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Internet Hunting Banned in California
TheSync writes "California has banned Internet hunting. Emergency regulations will be put in place by the California Fish and Game Commission, and legislation (SB 1028) is in the works. West Virginia is considering legislation against it as well. Hunters consider hunting by robot and mouse click 'a digrace to the sport,' whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine."
Bullshit. You have to remember we're talking about hunters, not fucking snipers. Hunters don't sit in one place a half a mile from where deer/moose/whatever congregate and pick them off. Those 'high powered and long range' rifles are typically used at less than 100 yards, simply to ensure the absolute minimum chance of missing. It would be trivial to set up a blind in a treetop and take pot shots at a group of deer a half a mile away but hunters don't do that shit because it's unsporting and, more importantly, it's too much of a pain in the ass to drag a deer that far.
BTW, I'm not a hunter.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
http://www.live-shot.com/ After viewing some of the links from that site I ran outside to make sure that my car was not up on cinder blocks.
Slashdot away!
In hunting, the challenge is what you make it.
Yes, there are a lot of road hunters and people who just sit by camp and hit things way off in the distance (sniping does require some form of skill though).
But then there are those who like the challenge. Some of my friends hunt with hand-made spears. Some of the crazy ones go out with a pack, and make the spear themselves in the forest, then hunt. I consider them real, true hunters.
I bow hunt elk mainly, and I'd say there's a slightly greater than 50% chance I'll bag one in a season. We go out into true wilderness, walking and do it. I don't shoot unless I'm closer than 30 yards, which is generally pretty hard in the area we hunt. Then I pack it out 10 miles on my own back. My father loses 20 pounds every hunt we go on.
But let's get realistic for a second. Since when was nearly any hunt that man did fair? We're smarter, and we had the mental capabilities to easily slaughter huge numbers of animals for 10,000+ years. Complaining about hunting "no longer" being a challenge is a bit disingenuous. It hasn't been a challenge for thousands of years. We used to light fires to drive animals towards the hunters, or drive whole herds of animals off of cliffs. Baiting and partially domesticating wild animals with offers of food, then slaughtering them. I'd say that things are a lot fairer now than they were thousands of years ago, but not quite as fair as they were maybe 200 years ago. Largely due to it being more of a sport now than sustenance. Back in the day, it didn't matter if you killed a whole herd of 200 animals to get one, because you'd die if you didn't get that one. Today, we just go out and get that one. If we don't, then we hit the supermarket.
The main reason everyone is so upset/scared over internet hunting are the safety concerns.
Not really. The internet hunting takes place on private grounds nowhere near populated areas, so it's safe. The concern is really the morality of it.
Also hunting on foot is a lot more noble and is a tradition that has been carried out for thousands of years.
Indeed.
And I might add this: most countries where hunting has been a tradition for centuries couldn't afford not having hunters. What I mean is, the hunter is part of the ecological balance of whatever area they hunt in. Take them out of the picture, and suddenly certain species of game, previously hunted, see their numbers soar, destabilizing the ecological niches of numerous other species, and introducing diseases and malformations in their numbers, due to overpopulation.
In many countries, hunters regularly conduct what they call "cynegetic management", or "sanitary shootings", which is essentially the removing of weak and diseased surplus animals. Those sanitary kills can also preserve endangered species, by lightening the burden on their food sources and the predatory pressure on them. This game management is healthy for the environment, which is what most green anti-hunting folks fail to understand.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
There wouldn't be a problem, except that the predators that would normally keep deer in check are largely absent. No one wants cougars or packs of wolves living near their town. But without these top predators, deer populations have nothing to keep their numbers down -- except hunting.
Therefore, interestingly enough, conservation demands that we hunt more deer.
It's not unlike the paradox of the principal-of-least-harm. In order to minimize the number of animals that die on account of your diet, it's best to eat nothing but large free-range ruminants. A vegetarian diet results in enormous numbers of rodents and insects being killed by threshers and harvesting machinery.
I guess I'm a little off-topic now...
As a sidenote, dickwads with anything are a problem. Is there really any tool you would trust a dickwad with? Guns are just a particularly extreme example.
Obviously you've never been hunting if you think it's just a matter of aiming at an animal and pulling the trigger. I hunt, with a camera, and oh how I wish it were as easy as just pushing an "I Win" button. There's a great deal of tracking, prediction, guesswork, and luck before you even get to the point of sighting the animal. That's the sporting element that's missing in a hunt-over-the-web setup. Without that element it's, as the aphorism goes, like shooting fish in a barrel.
With that being said, Possum tastes really good with onions and a side of grits (and gravel)
Vegans run the risk of B vitamin deficiencies (esp. B12)
Not really. It's pretty easy to live a vegan lifestyle without any B12 worries. You just have to ensure you have a large enough intake of it. I'll take that as a worry over heart disease, CJD, bovine growth hormone, not-fully-cooked-meat and the myriad other concerns that come with a meat based diet any day.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Your possums are different. They're also a native species which makes them less invasive. In NZ the possums were introduced from Australia. In Australia there are predators and food is relatively scarce. New Zealand has no predator species for possums and they thrive.Possums strip vegitation and eat birds eggs. Since NZ has no real predators, the birds breed slowly. This means they are threatened by possums. NZ has approx 70million possums. Sure we run over a few, but not that many.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Finally, I do realise there is some basis for the author's statement. I do realise that there are "hunters" out there who are just in it for the guns and killing. I don't have much respect for them either. "
Even in rural East Tennessee (home of the hick rednecks) there are few like that. Most other hunters do not care for it either. But, as long as they folow game laws they are still putting several hundred a year into conservation (liscenes and taxes on some hunting supplies) and game laws are set to preserve the herd, it is irrelevent your reasons why. Unfortunatly those people are usually poachers too.
"Maybe there is a cultural difference between the US and Canada too (somebody please enlighten me) - muzzle-loading season for deer around here lasts one week, the rest of the time my brother-in-law has to hunt with a bow and arrow (crossbow in recent years actually)."
That would depend on your state. In much of the US crossbows are seen as an extremely unethical way of taking a deer. Most feel you might as well be shooting a gun and it takes the skill out of archery (personally, I don't really care). Since I hunt with bows and arrows I made myself few would want to be held to that standard - usually quite funny if I decide to be hardline back at the compound bow shooters like they are to the crossbow guys.
In Tennessee Archery season and gun season are quite long, muzzleloading is a week long. The big differences are in what you can and can't kill. Archery and muzzleloading are either sex hunts, you can kill both does and bucks. Gun season is buck only. The limit for the number of game taken is highest in archery (six where I hunt, at most two bucks), and lowest in gun (two, where I hunt, though season long limit on bucks is three - so if you kill two in archery, one in muzzleloading, your done for the year).
I don't understand why some feel one weapon is ethical and another isn't (as long as both provide a quick clean kill - amusingly enough many anti-hunters who talk about using a knife - that would be a very brutal, long, and painful way to die compared to hunting equipment). Double lung or heart - deer is dead in seconds regardles if from an arrow or bullet. Games laws usually are set up where the skill needed is about equal (gun you can only kill the older, smarter bucks - in archery you can kill any deer). If they are not set that way then you have a serious ecological problem that the game comission is trying to fix (two counties in Tennessee had a limit of 127 does per person during gun season - the deer had become so overpopulated the damage they were doing was incrediable and it will take decades for local wildlife population to return to normal, some species even need to be reintroduced as the deer made them extinct locally). I do know some states severely limit gun hunting because there are no backstops for bullets and a missed shot may travel 5 miles and hit something/someone (east Tennessee doesn't have that problem, too many mountains/hills), I would guess parts of Canada have the same issues.
Ultimatly as long as the kill is quick/clean, the game is managed properly, and the method is safe for everyone else I don't see why one would be against hunting by any method. Deer do not have a sense of comsic fulfillness from an arrow (or if the state or food packagers kill them) and regret from a hunters bullet, nor does game management care how they are killed.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Technically, B12 is from bacteria (and bacteria aren't animals (shouldn't an RN know this?)). Eat enough dirty plants, and vegans would do absolutely fine without any other source of B12. (The amounts needed are miniscule).
For those of us who don't like dirt in our food (most of us in the modern world), or want to be on the safe side, there are vegan sources of B12 available.
If you want to criticize vegan diets, I'd suggest looking into omega 6/omega 3 ratios in vegan diets. However, the standard American diet also suffers from a similar problem, which is why (I suspect) this criticism isn't brought up more often.
For bonus points, why not look into the different conversion rates between the omega 6 fatty acids. (Vegans tend to only consume a limited subset of the omega 6 fatty acids and have to convert the omega 6 acids they eat into the other types they need).
For real data, backed up with statistics, google for "The Farm", which is a hippy vegan commune in Tennessee that has been a focus of several vegan dietary studies of adults and children. Or read "Becoming Vegan" which references more than a few studies on the health of vegans. Its not hard to build an argument that a balanced vegan diet is as healthy as a balanced omnivorous diet. Its also not hard to show that an unbalanced diet (meat eating or not) is unhealthy (just check out the growing obesity and diabetes rates in the US).
(Yep, I'm a vegan. And I did my research before choosing to become a vegan.)