Any way to block hunted animal posts from identify page or hide users completely from my feed?

General
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Hi all, I searched and could not quite find an answer to my multi part question.

I currently only see the option to post “dead” in annotations. I know hunted animals are allowed to be posted, but I prefer not to have to look at them. There is a new user who has filled half of my identify pages with all of his trophies. So, instead of providing IDs to birding observations, window strike victims, etc, I am stuck sorting through selfies smiling with animals they killed for fun.

Shouldn’t there be a way to annotate hunter posts? If these posts are valuable for research, wouldn’t it make sense to be able to filter by hunted animals anyway?

I would prefer to hide this person and hunted animals altogether, but I don’t see anything in this system or search details that allow me to do so. What would be the best way to go about this?

Final question, do hunters often use inaturalist to find animals to kill? I don’t want my duck observations to be used to seek out and shoot literal sitting ducks.

Edit: Since this was closed before I was back to respond to many helpful and some ridiculous comments, I would like to say one thing regarding thunderhead’s comment bringing up vegetarians/vegans killing (that no one mentioned except you): You are walking down the street. On one side, someone is walking on the grass. On the other side someone is stomping on a puppy. Do you stop either of them? Are they the same?

If you want to make this a meat eater issue, you would have to reckon with this strawman you created as well as the fact that most mammals and birds on the planet are in factory farms and most plants farmed go to feeding them. If everyone then turned to hunting, the wilds would be extinct in about a week. If that. Just like sport hunting has done in the past (and sometimes present.) Both suck, but no one is posting slaughterhouse images to my feed so I did not address that in my post. The repeated assertion that hunters do not kill for fun is interesting. If they are so sad, and none of them take trophies, why are they all smiling while holding up the heads of x point bucks and their piles of dead waterfowl? Don’t get me started on the lead ammo bans that they fight despite driving multiple scavenging endangered species to extinction and the introduction of domesticated non native species for sport killing.

Calling yourself a naturalist and then getting upset when people don’t approve of needlessly killing animals for enjoyment on an ever dying planet is certainly a hot take… Hunting isn’t even near the top of my list of animal issues I care to focus on, but it’s thrust in my face constantly in nature circles, and even people who aren’t into it feel forced to support it due to SGLs, so I repeatedly have to address my audacity to want to NOT do harm when possible and NOT have to watch others do it.

Re the comments about hunters being good at bird ID- maybe some are, but I have run into MULTIPLE while birding who have told me with the utmost assurance that the goose I was watching was (completely incorrect species) and they know because they kill them in hunts. Not saying that is the norm, but it is certainly a problem and showed me an issue of accidental poaching that I didn’t even know was a thing.

Re the person asking who the user was, I actually discovered after this it was more than one that joined- an unlucky day.

Anyway, thanks for making my first post on this site both irritating and helpful. The latter folks know who you are, I thank you for your assistance and understanding of my position. I am sure if I ran into any of you in the wild, whether we disagree or not, we could look through some binoculars together and appreciate someone out there living their best life.

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Is it mostly this one user or do you see lots of hunt photos from many users? If it’s only this user and your block list isn’t full, I’d suggest blocking him.

Unfortunately I don’t think, in practice, adding an annotation field for this will be effective if you want to avoid seeing hunted photos while IDing stuff. Many users don’t annotate their own stuff (not least of which because there doesn’t seem to be a good way to do so in the upload UI) and by IDing stuff, you’re more likely to see observations that no one else has seen and annotated yet. I myself ID mostly trees, which results in seeing a lot of planted trees. I don’t have a good solution to this. I’m sorry.

Regarding your last question, I’ve never gone hunting (noise and weight of guns is a bad sensory experience for my autism, and I don’t like getting up early), but I googled and I found some materials suggesting that hunters may use eBird to find locations where certain species have previously been reported. I did not find anything suggesting that hunters use iNaturalist for similar purposes.

https://projectupland.com/traveling/tips-for-out-of-state-bird-hunting/

The eBird people also seem to want to get hunters engaged in uploading information to eBird:

https://ebird.org/atlasnc/about/hunters

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/powering-a-new-era-of-conservation/

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You can exclude users from your Identity pages. See the tools here:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki-part-2/18792#heading--exclude

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If your - can only block 3 people - list is full. You could ask to add one more, for this good reason. I certainly don’t want to see a gleeful hunter among my Waiting for an ID. (I would prefer to be able to flag the gleeful smile. iNat only needs the dead animal, not the … hunter)

Not sure if muting them will achieve your Unsee purpose ? Muting is unlimited.

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Most hunters can already identify several species of birds – Wild Turkey, American Woodcock, Northern Bobwhite, Eastern Bluebird, Cardinal and several others including ducks, owl, and hawks

But - if hunters don’t know what that bird is - how do they avoid a protected sp ?

(Cornell site is down due to Cloudflare outage ?)

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Most observations are not annotated, especially when they are still at Needs ID status, so there is no realistic way to rule out hunted observations. But you can set the search parameters to exclude specified users from your search in identify. You can also block up to 3 people for any reason, which will prevent their obs showing up in identify

Any observation of a victim of predation can be annotated as “Interaction->Preyed upon by” which then prompts you to enter the species of the predator. In this case the predator is Homo sapiens

BTW Not all hunters “kill for fun”, at least where I am from hunters eat what they kill, generally speaking

As for the use of iNat for finding hunting targets, I do not know about this in the context of legal hunting, but I know poachers use it to find rare species (hence obscuring) and as an angler I find recent observations very useful in spring for determining which waters have warmed up enough to have fish activity, and will occasionally use the map to confirm the presence of a given fish species in a waterway, so I can see hunters doing similar.

I obscure any fish observations of a size or species that I think will attract others, so as not to lead the entire internet to my fishing spots, and I suggest doing similar with animals popular with hunters

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Do you really want to turn this into a #notallhunters hunting debate? The vast majority do it because they enjoy it. They consider it a fun sport to kill animals. Whether or not they eat them does not change that.

Treating hunters like magical nature fairies who just sacrifice themselves to (unsuccessfully) balance the ecosystem and get food is a very successful rebranding campaign but not one I fall for. I’m not into having to worry if my contributions to citizen science will be used to kill the animals I report nor am I into trophy photos even if they eat the carcass afterwards.

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No I don’t intend to turn this into a debate, that was one line in a comment that was primarily about how to avoid seeing observations you don’t want to see, and I suggested to obscure observations that would be targets of hunters

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There is blocking and muting and filtering your feed.
Better off just stating your question without the opinions on hunters, because NOT ALL HUNTERS, indeed.

I’ve heard more stories of plant damage and outright theft of plants and/or seeds., than animal hunting from iNat posts. Hunters have specific legal hunting areas, they know when and where without iNat help.

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No reason why they shouldn’t frame their question around hunting trophies. That IS their question. Eating the evidence, or not, is not the issue.

Plants however is off-topic for this question. And I live in South Africa where poaching of succulents in the Northern Cape is a catastrophe.

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I’m out of this conversation as the stated opinions from posters seem to lean towards hunters “kill for the joy of killing.” I’m betting they aren’t all vegetarians, and hey, even vegans kill their food first.

Blocking and filtering is what they can do. Maybe I’ll try to find these and mark them dead.

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I did some looking around and think I may have found who you are referring to. Lower Lake Erie region? If so, only 4 of their 10 obs. posted yesterday are of hunted game… I think blocking and muting would be most beneficial for you.

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Please avoid discussing the morality of hunting and posting observations of hunted animals on iNaturalist here - it isn’t critical to answering the OP’s question. People’s motivations for hunting are also not central to answering the OP’s questions. Threads which have addressed these issues in the past have become acrimonious and have been closed. Staff have noted repeatedly that observations of hunted animals are allowed on iNat.

Please focus on ways to avoid seeing observations of hunted animals. The main ways (filtering against annotations of Dead, using URL’s to filter observations from specific users) have already been mentioned.

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That was started by the statement in the original posting, that person’s opinion on the joy of killing. Unnecessary.

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You can upload your obs later, when the ducks have moved on. As I did with this after-fire orchid.

(Edited - back on-topic)

What I did when the West African fishing project filled my bookmarked URL with pages of dead sea animals - was to filter out that project - skim for turtles, and other, ID as ‘fish’. And on bad days - Mark this page as Reviewed - and move on. Definitely useful scientific data but more than a few is hard to work thru for me. I pass on the baton …

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OPs opinions can be framed in a post as an inquiry but the ones who respond are vetted?

Additional details aside from the question are equally inappropriate then, no? Especially if my assumption on who this individual is and their 4 hunted obs

is correct?

Edit: I dont feel I’m continuing the discussion on the morality of hunting or its place on INat at all. Rather questioning how posting opinions/biases in the topic is any different than within the responses, I felt @cthawley comment was geared towards those responding so I’d like to know.

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I’m going to close this topic as the question has been answered and there was a continuation of the discussion that @cthawley already asked to end.

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