Policy for unethical content?

[Jane Widness]

Is there official inat policy for observations that would be otherwise acceptable, but contain unethical elements?  I'm thinking in particular of "wildlife selfies", but there may be other use cases.  (See an example here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10624339).  Instagram, for example, recently changed some of their policies regarding wildlife selfies to make it harder to view them (see here).

[paloma]

I hate to see this kind of thing, and it's a big problem: see https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/15175-selfies-are-worst-thing-for-seal-pups-since-the-orca. If this becomes common on iNaturalist, I'm out of here.

[Charlie Hohn]

yeah one way or another it needs to either be flagged as inappropriate or the community needs to get the people to take the pictures down. I don't know the story with that particular picture and it doesn't look good but i am hoping the person just didn't know and took a photo with someone selling photos or whatever... education opportunity for them... they should still take the photo down.

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Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[Lincoln Durey]

I asked, we'll see.
We are of course all assuming they speak/read English ... can we determine from their settings what language we should write them in?  or is iNaturalist a Tardis, and she can read what i wrote no matter what?!

[Scott Loarie]

just my opinion, but posting observations isn't always the same as condoning the treatment/use of the animal subjects of the observation. For example, there's lots of bushmeat projects on iNat filled with pictures of poached/slaughtered/dead animals. I'd argue that these observations are useful/valuable for certain science questions related to biodiversity conservation but that they are not meant to be an endorsement of the bushmeat trade. 

For example, I snapped this obs https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/155540 of chameleons for sale in Marrakech because I thought they were interesting from a wildlife trafficking data perspective, not because I endorse their sale. 

How can you be sure that the person who posted https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10624339 wasn't also just trying to document this type of trafficking and not necessarily endorsing the treatment of the animal in the observation?

Best,

Scott

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 3:25 PM, Lincoln Durey <lincol...@gmail.com> wrote:

I asked, we'll see.
We are of course all assuming they speak/read English ... can we determine from their settings what language we should write them in?  or is iNaturalist a Tardis, and she can read what i wrote no matter what?!

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Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
San Francisco, CA 94118
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[bobby23]

At present, the community guidelines say nothing about observations of unethical animal treatment. The closest statement exclusively applies to hunted or injured animals, which is stated as follows: "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 don't like wildlife selfies as much as any of you do, and I think it would helpful to have some sort of marker that automatically "blurs" photos of disturbing observations. However, at present, the user is still abiding by the community guidelines.
Furthermore, I suggest we tread lightly as we go about defining what's "ethical" and "unethical" on iNaturalist. The loris' situation is unfortunate, but I've seen an observation of a wasp impailed on a fork solely for a photo, and no one pressed the user to take the observation down.
Furthermore, there are photographs of hunted game, bushmeat, roadside zoo animals, logged trees, skins, poached pachyderms, dogs raised for slaughter, and roadkill with their entrails falling out. All of these organisms have suffered, and all of these practices have been deemed unethical by people, including on iNaturalist. However, these are often western-based interpretations of ethical practice. Why are westerns authorities on ethical conduct? Is it right to exclude observations on "ethical" grounds when big game hunters still post pictures of their stags and bucks without so much as a scold?

[Charlie Hohn]

Seems really clear to me that the person in the photo was not trying to document trafficking the way you were Scott. They are clearly posing with the animal, I doubt they knew about the issues with doing so, my guess is someone approached them asking if they wanted a photo with it for a small amount of money and they probably did it without any awareness of harm. So I am not saying the person is malicious. but, I don't think they were aware of the issues either. 

I don't think we should blur images of dead animals, it's part of nature/culture and iNat. Maybe a tag for them so if people want to filter them out they can. And i think there are a lot of problematic issues with conolialist-centrist viewpoints but I don't think objecting to selfies with endangered animals really falls into that category, personally.

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[paloma]

My comment above was only directed to the issue of humans posing with animals, where the act of creating the photo is detrimental to the particular animal or its species.

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[Chris Cheatle]

One minor note Charlie, unless I am mistaken, while you can search for records that are missing an annotation, I dont think there is a way to search or filter for records that dont have a tag or dont have an observation field. So you could explicitly search for images that had this, but I'm not sure you could search in a way to exclude them. 

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[Charlie Hohn]

no, it would have to be an added feature. Not something I'm too concerned about, just saying i think it is a better alternative than blurring things

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[Alison Sheehey]

In relation to the photo in question. I have an awesome photo of a golden-mantled ground squirrel being fed by a visitor to Rocky Mountain National Park. I was not related to the fellow at all but the image did make its way to the rangers at the park since the behavior while widespread is totally illegal. I have not posted that image on iNat but if I did in order to document the species, what would be the best way to do it? Crop the guy out completely or post his bad behavior with an explanation of its illegality?

[Star Donovan]

Why not both? Crop him out, and in the description, mention that the photo was cropped and why it was cropped.