Anti-Internet Hunting Laws Still Popular, Despite Lack Of Real Problem

from the overreact-much? dept

Mon, Feb 19th 2007 7:46pm — Carlo Longino

Quite a fuss was made a few years ago after a guy in Texas set up a website offering online hunting, which allowed people to shoot penned animals using a gun connected to a webcam. As we noted at the time, the reaction seemed a little bit overblown, as it was unlikely many people would actually use the sites, and they weren't likely to proliferate. Now, a couple of years later, some states are still piling on the legislation to make such point, click and shoot sites illegal. It's hard to defend the practice of these canned hunts, really, but backers of the legislation can't point to any examples apart from the original site, and admit that it's not a big problem, but they just want to "nip it in the bud." Twenty-five states have laws banning the practice, thanks to the tireless lobbying of the Humane Society, but there remains little evidence that it's actually a problem. It seems like if there really were a demand for this sort of thing, offshore operators would have emerged to tap it. After all, why bother getting online to shoot a penned Texas buck when you could find a site in Africa offering online big-game hunts?

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26 Comments

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Old Guy, 19 Feb 2007 @ 8:08pm

Making Internet Hunting Profitable
Point, click and shoot...It's not really a bad idea, but the real profit would be made by doing it on c-span
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Feb 2007 @ 8:12pm

Likely the fear is the loss of tourist dollars that hunters bring to an area. Hunters spend money on food, lodging, and other supplies to areas where hunting is popular. The remote-controlled hunting might "nip" some of this money (and tax revenue) in the bud, and the politicians as well as businesses that depend on hunters don't want to lose this money. The remote-controlled operations might, of course, generate revenue, but I doubt that a robot with a gun is going to buy beer and sleep in motels in an area as much as a hunter would.
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Boost, 19 Feb 2007 @ 8:56pm

Sporting
Most avid hunters would scoff at this activity anyway. Hunting a penned up animal isn't hunting at all, it's target practice. I rarely take anything animal rights people say with more than a grain of salt, but I think I may agree that this is not a good practice. Most people don't take hunting seriously and think it's just something for rednecks with too much time and/or money. I believe, that most hunters would respect animal too much to take these sites seriously.
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Morgan, 19 Feb 2007 @ 10:36pm

It doesn't stop net neutrality folks.
The fact that all of the nightmare scenarios claimed by neutrality advocates aren't even happening certainly hasn't dampened their enthusiasm for legislation and regulation. So who care there's an actual problem to fix, let's get that legislation in there before there is so no one can tell if it helped or not.
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dorpus, 20 Feb 2007 @ 1:23am

Extreme Hunting
Will this give birth to a new generation of hunters whose purpose is to hurt the animals as much as possible? How about hunting sites in Africa that shoot children?
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ScytheNoire, 20 Feb 2007 @ 4:18am

Re: Making Internet Hunting Profitable
That was my first thought too... if only they could hook up this technology for helping with the political system. It would be such a wonderful thing. We can always dream.
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rbb, 20 Feb 2007 @ 4:51am

A hoax?
I don't recall ever seeing any of these hunting places in action. Has anyone ever seen an animal killed at one of these sites?

I think it is one big hoax meant to make the media and politicians look like complete a**es (although they do a good job without any help). Remember all the fuss about the company that let paying customers hunt women down with paintball guns - after all the fuss, it turned out to be a complete hoax.
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Angry Rvethead, 20 Feb 2007 @ 5:33am

Re: A hoax?
...Or the black rino bullet incident...I STILL run into people that think those things were real. Anyone that had a grade school physics lesson would know these things didn't actually exist. I love it when Anti-(insert your freedom here) Look like asses.
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Nasty Old Geezer, 20 Feb 2007 @ 5:41am

It was a real proposal
I don't think it ever materialized, but there was a proposal to set up the site on a Texas game ranch. The spin was to allow handicapped persons to shoot a "trophy" via remote control.

I have a lot of scorn for the animal rights type (where I live, PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals), but this bonehead idea was a non-starter. I even agree that it is a good idea to officially ban the remote hunting idea -- I would make it a violation to use such a site.

Put it in context -- no different than spotlighting deer or shooting game birds over a baited field.
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greg, 20 Feb 2007 @ 5:55am

hoax or not....
why don't we try remote poaching with people. how about we put a person--maybe people who think that cruelty to animals does not go on--in a cage and try the same thing. i'll be the first to point click and shoot. who could think of something so cruel as a hoax, let alone "the real thing"?
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Feb 2007 @ 6:34am

I am not an animal activist of any sort, but I do possess some common sense. Hunting via webcam is the most pathetic form of hunting there is. Hunting is supposed to be a sport. It's a game where you have to devise a strategy to take down the elusive prey. That prey, likewise, has senses that allow it to detect and avoid you, which is its defense mechanism. If you take away the person and put up a webcam with a gun, the animal doesn't have a sporting chance, and the "point, click, 'n shoot" interface removes the whole strategy part from your end, making it nothing more than target practice on live animals. This is not good sportsmanship by any stretch of the imagination.

If you have a disability that prevents you from hunting, deal with it and move on. We should not have to cater to every whim of the disabled like slaves. Let's face it, people that have disabilities have limits when it comes to some things. Granted, those people often prove they aren't as limited as we tend to think they are, but they still have limits. Obviously if you are in a wheelchair, you can't go out hunting. If that's the case go buy a good deer hunter computer game and/or find a hobby that's not beyond your limits. I'm sick of disabled people (not all disabled people are like this) whining about how rough they have it because we aren't out there trying to make the world a perfect place for them.
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PhysicsGuy, 20 Feb 2007 @ 7:01am

rock'em sock'em
wow... this is the first time i've ever heard of such a thing!!! ... now i await the time when i can have rock'em sock'em computer controlled boxing matches against kangaroos :o, the humane society can kiss my ass, "here humane society, com'ere... ever hear of schroedinger? well, i have a box you should open..."
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Steve Irwin, 20 Feb 2007 @ 7:20am

overseas hunting....
Hey, wait a minute.... you mean we can actually set up a site in Africa to let people remotely hunt over the internet -- and charge them for it? Brilliant!

How much do you think people would pay for that?
How about gorillas? Do people want to hunt gorillas?

Who do I talk to about setting this up?
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SmartAssWhizKid, 20 Feb 2007 @ 8:39am

Re:
You have no idea what your talking about. Hunting is not about pulling a trigger and watching an animal die. It's about being outside, surrounded by nature, sitting in a tree stand, or a duck blind. No hunter is going to give that up to sit at the kitchen table with a laptop and "hunt".
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kitchen table hunter, 20 Feb 2007 @ 8:50am

SmartAssWhiz
That's kind of the point. These services aren't for traditional hunters.

Do you know how many people out there are sadistic (fill in your own derogatory remark here)?

They're too lazy to get off their duffs, much less do all of the other work related to actually hunting.

This feeds right into the power trip of those people. They can kill from anywhere! And they can sit on their couch with a bag of chips and a beer when they do it. Then they can go down to McBurgerHut and pretend like they're eating thier fresh kill.

They don't know the difference, and they don't care. They can pay for it with their stolen credit cards and brag to their friends about how exciting it is to be in the big hunt.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Feb 2007 @ 9:48am

I think this could really be effective in Iraq.

Skip the "troop surge". Just install these point, click, shoot systems at key street corners around Baghdad! Commission Junction points for every insurgent you shoot!

We could use Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manage the whole program!
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about, 20 Feb 2007 @ 9:58am

How about putting some of those on the Mexican border?
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Trey Smith, 20 Feb 2007 @ 10:03am

Re: Re: A hoax?
umm check: http://www.rhinos-irf.org/rhinoinformation/blackrhino/index.htm not sure what your refering to, but black rino's DO exist...
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black rhino, 20 Feb 2007 @ 10:21am

Re: Re: Re: A hoax?
Trey Smith,
You dork. You seem to know how to use a computer to read and post information on the internet, yet you show an astonishing lack of understanding how to think.

Please do a Google search for black rhino bullet before you post a link to a rhinoceros site.

A 'Black Rhino' bullet is an armor piercing round for handguns (aka 'cop killers'). They were never sold in the U.S., despite a huge amount of 'news' reporting the opposite.
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D, 20 Feb 2007 @ 10:38am

Hypocrisy
Either make hunting illegal or don't. To make hunting via computer illegal is arbitrary and hypocritical. Hell, it's safer than hunting with Dick Cheney.
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Brian Carnell, 20 Feb 2007 @ 1:36pm

In Defense of Canned Hunting
"It's hard to defend the practice of these canned hunts, really..."

Its not hard at all unless you have some sort of spiritual view of hunting as communing with nature as some of the posters here do seem to have (and I'm not sure why we should legislate against canned hunting based on purely pseudo-religious reasons).

The goal of hunting is to kill an animal for food, hide, etc. Canned hunting and even hunting over the Internet accomplishes that at least as humanely as a slaughterhouse.

A more complete defense of Internet-based canned hunting here.
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Brian Carnell, 20 Feb 2007 @ 1:37pm

In Defense of Canned Hunting
"It's hard to defend the practice of these canned hunts, really..."

Its not hard at all unless you have some sort of spiritual view of hunting as communing with nature as some of the posters here do seem to have (and I'm not sure why we should legislate against canned hunting based on purely pseudo-religious reasons).

The goal of hunting is to kill an animal for food, hide, etc. Canned hunting and even hunting over the Internet accomplishes that at least as humanely as a slaughterhouse.

A more complete defense of Internet-based canned hunting here.
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Brady Price, 5 Apr 2007 @ 5:32pm

What's wrong with the issue?
A man from Houston, Texas spent $10,000 on a platform that holds a .22 caliber rim-shot rifle that allows internet users to hunt animals on his 330-acre ranch.Live-shot.com already lets internet users target practice with a .22 and tin cans. John Underwood purchased and bred live deer, antelope and wild pigs as targets. The first paid hunt will occur on April 9, and many states are attempting to outlaw it already, including Texas. You have to have a Texas hunting license, pay a one-thousand dollar animal deposit fee, and pay a fifteen dollar monthly fee. For an additional charge, you can have the meat and head sent to you. The final cost depends on the species and size of the animal killed and the cost of having the trophy mounted.In my opinion internet hunting is okay. This doesn’t kill more animals; people can still only kill the same amount. You still have to wait, and look for the right animal that you have a license to kill. It’s definitely not the government’s job to outlaw this. This doesn’t hinder anybody’s life, liberty, property, or pursuit of happiness. John Underwood says he designed it mainly for those who love hunting but are unable to get out into the woods such as the wheelchair-bound. The first person to sign up was Dale Hagberg, a paraplegic from Ligonier, Indiana. Mr. Hagberg says he broke his neck in an accident almost 18 years ago and has only been able to watch hunting on TV. He loved hunting more than anything. "I was an avid hunter before I became hurt, and I've missed it ever since," he says through his nurse. Hagberg is excited - and nervous - about his coming April 9 hunt. "I'm sure when I see the animal walk in my view, my heart will start beating as fast as it used to." Many people say it’s terrible and it’s “the stupidest thing they’ve ever even heard of.” people complain that it’s not real hunting and it totally ruins the sport. This doesn’t mean it has to be outlawed. They have the right to complain, and that’s okay. If they don’t agree, then fine, they don’t have to like it, but their attitudes shouldn’t prevent others from doing something they enjoy that doesn’t hinder others in life, liberty or pursuit of happiness in any way.
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Jordan, 5 Apr 2007 @ 5:36pm

Re: What's wrong with the issue?
that's pretty good! this guy has studied the issue and he knows what goin on, listen to him!
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Kristen, 25 Jun 2007 @ 1:12pm

Carlo Longino - Idiot much?
Wow! So much for actually knowing what you are talking about before pushing your ignorant opinion on the masses. The reason for the resurgance in the legislation is because of a site out of Texas run by a heartless bastard who has already allowed (at least) one canned shoot.
Next time maybe your post shouldn't be in the "overreact-much?" department...I think maybe the "I don't know what I'm talking about" department or the "ignorant yet opinionated" department. Just a suggestion.
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rosco p coltrane, 14 May 2012 @ 5:53am

deers
i like shootin deers
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