I wish I'd phrased it better, my point was more that early vision systems had weird issues, which we were able to figure out by looking at what part of the image those models paid attention to and realising it often wasn't even part of the animal in the photo, but e.g. the plants around them. We literally had to think about what made a cat a cat to make AI good at recognising cats.

This would also impact clustering.

That said, I think even for humans there's a similar issue: we spent millennia clustering things into groups and labelling those groups, which is why the Catholic church had rules about no meat on Good Friday but fish was fine and beavers counted as fish (and there is now a podcast titled around the idea there is no such thing as a fish*). For cats, I don't see it myself but the fossa is described as "cat-like".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish#Title