What’s the deal with this? Does it really matter whether the gun is being controlled by someone a thousand miles away? What difference does it make to the animal?
I really don’t understand why people are so worked up about this. Sure, if you’re anti-hunting then you’re anti-hunting. But why target this particular type?
For online hunting to work, they have to basically stick a caged animal in front of the gun, right? My wag is that the unsportsmanlike nature of this is what gets under a lot of people’s craws.
Is there a safety factor involved as well? When shooting you need to be aware of the target, what’s behind the target, and it’s probably useful to have peripheral vision to in case stray objects move into your field of fire.
Marc
To me, it’s just gratuitous slaughter. If you want to go out and hunt, go for it. The more deer you take, the fewer are there for me to hit with my car. But if you’re actually out there, you’re taking care to aim and if you merely wound the animal, you’re going to try to finish it off so it doesn’t suffer. You have a certain set of values that you’re taking with you. Desktop hunting is just a means to cause death without the values that true hunters take with them.
Yeah, it’s more an execution than a hunt.
Seems to me that Internet hunting would desensitize some people to the reality of taking a life (even an animal life). It would become a joke, a game, to these people. When the death isn’t right there in front of you, it’s easy to ignore. I’m not opposed to hunting, but I think people should be aware of what they are doing. What would keep people from shooting to wound? I’m sure that there are hunters who already do stuff like this, but at least they have to do a little work beforehand.
I love playing computer games with guns in them, and I can be as cruel and sadistic as anyone in single-player games, but if I knew someone was really hurt when I shot them in the game, no way in hell would I want to have anything to do with it.
It’s also unsporting to simply rope animals into an area and then shoot them. I think that’s called a slaughterhouse.
I’m sure you’re right, but in many cases i’m not sure i see a huge difference.
I hunted kangaroos on friends’ properties when i was a teenager, which i guess is probably the equivalent of hunting deer or something in North America. I also shot smaller game likie rabbits and foxes. Training a telescopic sight on an animal and pulling a trigger never felt especially sportsmanlike to me.
All a matter of degree, I suppose. It’s hard to define sportsmanship in a concrete legal sense, but it’s probably pretty much universally agreed that putting a deer in a cage in front of gun doesn’t fall under the good sportsmanship category.
I wonder, though, how successful they might be with a legal defense if they donate the meat for use as food. It’s not very sporting to pop a cow in the head with a hydraulic hammer either, but obviously that’s legal. But, it’s likely there will be slower deaths with the internet hunting, like with the animal being just wounded instead of killed outright, which I suppose isn’t the case with the hammer.
:wally 's
It’d be so easy to scam them.
So I hope they are.
I think it depends on how the online hunting is set up. If you set up a blind in the woods, and have the online hunter sit there for hours on end waiting for a deer to walk by, then it’s not really any less sporting than sitting out there yourself.
Personally, I think a lot of deer hunting as done these days is kind of unsporting as it is. Sitting in a blind facing an area where deer have been conditioned to feed by a timed feeder isn’t exactly going out and tracking down game as the Indians used to.
The main concern I’d have with online hunting would be wounding game- what kind of latency would a connection need, and what kind of optics would the hunter have?
I’m imagining situations where some guy with a POS Pentium II from 1999 and a 56K modem would take shots where the animal might have moved in the interim between the image getting to his computer, him clicking “shoot”, and the command traveling back to the rifle to fire. Anyone who’s played online FPS games knows how lag makes things strange, and I’d imagine that online hunting would be no exception.
I just hope the deer isn’t using God mode.
It seems terribly unsportsman like to most hunters. In my mind, if the hunter wasn’t quite handicapped, it would be unsportsman like to hunt in this manner. Just like with lots of other stand hunting (which is perfectly ethical, normal, and traditional enough to always remain legal AFAIC) with food plots or feeders, no ‘caged animals’ would be used. The unsporting aspect would be the fact that you didn’t need to be there. In the scenario in TX, I believe that an employee would be there to track and put down an injured animal.
True, but I don’t think this is a reason under consideration by the states trying to ban it. After all, these states are not clamoring to ban bowhunting, and that results in a much higher portion of woundings and slow deaths than rifles.
I agree with other posters who posit that the states see online hunting as unacceptably unsportsmanlike. Personally, I don’t see a distinction. Neither online hunting nor in-person bears any resemblance to sport IMO and I would not discriminate between the practices.
I thought I read that a lot of those trying to ban this are actually hunters and hunting groups. True?
True. They think it gives hunting in general a bad name to be associated with this version.
Hmm. Nothing in the quoted article about the F&GC being unable to charge more for out-of-state hunters, which was my first guess as to why before reading the linked article.
There’s the safety issue, which is only obliquely referenced by “once its perimeter fencing is completed…”. Say. Anybody read or see Jurassic Park? They had perimeter fences, too. Anything bad happen there?
I have.
To paraphrase an old, old quote, “Put not your faith in fences.”
I’m from a part of the country that has lots of hunting. Deer, turkey, pheasant…
I can think of 4 main reasons that people hunt here.
Meat supply.
protection of crops (keep the numbers down)
Pitting oneself against nature
Bonding with buddies and family.
On-line hunting doesn’t accomplish any of these socially accepted goals.
The people in groups 1 and 2 aren’t going to pay someone to be able to shoot a deer someplace else.
The people in groups 3 and 4 probably see online, caged hunting as the exact opposite of what hunting is about. On-line hunting contains no contact with nature nor with others.