Putting a Stop to Pay-Per-View and Pay-to-Kill Hunting

People who hunt often speak about their own ethical standards--ensuring, for example, that animals have a sporting chance and a fair opportunity to escape their pursuer. It's not the killing that matters, many say, but the tracking of wildlife in the outdoors, the thrill of the chase, and the matching of wits between predator and prey.

Sadly, there are some outliers in the hunting fraternity who lack either the skill or the inclination to follow these self-professed standards. So they take shortcuts--using money, technology, a rigged setting, and whatever means necessary to skew the advantage so that the hunter has guaranteed success and the hunted has the same chance as the proverbial fish in the barrel.

That's why public policy reforms are necessary to curb the worst abuses. And it doesn't get much worse than logging onto a web site, paying an Internet fee with your credit card, and shooting a confined animal thousands of miles away. Just click your mouse or hit a few strokes on your keyboard to fire the remote-controlled weapon, all while sitting in your bedroom wearing camouflage pajamas.

What if you want to leave the bedroom and gun down the creature yourself, but you just don't have much time to spare between three-martini lunches? Find a drive-thru safari near your house, choose a giraffe or zebra from the menu, and have the animal stocked in a pen for your shooting pleasure. The animals are hand-fed and wouldn't run from people, even if they could get beyond the fence line. Proprietors of these so-called canned hunts are so sure of your success that you won't even have to pay a dime unless you head home with the trophy and bragging rights in tow. 

A new bipartisan bill in Congress seeks to crack down on these extreme practices: H.R. 2308, the Sportsmanship in Hunting Act, introduced by Reps. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), and Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), would ban the remote shooting of live animals over the Internet and the trophy shooting of exotic mammals held captive inside fenced enclosures. It's hard to imagine anyone opposing such a common-sense reform, since rank-and-file hunters agree that these practices are abusive and unacceptable, and have nothing to do with hunting. 

But we can expect to hear the same old tired arguments from some hunting industry lobbying groups on Capitol Hill, like the National Rifle Association, Safari Club International, and U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, who've never met a type of animal mistreatment they won't defend. These are the same groups that have defended puppy mills, poaching, and the killing of endangered species--and even tried to shoot down HSUS programs to protect pets from the foreclosure crisis. They will try to obfuscate the issue of captive killing, and trot out bromides about the need to leave wildlife management decisions to the states, or this bill being the first step to end all hunting and gun ownership.

About half the states have banned or restricted canned hunts, and more than two-thirds of states have banned Internet hunting since a Texas entrepreneur launched the first pay-per-view snuff site in 2005. Far from being a slippery slope, hunting is still alive and well without canned hunts in Montana and Wyoming, and without Internet hunting in Idaho and Nebraska. But while the states are doing their part, a federal response is critically needed to address the interstate trafficking in exotic animals for canned hunts, and hunting over the Internet which is not confined to any state's borders. The goal is to dry up the supply of blackbuck antelope and aoudad sheep being trucked to shooting galleries around the country, and to make sure no state becomes a refuge for the next Internet hunting web site.

So the real question is whether shooting an African animal trapped in the corner of a Texas fence is really hunting at all, or is it something else entirely--something quite different that is masquerading as hunting? Outdoor writer and hunter Ted Kerasote answers this way: "Wildlife is not livestock. The problem comes when people are supposedly hunting these animals. That's the problem right there." Kerasote says captive hunts are turning hunting "into this caged, paid affair and it bears no resemblance to what hunting is, was, and could be. Like so many things in our world, people want to buy the product (the trophy) rather than experience the process (meeting the animal on its own terrain)."

David Petersen, another lifelong hunter and author, puts it a bit more bluntly: "To be scrupulously fair, not all canned killers are 'perverts'; some are merely profanely vainglorious and staggeringly stupid."

Ask your members of Congress to support the Sportsmanship in Hunting Act, which should be a consensus position for hunting advocates and animal advocates alike.

Comments

[ontothem]

This is just another example of what the HSUS is so good at: distorting the facts, replacing facts with emotions and misleading the public.
http://www.vidoosh.tv/play.php?vid=4360
The video the HSUS does not want you to see.
It's all about the money!

[Phillip Loughlin]

Personally, I couldn't care less if a federal law is passed to ban the practice (as long as the law is specific and only affects internet hunting operations like Lockwood's). At the same time, I think it's a foolish and pointless waste of time and money, because it's a law that prohibits a practice that no one practices. It wouldn't be the first or last time the Feds have passed a ridiculous law.

Internet hunting was stillborn from the moment John Lockwood first started to publicize his project. While HSUS and PETA were still mustering their righteous indignation, the hunting community rose up against it and shut it down before the first customer ever even got to log in, and 34 states have banned it since then.

At this point, the whole spectre of "Internet Hunting" is nothing more than a straw-man, used by groups like HSUS to vilify hunting. It's one more negative stereotype that makes the non-hunting public think hunters are nothing more than "bloodthirsty murderers" (as Cleveland Amory once called us).

[jakk]

Phillip commented:

"It's one more negative stereotype that makes the non-hunting public think hunters are nothing more than "bloodthirsty murderers"

I can see how from the viewpoint of a hunter, this characterization would be angering and frustrating. I know many hunters say that they hunt for meat and that's it.

I would argue that the innate act of killing an animal for fun (even if that animal is then eaten) is what contributes more to what non-hunters will think.

When I say "fun" I mean to say that I have yet to meet a hunter, even one who eats everything he or she hunts, who wasn't champing at the bit to go out and shoot, who didn't see hunting as a personal right, challenge, and pastime activity. As such, it is a sport, irrespective of how the product of that sport is used.

In my personal experience, I have never -- (although I hate to use absolutes) -- talked to or met a hunter who admits to great reluctance and pain upon having to go out and shoot an animal.

So as a form of sport which entails killing and sometimes maiming, hunting is going to be subject to these perceptions. Any hunters I've known who've stopped having fun at hunting, have stopped hunting.

(That's not to say that I see modern abattoirs as any better, for the record. Some of us don't eat animals for a reason.)

[Phillip Loughlin]

Point well taken... hunters hunt because we want to, not because we have to.

But the fact that we hunt for sport does not mean we're psychotic or bloodthirsty. That is a false characterization perpetrated by anti-hunting organizations like HSUS and PETA to generate support for their agenda.

We HUNT for fun. We do not KILL for fun.

Your point that you haven't found a hunter who admits any kind of remorse or guilt for killing animals is not really indicative of anything. I'd be willing to say that you don't find any who glory in the death they've caused either. Sure, they may be proud of a good shot and a clean kill, or of a well-played stalk, but actually taking a life is not a point of pride or joy. It's a necessary part of the event.

By the way, if you should talk to a hunter who made a poor shot, or maimed and lost an animal, you will almost always find a lot of remorse and self-recrimination. We don't take it lightly, no matter how it may appear to those outside the community.

The rest of the discussion, the judgement of Right and Wrong, is all subjective. Hunters believe it's fine to hunt and kill within certain parameters. Anti-hunters do not. May as well have a face off between Baptists and Catholics and see who's "right".

[jcmw]

Can someone please give one example of where internet hunting actually exists? I think this is a fairy tale! How is this article even credible? Banning something that does not exist is a waste of federal funds we already have too little of... Why not use those funds to protect animals that are in real danger? That would not get as much press?

[jakk]

"Can someone please give one example of where internet hunting actually exists?"

I wondered about that. I hadn't heard of any such operations in the recent years. I found that last year, Utah passed a similar state measure to essentially preempt this type of hunting -- an "ounce of prevention" one editorial called it. Maybe that's the intent. But I agree it's not stated as such in this article and is thus misleading to those who may not know the history of the Internet hunting issue.

I say this even as a supporter of HSUS. I don't know where many animal cruelty issues would stand today were it not for groups like HSUS. In other words I make that critique of Markarian's article from the standpoint of someone who would like to support his contentions -- but who finds the use of Internet hunting to be somewhat manipulative.

Frankly, I've been around a lot of hunting in my life, & you don't have to reach for the "Internet hunting" argument to show there are many questionable and outrightly cruel forms of "hunting." If people had seen what I've seen, they'd want more regulation where animals, weapons and potential cruelty are involved. Sure there are some ethical hunters, as hunting and ethics can be construed. But the bottom of the barrel is really scraping bottom. And, unfortunately, there is life and suffering at stake.

[RoloTomassi]

I grew up in rural south Alabama where hunting was a necessity for people of lesser means; we hunted deer with dogs, and it was indeed a sport, as the deer are much harder to hit when they run through heavily wooded areas with narrow limits of visiblity. I haven't hunted for over two decades, but do remember it fondly as many such memories include a great deal of interaction with my father [dead now for almost twenty-five years].

That said, I must admit that I've never heard of this internet hunting travesty--but that doesn't keep me from being thoroughly disgusted by it now that I know. I always thought much less of hunters who baited feed plots and sat waiting in tree stands to slaughter deer, but this is a far more disturbing and truly sick enterprise, and should be banned altogether.