Lack of clarity in community guidelines around animals killed by people

Curators
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Under “things that are OK” the community guidelines lists:

>Images of dead or dismembered animals. While we do not endorse killing or fatally injuring animals just for the sake of contributing to iNaturalist, as naturalists we all encounter such scenes in our explorations, for example in the form of road kill and recent predation events (including predation by humans). While these kinds of images can be disturbing for some people, they can also be interesting, and provide the same kind of scientifically relevant occurrence data as an image of a living creature. Very often they demonstrate some aspect of the life history of the organisms involved, or may even provide information relevant to the conservation of the organism in question.

I can see 3 ways to interpret this, from least to most restrictive:

1: “We don’t want to promote killing animals for the purpose of iNat posts, but if you decide to do this you can still post it” (based on “do not endorse” being different than “do not allow”)

2: “You can post observation of animals you killed so long as you had some other motive for killing it besides posting it” (seeing “do not endorse” as having the same meaning as “do not allow”)

3: “You can post animals killed by humans as long as you did not intentionally kill the animal for any reason” (seeing “as naturalists we all encounter such scenes in our explorations” as meaning dead animals are only allowed if you stumble upon them rather than kill them intentionally)

I’m wondering what the best way to handle flags for hunted animals is, normally I have been resolving them as hunted animals are clearly permitted in some manner, and even if 2 were correct motivation is impossible to know in most cases, so assuming others mean well would mean resolving the flag in the absence of specific evidence that posting to iNat was the motivation

However, some people see “not endorsed” and “not allowed” as synonymous, and this tends to lead to unproductive speculation around the observer’s motives, or people try to argue that 3 is correct and object to the flag resolution, in which case there is enough ambiguity in the current wording that I can’t really point to the community guidelines as definitive

I should also note that this usually comes up when someone flags a hunted mammal or sometimes a killed snake, whereas insects being killed for ID purposes is pretty normal and rarely generates any controversy, and banning the killing of insects for ID would have a pretty strong negative effect on data gathering

So I’m wondering if other curators have any ideas about how best to handle these, or if @tiwane or other staff can clarify the intended meaning here

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My interpretation is “You can post photos of dead or dismembered animals (however they got that way). Also, we don’t want you kill or dismember them to post on iNaturalist (but we can’t monitor that, so making that a rule would be foolish).”

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This has always been my interpretation too, but sometimes people challenge it and it is hard for me to definitively say the guidelines prove me right

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Is this after the closed thread about ‘gleefully killing a protected fox sp’ ?

Deliberately killing a protected sp is / should be against guidelines ?

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There has been a lot of discussion in other threads about how to handle observations of poaching and the conclusions have been that iNat cannot keep track of laws in each jurisdiction but anyone who comes across something they know to be illegal can report it to the relevant law enforcement.

When the fox incident happened I looked up the hunting regulations for the state it was in and it was open season for that species on the observation date, “state protected” in that state apparently does not mean a total hunting ban.

That said, this thread is not about protected species or unlawful acts, or about that incident, but about how curators should respond to hunted observations in general, as this is something I have encountered numerous times as a curator, and we really should not be bringing up closed threads about specific incidents here

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I personally don’t think the guidelines are unclear.

Saying “we don’t endorse thing A” is definitely not equal to “Thing A is not permitted,” and it requires some serious contortions of reasoning to get there in my opinion.

To endorse is to make a public statement of your approval or support for something or someone ( https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/endorse ).

Having iNat attempt to make guidelines based on local laws is essentially impossible, and I am glad that the guidelines don’t try to address this. An unenforceable guideline is often worse than none at all.

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Maybe a curator could explain that there is a vast treasure trove of scientific data provided by human harvesting, e.g. wet markets in tropical countries.

We don’t want to lose this data.

So whether we are philosophically opposed or not, we do want to be open to capturing important observations, regardless of their provenance.

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Not sure I have anything to add to what @cthawley said, but I guess I’ll reiterate it. Photos of animals killed by people are not prohibited. If they were prohibited, that would be explicitly stated. What we don’t want to do is encourage people to kill animals with the motivation of making observations for iNat. I suspect all or nearly all of the trophy photos on iNat were by people who were hutning anyway and posting to iNat is not a primary motivation.Now, if someone was posting a bunch of observations of animals they killed for iNat in some attempt to troll, that might be a different story and would require some investigation.

FWIW, the Community Guidelines page links to the 2017 community discussion about the proposed guidelines, and kueda explicity says we’re not making a statement for or against hunting and related legal activities.

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I would suggest to iNatters like me - block those iNatters whose images disturb you.

And ask tiwane to let us block more than 3, if our taxon / location has a hunting / poaching issue ?