I saw a person described himself as “pro hunter” in profile.
Ive banned him, but there are others and the i can only ban 3 user.
What do you think about hunter accounts? Should it be forbidden in user rules etc.
I think they may use fraud projects to see hidden locations.
But more information required. Was he pro hunter in as ok to hunt animals, or is “hunter” some online thing I am not familiar with?
EDIT: re-reading your post, it seems like you’re actually referring to blocking other users, given you mention a 3 user limit; I thought you meant you were suspending them.
Regardless of what your, my, or other people’s opinions on hunting are, there is nothing in the iNaturalist terms + conditions/guidelines that says having ‘pro hunter’ in your bio is a suspendable offence, and that user (or any others) should not have been suspended on that basis
noting that users can’t just make a project at any time and suddenly immediately access hidden coordinates; this access still requires other users to not only actively join the project themselves, but to also then make a conscious decision to trust the project admin with their hidden coordinates.
You can ask to block more people as you come across them. 3 is supposed to be a ‘good’ number to cover most cases.
I tripped over an iNatter recently – proud photo of a fallen zebra with dead eyes, and their Look at ME rifle.
Three kinds of iNaturalist issues here.
If you want to be able to block more than three people, contact the help desk at iNaturalist and ask if that is possible.
Observations by people who hunt are accepted here on iNaturalist because they provide useful data points for scientists doing research.
The question of whether and how to hide the coordinates is complex. It’s been discussed on the forum before. It is possible for someone to set up a project supposedly for one purpose but actually to gather the true coordinates of observations. (Probably more of a problem with organisms that stay in one place, like mushrooms and certain plants than with the mammal species that people hunt.) That would probably best be dealt with by not clicking the button that allows the project administrators to see the coordinates. Default is that the coordinates remain hidden.
I’ve now seen many people expressing strong distaste for observations of observations of hunted or fished animals, and while I myself am generally pro-hunting/fishing, I don’t like how other users are having such a strongly negative experience with this site and the amount of complaints I’ve seen and the strength with which those complaints makes me want to see the exclusion system proposed here implemented sooner rather than later.
I bumped into this recently because I was experimenting with creating an automated slideshow of shark photos sourced from iNaturalist. First I wanted to exclude images of beached dead sharks which is fine since I can filter for just alive observations. But preferably I would also like to exclude photos of anglers holding the sharks they caught, so that the slideshow would for the most part only have living sharks in natural settings. But there’s no easy way to do that and I imagine it would be unlikely for anything like that to ever be realistically feasible. It would require an annotation/observation field and I doubt annotating every observation of an angled fish or hunted deer is something many people on iNat are interested in doing.
seems like an “in situ” annotation might be helpful.
My understanding is that many who hunt are conservationists, so I think for Curators to ban persons from a nature platform strictly on the basis of practicing something legal is a poor idea.
That said, anyone can block up to three users without explanation, is my understanding, so a user would be free to use their blocks on those with whom they disagree for personal reasons (and likely many do).
(I cannot comment on the projects location aspect as my understanding of projects is not full enough.)
Can you expand a little please? I don’t understand what the fraud is you are referring to??
I personally do not have a problem with pro-hunter accounts and there should be no forbidding such accounts - who is going to police it? That being said - a lot of people have ethical issues with hunting game or fishing but we can just easily say that collecting and euthanizing insects for study and identification (I honestly do not know how you are going to identify a tiny weevil under a microscope while it is still alive and crawling all over the place), falls in the same category - the animal (or fish, plant, opened gall - take your pick) being recorded here for posterity was alive and well and going about its business quite peaceably before some inatter interacted with it.
Hunting and fishing probably allow many users to see something which otherwise would never be seen, and that is a true benefit to us all(*). Can I see a bio of every scientist on this site and ban those that drill holes in the heads of live monkeys to understand how some or other lab created disease spreads, but who have a passion posting obs of wild orchids? Probably not, and neither should I want to. How others sleep at night is their problem, I’ve enough om my plate for the few flowers and loads of insects I’ve inadvertently damaged or stepped on.
All life is precious, but sometimes life is given to us. Possibly we can say that life that can be cleanly taken with gratitude, feeds a family something more healthy than overprocessed factory food and we can get an ob to boot, is maybe not a bad thing in of itself and we can maybe learn something from the person who might have spent days in the field to get that ob. I’ve met many professional hunters in my life who will never torture an animal and I have personally learnt a lot from pro’s as to how walk in the veld, interact with nature and how to avoid being a statistic of stupidity.
If you have evidence that the person in question have tortured, maimed or otherwise dealt with an animal in any way other than what can be described as a clean kill and have posted images of such deviant behavior (which would be unlawful in probably all countries) then by all means report those obs and the site should take them down (see Para 1 of the site Terms of use).
(*) I’ve taken a picture of a cuttlefish an unemployed subsistence fisherman caught, talking to him - that was his only food for 3 days. And that data point was very far in on the lagoon in question, I personally was not aware that cuttlefish go that far in so good data point.
Hunters and fishers should not be banned since you cannot tell if all the dead animals on iNat were deliberately killed for nefarious reasons. People can find information on what fish are stocked and where even without iNat. Some dead animals on this site were found dead.
As stated above, hunters and fishers tend to have an interest in conserving nature more. You cannot fish if their environments are polluted, the fish are unhealthy or there are none anymore. (Disclaimer: I fish for food, so I am biased).
Thanks for your concern, @salix-babylonica. I hear you, but people who hunt or fish are allowed on iNaturalist. I know people have strong and varied opinions about hunting, fishing, etc., but animals that have been hunted or fished are allowed on iNaturalist.
I think the major concerns here are whether this specific user is trying to get locations of animals to hunt via iNat. Well, anyone can get locations of any observation with open geoprivacy without logging in, so that can’t be prevented. Another concern would be someone soliciting/tricking users into divulging the locations of obscured/private observations, so that they can be hunted.
Regarding this specific user, salix-babylonica emailed us at iNat with more specifics and I don’t see any signs of the user doing that. And if they did, they make it clear in their profile that they like hunting, so I don’t see any deception involved. If someone is obviously using iNat to poach threatened species, that would be a different matter, but I don’t see that here.
Here’s another way to look at it. If a hunter is trying to be sneaky to gather some sort of hunter intel, would they openly disclose that they are a hunter in their profile? This is just my personal option, but if somebody says they are a hunter, I’m not concerned about their motives or them being sneaky about something.
Next, if people know that they would be banned for disclosing they’re a hunter, wouldn’t they simply stop disclosing it? What prevents them from setting up another email address and rejoining under a different user name? In the end, have we really accomplished anything by banning them?
Finally, this a very slippery slope that I don’t think iNat would want to go down. I’ll pose some rhetorical questions, those that don’t need to be answered, to explain what I mean about the slippery slope.
Do we ban all hunters? Those who hunt for food and trophy hunters? Is it fair or acceptable to ban those that are open about being hunters while ignoring those that aren’t open about it? What about people who fish, whether personally or commercially?
If we are going to ban hunters, where do we stop? Do we ban people in the pest control business? How about farmers who use pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids? Do we ban butchers and meat processors? Refinery workers? Scientists and researchers who are involved with animal testing?
In short, how do we decide which hobbies, pastimes, jobs, and careers we’ll allow and which we won’t allow?
Anyway … I suppose that’s the long way of saying we (meaning iNat) should be careful about opening Pandora’s box.
I’m not a hunter, but would a user using iNat to find where the species they intend to hunt are most likely found be disallowed? I don’t see how it could.
This is assuming they are in legally, publicly accessible areas which allow hunting and the user is doing it with proper regulations.
While I personally wouldn’t like this and would be annoyed, I think it would be smart and I can’t begrudge a user who does this and doesn’t understand the semantics.
EDIT: also, people could do this easily without anyone knowing, so of course it is allowed, but if one user were to be openly doing this, would they be discouraged? Granted, this could be easily done without an account, so my comment is more an interesting discussion than anything in reality.