Is it fair to use duck decoys that flap their wings?
I just read that a mallard decoy has wings that spin like little propellers. They look to ducks in the sky like the decoy is just landing (i.e. that it has spotted a good place to fish). This is apparently 10 times more effective than a sitting duck.
There is discussion of making them illegal, but isn’t that the whole point of decoys, to fool ducks?
I’m neither a hunter nor much of an animal lover, so this debate is more of a puzzle to me than anything else.
The pragmatic answer is that hunters will prefer longer hunting seasons than having a shorter one because a robotic duck can make hunting easier. The more ducks you capture the shorter the hunting season. It looks like even the hunters agree in the limited use of roboduck, but not to a complete ban.
Thanks for the link. I would guess that after a while the ducks will adapt so they don’t trust the roboducks anymore and they will lose a lot (not all) of their effectivness.
Fair to who? It certainly isn’t fair to the duck that humans get to use shotguns, duck blinds, decoys, and even have dogs go out and retrieve their kills. But then hunting for any species has never ever been about what was fair to the prey or the predator.
The only valid reason to make them illegal would depend on how it impacts the duck population. So far as I know most states already limit the number of ducks one can take. So I don’t know if this is really a serious problem.
What would be really unfair would be to have a decoy that was a female duck in fishnet stockings that batted its eyelids and said “Well, hello there, big boy!”