by humans, fence clerly does it, sure, some parks also surrounded by towns so animals mostly stay insidi, but nothing prevents them crossing this barrier, clearly amount of territory under fence plays a role too.
Every rabbit and dingo in Australia is captive by default then.
Rabbit Proof Fence
Dingo Fence
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See the second part of that comment.
Shouldn’t the area involved matter? If a population is inside a fence, but the area is significantly larger than the normal home range would be, then does the fence even come into play? Certainly very few of us would consider the Wind Cave or Theodore Roosevelt NP Prairie Dogs to be anything but wild, even though they’re in the same fenced off area. (With respect to Wind Cave, if I remember correctly, there isn’t a fence between the National Park and the nearby State Park. That would make for a total of 100,000 acres…)
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Two thoughts (although I don’t know much about american bison, so I’m happy to be corrected):
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I don’t think bison in huge areas should be marked captive, even if there are fences at some point. Bison in small enclosures (eg the ones in SF’s Golden Gate Park) should be marked captive. Not sure about ones raised for meat, but if they’re analogous to grazing cattle I’d mark them captive.
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What does marking these observations of the ones in huge fenced areas as captive accomplish? What is the benefit to the community? I don’t ask that to be facetious or as an attack, I’m genuinely curious as to what problem this is solving.
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I would in fact claim that lions and elephants are Kruger National Park are captive.
I’m considering the bison captive for the reasons stated by @fffffffff above. They are restricted in movement by humans behind a fence. Sure, it’s big, but it’s fundamentally no different than any other captive animals.
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Those aren’t the same situation. These fences were created to keep animals out of an area, rather than to restrict them to a certain area within a fence. The rabbit-proof fence didn’t even work anyways, as the rabbits dug under the fence.
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The prairie dogs aren’t captive because they could easily escape by digging under the fence. They could probably even go right trough it if they wanted too.
I heard this Some years ago on a nature tour of Catalina island where we saw the local bison herds roaming the island hills. The bison had been brought to the Catalina when Hollywood was making western movies there; and they were just left behind when that ended. Eventually, the island conservancy took responsibility.
Fast forward several decades. The bison population grew too big for the available land and were over-grazing their island range. Catalina struck a deal with a reserve in the South Dakota run by Native Americans to adopt and move some of the island animals to South Dakota with the aim of diversifying the gene pool of the bison herds there.
But, after so many generations, the bison from Catalina could not withstand the cold winters, even though it was in their native range. Also, “island effect” was in play and the Catalina bison were smaller than normal bison. The Native Americans minding the herds had to build special heated barns to keep those little “Hollywood Bison” going.
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@tiwane It’s to represent their actual range. When I started bison appeared to occur across North America, which obviously isn’t true anymore. My first goal was to make the range map actually represent where they occur in the wild. This kind of lead down a rabbit hole, as I had no idea that basically all bison were captive.
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I commend your efforts, @raymie. Growing up with family raising bison, elk, and cattle I view a pastured bison in essentially the same way as other pastured bovine. At one time I, too, was going through and marking bison observations as captive and I was shocked at the vitriol that was directed at me for this.
As someone who has built bison fences, I will tell you that a they won’t prevent free movement of deer, pronghorn, jackrabbits, coyotes, or prairie dogs. But they would for cattle, pigs, sheep, llamas, burros, or hogs. Those are not native animals, but there are naturalized hog and burro populations in the US and I haven’t (yet) come across anyone here arguing that fenced members of theses species should be considered wild if provided a sufficiently large enclosure. Consider this Wind Cave bison photo. If that were a llama or a burro or a hog would people argue that it is wild?
Part of the issue here is that iNaturalist uses the inherently subjective term “wild” on the observation page. In other places (the ID screen) the wording is “captive” which is, I think, clearer.
The biggest hurdle, though, is the way that iNaturalist demotes the “non-wild” observations. They are listed as “casual” and removed from most default views and graphs and can never be verified no matter how interesting or detailed the observation is, while “wild” bone, track, and scat observations still get full “benefits”. Additionally, the “Organism is wild” categorization appears as a data quality assessment, in a list of items which would indicate that the data itself is faulty. The inference being that they shouldn’t be included on the site. That something about the observation is incorrect.
I would prefer that captive/cultivated be an “attribute” instead of a “data quality assessment” item. I think it would make this a less contentious issue and I find myself agreeing both that there is a clear distinction between a captive bison and a truly free-roaming bison and that there is value to be had in observations of captive animals and cultivated plants, too.
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I would in fact claim that lions and elephants are Kruger National Park are captive.
Even when the fenced area is the size of a small country?
@raymie @melodi if the animals are able to complete their natural life cycle and are not shielded/isolated from ecological processes - predation, drought, disease, etc, then they are for all intents and purposes wild. The only human element is the existence of the fence, which is only there to prevent conflict between humans and wildlife in unprotected areas.
In this same vein, are birds that frequent birdfeeders captive? Many individuals are quite dependent on these human-provided resources and would starve without them, even though they could fly somewhere else. They would be captive in this sense.
@psweet has nailed it on the head, I think - the area involved should matter. Zoo animals are clearly captive, but the line becomes murkier and murkier as to become irrelevant as the size of the area involved grows.
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No, they won’t as people don’t force them to feeders, when animals are moved to a place and get a fence it’s humans who decide for them, speaking theoretically.
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If we define the restriction of movement as the criterion by which something is captive or not, there is very little wild megafauna left on land. Humans naturally restrict large species from entering towns and in many cases even agricultural areas, and when the few cases of those that do turn up in urban areas happen, we either relocate them or euthanise them.
We set aside habitat for them, and if they happen to stray beyond this defined area, they become a target. This happens even for the wild bison in Yellowstone, and similarly for wolves and other wildlife in the same area, in Europe, and elsewhere.
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That is the main part of wild term on iNat, but in case of wolves it’s restriction from getting somewhere, not by a fence, not restriction of getting out of particular place (and nothing really stops them, moose, hogs, bears, etc. often roam in towns and even big cities). It’s not an ideal system, but it solves more issues if we would use place of birth as a mark of captivity.
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I think this definition of ‘wild’ that hinges on the existence of fences is arbitrary and overly simplistic. There are countries with extensive border fences. Guess that makes everything inside the border captive 
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