SO familiar with this one! My stepdad doesn’t like meat much (says the flavor is too strong) and most of his meat consumption is packaged lunch meat and chicken. He doesn’t want to handle raw meat of any kind, and says he tries not to think about where the chicken came from. When my mom kills a rooster to eat, which happens every few years or so, he refuses to eat it even though it was much healthier than any store-bought chicken. Same with the roadkill deer. Extremely annoying!
5 Likes
It’s the same “nature disconnect” that I believe iNat was created to try and address… or at least that’s my interpretation of the iNat mission :)
2 Likes
One good (and a bit surprising) thing is he will bring home any roadkill deer he finds, and sometimes even help butcher them, although he doesn’t like to - he just won’t eat any of it!
1 Like
Can it be a question asked on signup? So that new iNatters know it is a possibility.
3 Likes
Hey folks, please keep the discussion on topic. :-)
Also, please remember that this is a place for constructive discussions. If you feel the urge to say the same thing that has been said by several others, just use the like button rather than making a new comment.
This is currently all hypothetical, so I suppose it’s possible. But I personally don’t think it should be, there’s already enough to get a across. If implemented, might be best if it’s an opt-out - a user sees the warning graphic, clicks on it, sees a pop-up and makes a choice.
9 Likes
Moths should always be at level “9” 
1 Like
I thought he was referring to me! Which he probably was. Your posts were not off topic at all.
1 Like
Good discussion. I have sometimes used a dummy/warning main image for roadkill observations (examples 1, 2, 3), and have wondered if it might affect the machine-learning process (although I expect one image gets drowned out pretty quickly). I would probably opt out of programmatic blurring/replacement of dead animal photos if given the choice, but I can certainly see both sides.
1 Like
Constructively speaking, this is the biggest underlying problem with any of the efforts suggested in this thread- the limitation of the amount of existing annotation data used to enact any of these filtering strategies. The manual addition of an annotation to each record is the highest hurdle.
So, how do we develop a focused effort to find and label the dead (or, at least “objectionally dead”) organism records? In the past, I have tried to skim through un-annotated vertebrates (likely the biggest source of squeamishness for a lot of people), but my hit rate was so low in that context that it got a little too boring to continue. Does anyone have suggestions for getting to those in a little better way? (edit: I spawned a wiki for those.)
Meanwhile (warning @mamestraconfigurata , moth-related content ;) ), as I have been annotating Lepidoptera life stages, I have realized that seeing specimens with pins through them (related topic) gives me a negative reaction. I’ve recently added marking them “dead” to my workflow and it’s very satisfying to know I can “make them go away” if I want to filter them out later.
It’s not a specific recommendation for others to do this (high-volume annotation may be an unusual activity), but I’m bringing it up to illustrate that if anyone is inclined that way, there is a “payoff” to adding =dead to one’s annotation workflow. Even if you are not bothered, you will be helping some other user(s).
12 Likes
Thank you - I closed my eyes when I read this!!
2 Likes
@lotteryd, I would not mark pinned specimens as dead because usually the observation should come along with the date (and time) of capture, reflecting the moment when the specimen was collected at which point it was alive. Marking them as dead suggests that the date information should not be used for studying things such as phenology for example. If the date (or the location) does not reflect the moment of collection, well, that is another story and the observation should be made casual in some way. For an observation that is not casual, I understand “dead” as meaning dead at the time of the observation/collection.
5 Likes
I totally understand your concern for having the correct metadata for specimens! From prior discussions of ways people have proposed to avoid seeing death at iNat, I would still argue in favor of the =Dead annotation on a collection item’s photo set, as long as that dead state is what the photos in the record actually show.
To importantly preserve the concept of having collected the specimen while alive, maybe an Observation Field could carry that datum? Something appropriate might even already exist in the large list of fields. Might any entomologists be able to give advice on how best to do a separate but suitable annotation via observation field?
I realize that my opinion here is in direct contradiction to tiwane’s earlier advice in a prior thread, but then again higher up in the present thread, he describes a shift in thinking ( @tiwane if any additional ontopic remarks).
5 Likes
Seems to me that insects with pins through them are dead and probably were soon after capture. Although I wouldn’t bother, it seems to me that there’s nothing wrong with marking them dead.
8 Likes
If the consensus were to be that there would be something wrong with it, and collected specimens should be annotated =Alive if alive at capture (though not at photograph stage), then I would argue for using an Observation Field like “killed by” =humans (where the collector is human).
It would be harder for users to know to filter that out, but it could be a workaround for the squeamish.
3 Likes
I think this is a great question, and I don’t really have an answer. I would think that there wouldn’t be any defined responsibility, just as there isn’t a responsibility to take the time to ID anything on iNat. I think the idea is that it would be a community effort, and any tagging or annotating of observations would constitute progress. I think the more objectionable an observation is, the more likely it would get tagged, analogous to how flagging works with inappropriate content.
2 Likes
What you should think of is an object of observation have to be on each photo, we’re not iding other observations if they don’t fit the criteria, a picture without any organisms at all shouldn’t be in observation, try modifying existing photo instead.
1 Like
I feel similarly with pinned insects - the only information we have to go on is what the photo shows. The insect may have been alive when it was captured, but if it is pinned (and spread) it is dead. I have comment about degrees of death, but not for here!
7 Likes
Like a stone effigy of a knight on a sarcophagus, a pinned insect is clearly dead on the photo. Those pictures stand out among the many which are clearly alive (or even blurred in movement)
3 Likes
I would also like to add that I have yet to come across a photo that is wildly ‘gross’. I have yet to see a corpse with it’s guts ripped out and maggots, etc. Dead things, yes - but not ripped up dead things. FWIW
Annotations should be added about interaction with insects, so pinned ones were alive when a person met them and should be annotated as alive. But pinned insects are far from being disturbing, they’re the most whole bodies imaginable, while some squished but alive ones give more unpleasant feelings. It opens a question that really annotating doesn’t solve a problem of what can make a person feel bad.
1 Like