I’m not a gun owner, and I don’t hunt. I’d like to hear from someone who does. It’s easy to be an armchair critic when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Apos’ assessment might very well be accurate, and I might not have even thought of questioning it if his supporting “facts” had been so obviously exagerated. Someone confident in what he’s talking about doesn’t need to do that.
I’m a pretty big hunter during season but I’ve just never got into hunting birds of any kind and have no experience with it.
When I’m hunting a deer or a bear the sport of it is mostly finding your quarry. Studying the area to either find the tracks of an animal, or studying the area and recognizes a place where one could reasonably expect a deer or bear to come by fairly frequently.
The actual kill requires some skill in that you’re aiming and shooting, but most of the time when I down a bear or deer the animal has stopped moving briefly (deer/bear don’t generally walk long lengths of time without stopping, they frequently stop to do various things, look around, mark territory, look for food etc.)
With birds the sport of it isn’t so much in the hunting as game birds aside from wild turkey appear to be pretty easy to find (actually wild turkey are pretty easy imo too, I stumble upon them all the time in the woods and they barely even take notice of me.) With birds it’s more the shooting that is the sport in it. It’s like shooting at clay pigeons but they’re live targets.
Anyways, while it’s not my idea of fun, we are omnivorous creatures. Man can choose to forgo the eating of meat but there’s nothing unnatural about killing animals and eating them for a human being. Morally speaking we all have our opinions, but if you’re okay with eating beef, chicken, turkey, etc then I fail to understand the outrage at what Cheney is doing.
I’ve got friends and relatives who hunt. I’ve been out duck hunting once or twice but I was pretty much along for the ride. I can tell you that canned hunts are almost universally looked down upon by those who consider themselves serious hunters.
I have a friend who killed a wild boar in a canned hunt. To a degree I don’t consider it the same accomplishment as if he had killed a wild boar that was actually in the wild.
However, ultimately we’re all talking about sport hunting here. None of us from the most casual hunter to the big game hunters who go on African safaris and spend most days out of the year hunting or preparing for the big hunt are doing anything but engaging in sport. It’s like a baseball player looking down on a softball player because the ball is larger. The fact is at it it’s root we’re just talking about silly sport in the first place.
It’s not that killing animals for food is amoral- that’s a strawman- it’s just that it’s lame to call this kind of catered shoot with tame, pen-raised birds “hunting.” It’s very little removed from shooting them right in their cages. The only entertainment factor involved in this kind of activity is the pure fun of killing something. Not illegal, but not exactly heroic either.
What stretched facts? They released hundreds of birds and killed almost all of them. They were farm raised and fed all their lives by human beings: they were not wild pheasants that lived their lives in bush and knew how to fend for themselves. If you are going to accuse me of stretching facts, put up or apologize. I gave you a perfectly legitimate cite as a reasonable basis for what I said, and so far YOU stretched what I said: I didn’t say that Cheney alone shot hundreds of birds: I said “Cheney and his fucktard friends shot hundreds of birds”: and that’s exactly what all the news stories say happened. 417 “at least” and an unknown number of cage-raised mallards. That isn’t hundreds? Cheney himself shot at least 70, and there were ten people in his party.
I would wager to guess that if Cheney hadn’t gone and shot his friend by accident and cut things short, they probably would have been able to get almost all of them.
It seems that alcohol was not involved according to the sherrif, at least on examination a day later, so I retract that accusation. Apparently, you can be this stupid stone cold sober.
The thing is though these caged birds still fly about and such, if they were just sitting there there wouldn’t be any sport in it. The purpose of the canned hunt in this case is so you’re guaranteed a shot at some scrambling birds, not to just kill a bird that isn’t moving.
The sport in the bird hunting is being able to knock the birds out of the sky with your birdshot. Cheney isn’t just walking around shooting birds that are just laying around, at least I don’t think he is, that’s not consistent with the little bit I’ve seen of these types of hunts in the past.
It’s like the canned hunt my friend killed the boar in. The boar wasn’t just put in front of him and my friend told to shoot. They were in a controlled area, the boar was released, and my friend went in looking for him. It basically takes the “random” factor out of hunting, the fact that on any given day you may be hunting in an area where you can’t find prey. Again, not my idea of fun (and the boar example is a bit different from the bird one, but bird hunting and larger game hunting are pretty different as it were) but we’re talking about killing for sport ultimately, I don’t see how one can judge one type of sport killing to be worse than another. If you oppose sport killing in general, that’s another issue.
Also yeah, I realize the food thing is a non sequitur now, I eat everything I kill and I too often forget many hunters are just in it for the trophies or the pride (I’ve known of people to just decapitate a deer they kill and throw the body away.)
I still don’t see the point. No one is denying it’s a canned hunt buuut…
Those are birds raised specifically to get killed in a canned hunt. Do you oppose the idea of sport hunting in general? If not, then I don’t see the complaint. If so…then that’s a valid stand but to focus purely on the fact that it was a canned hunt instead of a hunt in general makes no sense to me.
There’s a significant difference between hunting for real sport, food and trophy, and just wanton destruction, using living things for the blood spatter. I would assume that when you hunt, you go for a nice clean kill. You don’t deliberately shoot and animal in the lower gut and then walk off to the next animal. I don’t advocate giving up killing animals. But doing it with wanton carelessness and a complete lack of interest or respect for the pain and suffering you put them through is not exactly laudable either.
The idea that morality is just a reproduction of what is natural is too silly to argue about, because I doubt you even really believe it.
Did you read what I actually said before responding to me? If you had, you’d already know the answer to this question.
I already posted what I think the difference is, so you can go read that if you’d like.
A canned hunt for a boar!? They can’t even fly!
That’s not hunting, that’s slaughtering.
(I mean slaughter in the literal sense - that is, an efficient way to end a domesticated animal’s life for meat, with no skill involved)
In general I don’t see what one has to do with the other. You respect real hunters because of their respect for nature and etc. The canned hunts have little to do with that, these animals aren’t part of a natural habitat, they are creatures that have been specifically raised to die, they weren’t part of the natural order of things in the area they were killed.
The argument that its okay to kill an animal as long as you do it with respect is ludicrous to me, especially when you’re saying two identical forms of killing are different morally because in “natural” hunting the hunter has to go out and find the quail to kill as they fly around and all Cheney had to do was wait for them to be released.
Shooting farm raised birds isn’t hunting in the same way that screwing prostitutes isn’t seduction.
Shooting someone (accident or no) doesn’t rise to the level of a hummer? WTF?
Exactly. They lack any semblance of respect, care, or concern for what they are doing.
As I’ve already noted, I’m not a real stickler for whats “natural.” I judge human beings in part by their conduct towards animals. Hunters pass. Canned hunters fail.
En masse. For vast slaughterhouse fun. Without any concern for a clean kill, or sense of scale. At the very least, you have to agree that killing more than 70 animals at once is gluttony. Are they even eaten? Is raising animals purely for the fun of killing and no other purpose them really something that doesn’t give you any pause. That doesn’t seem disturbing to you in any way?
See this CS thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=358795
Here’s some hunters that agree with me about the patheticness of canned hunting, not to mention the flagrant disregard for safety that this particular party apparently had compared to normal hunters:
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/opinion/13866143.htm
First, it’s quail, not pheasant.
These are not “tame” birds by any defintion of the term. Tame implies that they have lost their fear of humans. And why say it was “hundreds” when in fact it was less than 100?
I spoke this morning with a good friend who is a serious hunter, and has been all his life. His take was along the lines of “Yeah, when I was a single guy, I’d look down on this sort of thing. But being married and with a kid, I don’t always have 3 days to go out quail hunting, so I’ve done a few of these hunts and they’t not bad. But take note that Cheney is using a 28 gauge, which you have to be a damn good shot to use. Most people would use a 20 gauge. The main thing different about these hunts is that you’re guaranteed to find birds. But once you find them, they’re just as hard to shoot as wild birds”.
Now, having said that, he also noted that no matter what the other guy did, Cheney bears at least half the blame because you’re always supposed to be aware of your hunting partners’ position. No ifs ands or buts about it.
In my opinion, a more apt comparison would be batting against a Major League pitcher versus hitting a ball off the tee. Or maybe just swinging a bat and having someone else throw the ball between short and third.
Here’s one cite from KDKA news in Pittsburgh for the incident in which Cheney’s party killed 417 pheasants, with Cheney killing more than 70 himself.
I think Cheney’s one of the most arrogant assholes of the 20th or 21st centuries and I can’t frigging stand him.
I admit I laughed when I heard about this news story and I’ve made some tasteless jokes about it, and I rolled my eyes when I heard it wasn’t released until a day later. But all that said, my ultimate take is “It was an accident. A stupid accident. We have all had them [though probably not with a shotgun]. Nobody died or was seriously injured. Ultimately, big deal- this will not appear in any history books in 20 years unless Whittington takes revenge with a chainsaw.”
It’s good for humor and it’s newsworthy but as a major issue to focus on there’s no there there. Dems should let it pass. God knows the Administration and Cheney himself give enough real stuff to concentrate on not to have to bring in what is ultimately his personal life.