That's not pedantic. Farm minks aren't wild animals, period. They're domesticated.

I was wondering about this. Because yeah these minks don't grow up in the wild, but at the same time, domestication is an actual evolutionary process. So can they be considered domesticated just because they were raised in a cage?

> So can they be considered domesticated just because they were raised in a cage?

Yes, most definitely. Over many generations. They're the same species as wild minks, but domesticated (just as dogs are same species as wolves, but domesticated).

And the scientific community agrees. For example, see this paper: https://bioone.org/journals/wildlife-biology/volume-15/issue...

It's true that they've not been domesticated as long as dogs, for example, but there are clear morphological differences between the two.

Most importantly for our conversation, infectious diseases can behave very differently in wild and domestic populations, for reasons of population density, immune status, etc.

while immune systems in domestic and wild animals can vary, my point was that the source of infection was more likely human caretakers. Chances of a wild mink catching covid from an infected human are probably lower than getting hit by lighting 10 times in a row

Quite, also they're definitely downstream of human hosts. The comment that was replied to was implicitly talking about strains in wild animals that could have been the source of the whole malaise.

exactly. there were also reports of zoo animals catching covid, but no animal infected with the virus was ever found in the wild. at this time, it does not look like institutional narrative of covid being purely zoonotic was ever backed by evidence.