Of course, relying too heavily on this would make “not wild” those populations of elk and deer that rely on humans providing food through the winter, now that humans have built up the valleys where they used to winter.
This wild vs. captive thing is not simple! Maybe what we need is less a long, detailed document that most of us would ignore anyway (I certainly would) than a simple statement like, “When uncertain, mark it wild.”
A couple of years ago there was an article about the last few acres of wild forest and they kept it a secret so it would not be trampled bij visitors. If it truly is so, I do not know, but thought to mention it.
I will try to keep this in mind (everywhere). It is (for me at least) probably partially answerable (is this a word) most of the times. I will try to understand if the flowers again visble in the landscape are of some generations after help or not and the same with trees.
I have always found that construction meaningless. One of the only three? One of the only three million? Without some reference point, “one of the only” doesn’t tell me anything.
Which would be useful for making a point about today’s concept of “conservation.”
I have always found that construction meaningless. One of the only three? One of the only three million? Without some reference point, “one of the only” doesn’t tell me anything.
I used the phrase “one of the only” because the exact number of herds considered “wild” varies from author to author. I have usually heard the phrase “one of four”, with the four being Yellowstone, Wind Cave, the Henry Mountains bison herd, and the Elk Island herd in Canada. Except, as has been noted in this thread, the Wind Cave herd is fenced in, the Elk Island herd is fenced in, and the Yellowstone herd is artificially confined through use of natural landforms. However, I’ve also heard “one of seven” and other numbers of supposed free-ranging herds, and there’s no consistent definition of what herds are considered wild beyond Yellowstone, Wind Cave, and Henry Mountains always listed. So unfortunately I cannot be more precise.
Which would be useful for making a point about today’s concept of “conservation.”
Deleting the entire megafaunal population of a park the size of New Jersey that is allowed to function on its own just to make a point doesn’t help anyone learn anything: it’s merely an argument in semantics. It’s basically deliberately creating a problem for other people that no one asked for and trying to justify being obnoxious. There really isn’t anything in nature that hasn’t been affected by humans in some way. Even populations of wild game like white-tailed deer are heavily managed, and humans do take steps to manipulate the populations of many native species. Most visibly terrestrial megafauna, but you also see this in things like the initiative a couple of years ago to plant more milkweed to boost the monarch population.
Indeed, while the observation that everything is affected by humans to some degree is useful, it ties into a broader problem that I have heard several wildlife biologists mention in that if you only define things that have no trace of human influence as “wild”, it encourages people to think of large swaths of the planet as “not wild” and therefore not important for conservation. Wildness becomes defined as “other”. This results in people not caring about local conservation efforts or wildlife closer to urban areas compared to wildlife in the Amazon or the Serengeti. Despite the fact that conservation in these areas is important for maintaining sufficient habitat area for many species. It also results in a dangerous dichotomy which defines anything humans do as unnatural, which not only teaches people humans cannot coexist with wildlife on planet Earth (and this is an increasing problem among public perceptions of nature) or that improving local environments is pointless (i.e., we can’t remove a city, but it is worth replanting forests and removing old dams). This is one of the reasons behind the big push for “urban conservation” and awareness of wildlife in anthropogenically influenced areas in the last three years or so, to try to bring attention that “wildness” is not restricted to far off, out-of-sight lands.
Good example of this is when conservationists initially started the breeding program to save red wolves, they aggressively purged any red wolf that they believed to be “tainted” with coyote or gray wolf genes (Dan Flores’ Coyote America is a good source for this). And I do mean purged, they wouldn’t even allow hybrid red wolves that were housed in zoos to live out their lives in captivity without breeding. This ended up wiping out the vast majority of the surviving “red wolf” population (only 14 out of 400 individuals known survived). Then genetic studies have found out that red wolves arose via an introgression event between coyotes and gray wolves, and that may have been due to environmental changes driven by Native American populations (specifically, deforestation by people like the Mound Builders allowing prairie taxa like coyotes to expand eastward and breed with gray wolves).
So in the modern day conservationists may have accidentally killed off the majority of the surviving red wolf population in the name of “purity” (since red wolves naturally interbred with both coyotes and gray wolves anyway), and may have even removed key red wolf genetic variation from the gene pool (surviving red wolves are very inbred). Conservationists’ obsession with genetic purity is also one of the biggest roadblocks to restoring red wolf populations. Red wolves right now are restricted to this tiny area of northeastern North Carolina, because if they try to introduce them anywhere else the red wolves immediately start trying to breed with the local coyotes. This is why there is great concern the red wolves will get wiped out by climate change, instead of, say, moving them to a place like Smoky Mountains National Park where they used to roam. Additionally, the current obsession with restoring everything to it’s “natural” (read: pre-human) state has made the conservation of the red wolf a hot-button issue, because researchers fear if the red wolf is known to have arisen as a hybrid no one will want to preserve it anymore (and some anti-wolf advocates have actually used this argument to claim the red wolf should not be preserved).
Removing entire populations of animals that the vast, vast majority of people would consider close enough to wild to be indistinguishable would be entirely unhelpful for this, and on top of that would go against some of the major goals of iNaturalist, which is to help people learn and be aware of wildlife more generally. Few would consider a more-or-less self-sustaining ecosystem spanning a 19,000 square km area the size of Puerto Rico and Cyprus combined to be “captive”, and defining it as such seems needlessly contrarian.
I agree with your comments about classifying creatures as wild, but not about the trivial point of “one of the only.” A person could say/write “one of the few.” It would usually be accurate and it makes sense, unlike “one of the only.”
I was looking over some IUCN material today and thought their definition of wild might be relevant here:
Pigeons in the city are free to disperse out of that city. Mockingbirds in farmland are free to disperse into other regions. Hence, they are not captive.
I think this is a reasonable enough definition of “wild” versus “captive/cultivated” for animals. Plants might be a little different due differences in life history between plants and animals (i.e., motility, autotroph versus heterotroph).
I believe the definitions were set up as a starting point, not a dogmatic rule.
Additionally, the definition of captive vs. wild also mentions:
Wild
- zebra in the Serengeti (assuming it’s not in a zoo in the Serengeti)*
as well as:
- garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area*
Since the Serengeti is a managed National Park in Tanzania, the arguments about all zebra in the Serengeti being captive would be opposed here as well.
Which I believe applies to bison breeding and leaving the managed Yellowstone NP herd.
I think the debate over complex cases such as this, is the important thing, since it gets us all thinking about what truly is wild vs. captive, a debate which I do not think will ever be resolved by the way!
Then let us take this concept to the current argument about trees.
The first rule of iNat is “assume that people mean no harm”. Regardless, recategorization is not deletion.
Yes, because these are terms with many different interpretations in many contexts. Not so much, because these are terms with specific(ish) operational definitions in iNat and the vagueness of their meanings in the wider world is irrelevant to the iNat definitions. iNat’s definitions are not pointlessly arbitrary; they reflect an effort to maintain consistency in time series of observational data.
For what it’s worth, I don’t have a beef with @raymie’s project. There are many (many,many) herds of bison in North America and almost none of them are wild by the iNat definition. Getting those into the correct category is not “obnoxious”. That there are some very large instances that test the definition of captive/wild in iNat is interesting and useful for sharpening iNat’s definitions (to the extent that concerns about data integrity allow).
There is no unitary definition of wildness and the modern, Western conception of it as something beautiful and pure that exists beyond the borders of civilization is at 180 degrees from the Western generally accepted conception of wilderness that prevailed a couple of centuries ago. The notion that the world is separated into bits that are tainted by human involvement and those that are somehow more pure (in the modern consensus) or more dangerous (in the older sense of the term) is an artifact of the belief that humans are fundamentally different and apart from the natural world. That foolish conceit was led to all sorts of problems, of which squabbling on iNat is a minor example.
iNat needs to do a better job of explaining why the definitions exist. Seems to me that the unceasing stream of discussion about the meaning of wildness, some of it heated, testifies to the need to do something about both the communty’s understanding of the need for these defintitions and the way they influence data categorization.
The Serengeti isn’t fenced, the animals in it can leave.
I don’t know what this comment is referring to exactly.
I didn’t say they were arbitrary, but somewhat (by necessity) vague.
Good point, I’d lost sight that your point was the fencing/intention, not management or protection itself per se.
You can read any topic about planted trees if you’re interested in more arguments about weird stuff.)
In an effort to move towards some kind of consensus, I’ve created a survey to evaluate various criteria that could be used for determining wild vs. captive status on iNaturalist: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/survey-about-criteria-for-wild-captive-observations/27007
Understood. I mostly agree with what you had to say. I just think it’s important to keep the context - iNat’s definitions - clearly in focus. They exist for reasons that makes messing with them problematic. No definition is ever going to get rid of the essential fuzziness of the word wild and it’s important that the definitions we use remain constant if we don’t want to render the data useless.
A lot of useful concepts are, necessarily, vague. Consider definitions of species, for example, or gene. Basically, the less you know the easier these are to define. But we need these words and use them often. Similar problem/reality with wild vs. captive/cultivated.
(I’d mark the bison in Yellowstone and Wind Cave as wild.)
OK so I’m a very late comer to this conversation, but I feel this question goes much deeper. I did some heavy scrolling through bits of this, so if this has come up earlier I apologize. However, there are no true bison in SD that I’m aware of. If we dig down to mDNA, all the bison in SD are part bovine right? Sure they are bison, but still just a little bit cow. I studied wasps, so this is a bit or of a reach, but it seems to me, outside of Yellowstone, bison don’t exist. Perhaps there they are functionally extinct. But then again I can’t give a definition for a species that will make everyone happy… I say fences don’t matter, but DNA doesn’t lie.
It was brought up somewhere in those discussions, people also not really clear in their dna, so as long as species functions as it was before it doesn’t matter too much, plus this “foreign” dna will get less and less prominent with generations.
