Report Unhealthy Animal Feature [DONE] [#1197]

I know this is an odd feature to have, but I feel like it would protect some newbies from getting bad animals. A feature to report obviously unhealthy animals (obese, underweight, injuries that show in the photo but aren’t stated, kinks) or anything else that could qualify as unhealthy. I have seen obese snakes, extremely underweight leopard geckos, and many other things that I feel should be kept from being sold so the sellers don’t continue to mistreat animals.

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Agreed- I can see that feature getting abused, though, so I’m not certain how one would go about it. Like if multiple people report the same animal, or maybe a limit to how often someone can flag posts, so they choose carefully which to flag?

But I have seen a couple examples where the animal looked to be in extremely poor condition. And in those cases, there’s got to be some way to stop those sellers.

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As @mblaney said, it is a really good idea but it would definitely get abused. People are harsh and will spend their whole day reporting any and every animal that a competitor or breeder they don’t like has listed.

John would then have to make a decision… " Do I trust the user and delete the ad, or do I trust the breeder and keep the ad up?"… The only fair way to do that would be to check each and every report individually. That’s would take a lot of time to sort through and would require John to know the healthy proportions of each species.

I think the best thing to do if you see a unhealthy animal is to document it.
Screenshot that listing, check out their other animals, go too their Instagram/FB and see if you can find why they look so unhealthy.
If you still believe these animals are not being cared for properly, then reach out to them and maybe try and help or contact the local wildlife charities in their area and ask them to look into it.

Again it is a really good suggestions that would undoubtedly save a lot of newcomers a lot of heartache but I can’t see how it can be done both fairly and efficiently.

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Hi guys, this is already a feature:

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Technically it says for just Scam or Spam, and we should add “or other TOS violation” which includes unhealthy animals.

That being said, as eagle mentioned, it can be tricky. People flag stuff all the time which is borderline or even not unhealthy. We’ve had some supposed kinks be reported which are clearly just shadows or other photo effects.

The challenge is it’s a subjective thing. We lean toward a free market and to let the buyer judge for themselves, but if it looks bad go ahead and report and we’ll take a look. We DO remove stuff on a regular basis for this reason, and the only way we see it is if it gets reported.

In the future this “report” feature will let you choose why you are reporting it, and it will become more clear.

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I am expanding the “report” instructions to:

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Aside from the correct fear of abuse of the function, I worry that some might misuse it out of lack of knowledge.

I am thinking about things like imports/WC that are often offered in the smaller subsections. These animals are very frequently going to sport scars and such from having lived the wild life. People who are familiar with and capable of taking on WC animals will look beyond these things knowing where they come from but newbies or people just unfamiliar with WC animals (or hardcore anti-import people) might be inclined to report the animals inappropriately. “Heart in the right place but head in the wrong” type of thing

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