Abstract

When applied to non-human animals,'wild' is a poorly defined concept despite its central role in conservation, wildlife management, and environmental policy. Numerous attempts have been made to define wildness, yet the distinction between 'wild' and 'non-wild' remains contested and inconsistently applied across disciplines and legal frameworks. A shared, empirically grounded understanding of wildness would strengthen cross-disciplinary communication, support more consistent policy and legislation, and clarify how wildness shapes human attitudes toward wildlife and nature. Here, we took a quantitative, data-driven approach to assess whether a shared understanding of wildness in animals exists within the research community. A total of 358 professionals from fields including Animal Ecology, Animal Behaviour, Conservation, and Wildlife Management completed an online survey comprising 44 wildness-related statements along established measures of attitude and acceptability toward wildlife (AATW) and nature-relatedness (NRS). Exploratory Factor Analysis revealed six components (19 statements) in the concept of 'wild': Human-mediated animal availability, Urbanisation, Independence of animals from humans, Human-wildlife perceived conflict, Individual history of wildness, and Feralisation. These factors were weakly to moderately intercorrelated, together explaining 43.91% of the variance. Mediation analysis further demonstrated that Urbanisation and Human-wildlife perceived conflict shape humans' nature-relatedness by influencing attitudes and acceptability toward wildlife. The respondents' demographic and professional backgrounds also influenced their conceptualisation of wildness. These findings suggest that while there is a shared latent structure of wildness across professional fields, it is multidimensional, with implications for developing working definitions applicable across research, policy, and practice.