Internet Hunting

cybergrunt69 writes "An enterprising Texan, John Underwood currently has a website that lets you target-practice online with a .22 caliber rifle, but will soon start offering "hunting" abilities. He recently built a platform for about $10,000USD to house this new system on his 300 acre properly, but the Parks and Wildlife department is now scrambling to find ways to try and stop him. While this may sound like cheating to some people, this may be a large benefit to hunters with disabilities."

Comments

This is interesting...

[Erect Horsecock]

While the concept (firing a weapon from your home computer) is interesting, I think it removes some of the challenge and "sportsmanship" of hunting. Hunting is already lopsided in favor of humans anyway (Scents designed to draw the animal closer, clothing to mask or remove human odors, calls, etc) the idea of making it almost effortless is disturbing. If you want to kill an animal do it with your own hands on a weapon, not on a mouse button.

Oh and as far as disabled hunters go Here is a rather general article about disabled hunters and the "sport" they love.

Re:This is interesting...

[SetupWeasel]

Yes, an animal still dies, but the difference between hunting for food and buying it at the store is the difference between lethal injection as a criminal punishment and letting someone torture a man to death as his criminal punishment.

I was looking around for stuff to mod, but this I have to reply to.

The life of some of the animals you eventually buy in the stores is horiffic. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't think farming animals is inherently wrong, but we have pigs living their entire lives in cages they can't even turn around in.

I'd rather have the animals have five years of freedom and a painful death any day over five years of hell and a peaceful death.

Hunters with disabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

In the days of true hunting, hunters with disabilities became the prey.

Guilty or not

[ThinkPad760]

So if you kill someone while on-line are you guilty? And how are they going to get you if you're in some far off country. This is a dangerous idea that could (most likely will) get way out of hand.

Re:Guilty or not

[Apiakun]

Of course you are guilty. I was wondering the same thing myself when I read about this earlier this morning. If some random person were walking along, and you clicked to shoot and killed them, then what? What if you're accessing the site through an anonymous proxy? How would that be dealt with? I see they are attempting to rule on whether or not you must be on site in order to make a kill, but in the meantime, what happens?

Who wants a job?

[Kotukunui]

An attendant will pick up the shot animals!!!

WTF?
Who wants that job?

At the golf driving range we all target the ball-retriever machines/attendants when they go to get the balls... and , hey this is Texas we are talking about!

Oooh I see even more marketing opportunities here!

[Xpilot]

Shoot the rabbit and WIN AN IPOD!!!

Mouse aiming? Forget that, I need WASD too~!

[MukiMuki]

What we NEED is a robot on a Segway (for terrain adaptation and minimal field footprint) that's noise-dampened, carrying a shotgun, with a sensor that won't allow it to shoot outside a given radius.

Why all this, you ask? So we can CIRCLE STRAFE those freaking animals over the internet~!

(Deer proceeds to knock over robot mid-hunt, rendering it useless)
Walkie Talkie Voice : ::Shht:: Counterhunters Win.

A Link

[suwain_2]

Yahoo has the story, too. They include a link to the website: live-shot.com.

Redneck philosophy in a nutshell.

[caffeinated_bunsen]

"If you just had a gun for that."

A more concise summary of the essence of redneckhood may never have been spoken. Truly a quote for the ages.

Re:What's the point?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I thought the entire excuse for hunting was for tradition and the sportsmanship.

No.

That's what city people who never actually hunted think.

Hunting is NOT a game.

Hunting is about skill, and patience, and responsibility, and consequences.

Hunting is about handling deadly tools safely.

Hunting is about working alone, or in a group, to achieve a difficult goal.

Hunting is about coming to a personal understanding that you, and your family, are also animals, that every day you live because something else - plant or animal - died to feed you.

Hunting is about the lengths you will go to keep your family fed and healthy.

Hunting is about knowing, deep in your gut, that the animal you hunt will hurt and die. And hunting (for humans) is about honoring that animal, by making its death for your benefit as fast and painless as possible, an easier death than it would suffer from the teeth and claws of some other peredator, from disease, from accident, or from starvation.

Hunting is about understanding your place in nature:

You are a predator.

You are at the top of the food chain

You are SO effective at what you do that you MUST be careful, lest you wipe out those things you depend on for your own life.

Re:What's the point?

[swillden]

I thought the entire excuse for hunting was for tradition and the sportsmanship.

Different people have different reasons, but some of the common ones are:

• The joy of being outdoors and close to nature. Hunting gets you closer to and more involved with nature than just about any activity other than maybe wildlife research.
• The adrenaline rush of the stalk.
• The pleasure of eating the game.
• Camaraderie with other hunters (often family).

The main reason I enjoy hunting is that it motivates me to get closer to nature than I ever do otherwise. That's a really odd fact, one I don't understand. I'm not necessarily anxious to kill anything, though I like the meat, and the thrill of the stalk is fantastic (I most often hunt with a bow). What I enjoy most is being out there. So why don't I go out there just to go, rather than to hunt?

I do, actually. I like to hike and camp, and I spend lots of time in the mountains just because I enjoy being there. I take hikes involving one or two thousand feet of elevation gain and three or four miles horizontal distance. I take lots of pictures and occasionally "stalk" with my camera.

But when I'm hunting it's not unusual to climb three thousand feet or more and hike 5-10 miles in the morning and then do the same again in the evening. And although I always pay attention to my surroundings (that being the point of going there), I pay much *more* attention when hunting, and I therefore get a lot more out of it. For example, when hunting I can often smell the animals and even identify them by their scent. When I'm just hiking I don't seem to notice their scents at all. Hunting motivates me to do things like dressing from head to toe in camouflage and then sitting completely motionless for hours, until the animals have completely forgotten I'm not just an oddly-shaped bush. A fawn bounced into me and knocked me off the log I was sitting on, once.

I enjoy hunting because I like the cool experiences I have as a result of doing somewhat extreme things to get very close to nature. I could do *exactly* the same things without spending $60 on a hunting license, plus more than I want to think about on all of the gear, but I don't, and when I try it's not the same.

Anyway, the point of this wildly off-topic rumination is to say:

Shooting animals via remote control over the Internet isn't "hunting" for people who for whatever reason can't do it in person. It's just a weird, hi-tech way of slaughtering animals. Killing is actually the smallest and least important part of sport hunting.