As far as I am concerned, it is not a matter of “gore”.
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What if they also eat the animal they’ve killed? Or it’s killed only for food? Does that make a difference? And how would you identify those killed just for sport? I’m really not seeing how this would be practically implemented.
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I have in the past accompanied an in-law on a sport-fishing boat trip. I was uninterested in participating in the fishing, and to me, killing other animals for sport is self-indulgent and cruel, but at least I was able to make some observations of some of the fishes caught. I felt it was more respectful to record them than not, but others may disagree. I have also photographed the quarry of bushmeat hunters in West Africa. Again, I might not condone their actions, but the records can be useful and interesting for research, and might in some small way help those species in the future.
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If I’m the one doing the annotating as Dead, that doesn’t help me to avoid seeing them.
I see a section in the Filters page for “Description/Tags,” but I do not see an option to exclude a given tag in that way. If this involves using the URLs, it isn’t intuitive how to do it.
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No but I am doing for the next one.
Hoping that one day iNat will make a personal setting for iNatters who want to see their biodiversity alive.
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I will say that where I’m from killing for sport is not common, fishing is typically either catch and release or the fish are eaten, and hunters eat their kill. And these activities are regulated to prevent over-harvest.
I don’t really think iNat should try to make moral judgments about when hunting is or isn’t OK, iNat should just be documenting the organisms people find
Now, if people are killing things for the purpose of uploading, I could see that being prohibited, as that would be an objective ecological impact caused by iNat.
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I dont think that we can, or should, be protected from being disturbed by awareness of the practices and neglect in the world, but the distress it causes is occasionally an issue for me. Carcasses havent been a problem for me so far, but a photo of a live bird, parrot I think, on a perch in a shop, chained to a metal ring in its breastbone, was very disturbing, and made me realise how unaware I am of most of the world.
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“Out of sight, out of mind” only denies the existence of their lives.
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But even then, I could potentially see cases where killing an organism specifically for ID would make sense in context - like an entomologist working on a group that requires dissection to study and ID properly.
Though, I acknowledge that this is probably almost never the case for more charismatic animals like mammals or birds/reptiles. We’re long past the days when Ornithologists shot every bird they saw to skin it and study it.
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As someone with a strong commitment to conservation, I fish for tilapia in a freshwater lake where I live. Tilapia are an invasive pest species at this location. They pose a threat to native fish and predate invertebrates. I humanely kill them when I catch them (it is an offence to release them alive). I have posted images of tilapia on iNaturalist. I think the same logic would apply to terrestrial invasive pest species, as long as the suffering of these animals is minimised.
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That brings up the issue of many species of insects that have to be collected to be ID’d, or the plants and fungus that have to be dissected to be ID’d.
I would vote against that prohibition.
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There are certain species of fish in some areas where if you catch them, you are required to kill them by law. Asian Carp is a big one that comes to mind.
They’re so bad in the Mississippi that the Chicago canal literally has an electric fence to keep them out of the great lakes
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@neylon @lothlin I really should have worded that better, given that I deal with insects like that myself. I was thinking of some sort of extreme case where someone is shooting vertebrates that are protected, out of season, or in numbers in excess of the bag limit, specifically for the purpose of posting to iNat
I too would strongly oppose a ban on killing insects for observation, then I would have to take down my suspected Leptothorax retractus range extension
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That would be an interesting situation and hopefully a very rare one. The iNat record could become evidence in a criminal case against that individual. I wonder how iNat staff would deal with that person and their record if they in fact broke the law and documented their crime in their posted record.
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Honestly I kind of wondered, given the username 
I feel like going out and shooting vertebrates without a hunting license, especially rare ones and not species considered pest animals, is a reportable criminal offense.
(to be clear, I’m perfectly fine letting the racoons and squirrels live their best lives, but I also know that there are plenty of people that keep their BB guns handy in the country)
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I don’t agree with the idea that graphic observations should be taken down. The fact that something was killed in some way can be an important data point for that observation. Personally graphic images of nature don’t really bother me but I can see how they can bother some people, so I try to put a trigger warning as the first image of things like roadkill animals (like in the below observation). But I don’t think there is really any system that could work perfectly even if it was really a problem. I kind of like the idea of having an option to blur the thumbnail if its marked as dead or graphic like on reddit but that would still entirely require self policing.
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For what it’s worth, I just did a search for the iNat username posted on the OP’s forum profile and came up with nothing. The OP posted a demand and, judging from the tone and general nature of the post, is not interested in what anybody else thinks. Not sure why this continues to consume bandwidth.
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I respect how you feel but I don’t think your point is valid here. For one, if you are referring to Apple’s “objectionable content clause”, I don’t see it applying to iNaturalist; it’s meant to target content encouraging violence or abuse. iNaturalist does not fall under that, as it hosts both living and dead animal observations for the purpose of public driven research.
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I don’t enjoy looking at pictures of dead animals but I do so for the purpose of my research. For example, plotting the sites with dead migratory birds with iNat data helps me visualize where the “high-risk” areas in my city are. Having this information can prevent future mortality cases once these zones and their subsequent features are identified.
I hope you can see that there is value in these observations and users aren’t simply just posting this type of content to be upsetting.
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@areyouserious it looks like you just joined iNat, and I’m sorry you came across an image you found disturbing. As others here have said, posting photos of dead animals to iNaturalist is OK, and everyone’s threshold of what they find disturbing varies widely. I think most of us don’t like seeing dead organisms, particularly gory ones or images that show an animal exploited or in pain.
It seems like your main ask is that there be some way to flag an image or observation in the mobile app, correct? If so, that’s definitely functionality we hope to add, but I can’t estimate when that will be, I’m sorry.
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