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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."
It's my God given right as an American to be able to sit at home in my underwear and kill shit.
I had just wrote up an shell script to do all my hunting for me, and now this!
I highly doubt the submitter's genes would be alive today, if not for the hunting of "innocent" animals, whatever the hell that means.
I agree, this is integral "Your Rights Online." I protest this grave infringement against my inherent right as a human to operate a deadly weapon using some Flash game on my desktop.
Way to make an unbiased and factual news post, Timothy!
Yeah yeah "but timothy didn't say it thesync did" ever heard of being an editor? Ever heard of a respectable news site?
The funny part is that the first quote *is* a quote (minus the blatant spelling error, of course - congratulations again!) while the second part is complete and total fabrication.
You know what? Stuff like this doesn't help *anyone*. If you need to put words in people's mouths to make your point, your point has failed.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine.
Nice troll. I still continue to be amazed such nonsense makes it into the article summaries. Animals are not "innocent", and in many cases hunting acts as part of the ecosystem, preventing animal overpopulation. It you're going to troll Timothy, try to at least sound intelligent.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
*sigh* PETA is just too extreme. And red meat is just too tasty.
-It' ok to eat fish because fish don't have any feelings. -KC
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Does this mean no more playing punch the monkey?
Why does there need to be a law for everything? How can the banning of Internet hunting be regulated, anyhow? What is the state going to do; get ISPs to look at the logs of everybody who are signed up at Internet hunting sites? Doesn't California have better and more important things to focus on, such as balancing the budget?
My bow and I would like you to come within 100 yards and say that ;-)
It's about time that they outlawed Deer Hunter. That game ruined my life! Now I'll have time to watch "The Dukes Of Hazard" DVDs.
so you're crapping in the bushes and a deer comes along and you shoot it with your high powered rifle, easy right? But on some level you now understand what its like to crap in the bushes like a deer. And for understanding this, the killing process becomes very real.
over the internet it is no longer hunting. Its a video game where things actually die, there is no connect.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
Of course most likely you'd not be really killing real animals, any more than you're talking to an innocent teen when you dial 0900-VIRGIINS. Instead you'd pay your $50 or whatever and the whole shooting would be mocked up, probably from Discovery channel footage. That way a few thousand cyberhunters get to "shoot" the same bambi and nobody really gets hurt except a few credit cards.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I dont see a difference between killing an animal for food or sport, even if the sport is done on the web.
This sounds like passing a law for PR, nothing else. We dont need feel good, nanny laws created. This is law is purely about ones feeling about hunting, nothing more.
People need to stop passing more laws for behavior and freedoms of the people, and deal with voilent crimes, polution or robbery. They need to stay out of peoples lives and hobbies.
If they said "No Church Online" you bet there would be more people talking about this law.
Serriously, do you need to be told what you can watch, what you can eat, who you can marry, whats proper in your own home? Damn if you people dont see this is a fluff law you are a sheep.
I think the orginal poster is talking about tearing the heart from a 9 foot tall bear with your bare hands then holding it over your head on top of a hill shouting in sheer barbaric primal release.
In keeping with my roots, I do a similar thing when I buy a plastic and styrofoam refridgerated package of boneless, skinless chicken breast for $1.99/lb.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
How many of you criticising this legislation are actually hunters? As someone who is both a techie and an avid outdoorsman, I don't see any problem with this legislation. High powered rifles do not ensure a perfect hunt. I personally am against confined game farms where a hunters prey is pretty much domesticated, and I have a problem with doing it over a computer. Hunting can and should still be a challenge. I don't see something like internet hunting promoting, for example, an intimate parent/child bond as there's hours or days spent away from other distractions. I mean, seriously, if you're out hunting, you're off in the woods or the field, and there isn't an instant messenger or e-mail to pop up -- hell, damned cell phones are enough of a problem in the outdoors. It comes down to that Jurrasic Park conundrum: just because you can doesn't mean you should. Hunting over the internet is not a right. I can understand the advantage for disabled individuals, but then again, I hunt with people who are "handicapped" under my state's laws, and you know what -- there are already special accomadations for them, such as allowing the use of ATVs while hunting, or allowing the use of crossbows. And yes, fat, lazy Americans should get up off their asses to actually go hunt, if that's what they want to do. Sorry to say it, but every group of Americans could use some Darwinistic thinning -- if you want to go hunt, you should have to figure out how to use a gun, walk through the wilds, etc. Those who can't figure this out, and, say, accidentally shoot themselves, or die in the wilderness... well, go population control. And, I can see where PETA would call this a triumph on their part. I find it kind of odd to agree with PETA on something, because I'm usually against what they have to say. I mean, think about it this way ... what real arguments can anyone make for allowing this? What convincing situations and reasonings can someone present?
"If God's on our side, he'll stop the next war." -- Bob Dylan
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.
Why is 'whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine' appended to the end of this story?
Because an unbelievable number of people think like that. You know, people who wear nice leather shoes, eat some meat with their dinner, and who have a domestic cat that, despite eating three times a day in the kitchen, stalks and kills neighborhood songbirds just because it's fun. People are spectacularly hypocritical and uninformed about this stuff, and know nothing about the monumental amount of work and cash that hunters put into wildlife management programs and wilderness preservation.
On tonight's dinner menu at my house: pheasant that my wife, my dog, and I laboriously hunted in South Dakota last October. During that outing we pumped a couple thousand dollars into the vapor-thin local economy, walked over miles and miles of farmland, always filling in the host farmers on what we saw in their cornrows and pastures. The "innocent animal" bit only makes sense if you also consider mosquitos innocent, the earthworms that get sliced up by farm equipment creating vegan meals to be innocent, and so on. Bah. This topic is so rife with nonsensical, contradictory emotional baggage and anthropomorphized Disney-esque pablum. Yeesh.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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
What would be useful here is a new term that would permit the distinction between "hunters" and "dickwads with big guns." Currently we lump the two groups together and heap derision upon both for the sins of the latter (and some don't like the former, either).
... and thought myself lucky to have had an interesting day.
... the hunters, of course. It may be shallow to lump hunters together with dickwads with guns ... but the hunters would not suffer so much abuse if the dickwads with guns went away forever.
In my case, I *have* been deer hunting and goose hunting --- myself armed with a camera, and my companions with guns. I've had a bleeding deer carcase in my lap for 45 miles bouncing along in an open jeep in 25F weather,
I don't think I could pull the trigger, and there is that little issue that I'm a vegetarian. But I don't hate "hunters."
I do, however, hate dickwads with guns. In my day job, I put up scientific apparatus in remote places, and dickwads with guns use my antennas for target practice, chop up my coax, steal the guy lines, and generally remind us that the gene pool has a shallow end.
But if there is one group of people who should *really* loathe dickwads with guns, it is
But on some level you now understand what its like to crap in the bushes like a deer.
Or piss on one.
My dad and I were hunting years back on a tree farm. About 20 minutes before sunrise (can't shoot here till then) he went off to take a leak. A minute later I hear some loud rustling and he yelled astring of curses.
He had walked up to a clump of tall grasses and was relieving himself when a buck jumped up from within the grass, where it was sleeping, and ran off. My dad had pissed on it and woke it up.
He said "imagine being that buck's wife and trying to explain who's scent that is!"
R(k)
What is this innocent animals statement? Is the writer trying cast aspirations about hunters?
My brother-in-law is hunter in SW Ontario. We all enjoy the spoils of his "sport" Not much of the animal is wasted. Let me tell you, fresh Ontario Bambi steak off the charcoal BBQ is to die for. I have vension steaks and gound/minced vension for chilli in my freezer too, and will be a far healthier for me than N. American beef that has been pumped full of anti-biotics and growth hormone, fed things that aren't part of its normal diet and has more chance of giving me nvCJD than anything from the UK. And yes, I am aware that there is an epidemic in parts of N. America where elk and deer are dying of a disease similar to BSE.
For all those meat eaters out there who make anti-hunting comments: are you prepared to kill you own animals, gut them, and prepare them? Or will only accept it in the sterilised format from the supermarket? Think about it. Some people have good reasons, some are just hypocrits.
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. 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).
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.
Where do you get your chicken breast for $1.99/lb? It's around $6.50 here. I think I would probably hold it over my head shouting in sheer barbaric primal release too, if I found it for $1.99/lb...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't think this could be funnier if you tried.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Hey, there's an idea. I could set up a fly swatter with a web cam and let the world kill my bugs for me!
I don't think there needs to be a law for everything, but to me this is a case where hunters are saying that they don't want hunting to become inundated with people who are not hunters.
Hunting isn't just about taking out your high-powered rifle and wasting an animal. You have to be out in the environment. You have to be where the animal is in order to kill it. While the technology for finding and killing animals has become more advanced, there is a connection between the hunter and the prey . I'm not a hunter, but every hunter I've ever talked to takes this seriously.
It seems to me that one of the primary reasons people go out early in the morning and spend long hours in the woods looking for animals to kill, then doing the dirty work of dispatching the animals and hauling their dead bodies is that they want to be closer to the life and death struggle of nature. They want to feel less removed from it, not more removed from it.
In that sense, a ban on Internet hunting is a way of saying that they want to preserve this aspect of hunting, so that it is not overwhelmed by people who have no sense of what hunting is all about, and think of it as merely a video game featuring live animals. While I don't hunt because I don't see the need to kill animals in order to feel closer to nature, or in order to prove my dominance over other creatures, I can understand why hunters would want to keep hunting from becoming an exercise that requires no interaction with the natural world.
As a side note, California does have to focus on balancing the budget, but I hardly think it's a question of balancing the budget or passing a law banning Internet hunting.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I don't believe in animals rights, and I know god wanted us to eat them otherwise he wouldn't have made them taste so good. However, people who kill animals for entertainment have mental issues. Any psychologist will tell you that children who kill animals for fun are prime candidates to become serial killers.
If you want to go out in the woods playing super predator, tracking and stalking, have fun. When you catch your prey why not shoot it with a paintball gun and call it a day? I don't get the thrill out of killing animals.
What "critisism of apple"? What are you implying? You're lucky I don't have mod points!!!
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Assuming evolution works, then the fact that our bodies don't make us good hunters should tell you something... like perhaps we shouldn't be hunting.
Ah, but our big brains and opposable thumbs make us very good hunters (us very good tool builders/users can use tools to overcome our lack of running speed, sharp claws and sharp teeth). The calorie density of meat is the only reason your distant (and your fairly recent) ancestors flourished and resulted in a population that included you.
Among primitive man, nobody who lived very long was a vegetarian, and nobody had the luxury of buying their meat already killed and cleanly presented in the supermarket. If they didn't kill the animal themselves, they knew who did.
If you're a strict vegetarian, congrats, I haven't got much criticism for you (though I do dislike a lot of the self-deceptive propaganda you read). If you're not a vegetarian and you buy meat from a supermarket, there's only one response you deserve:
Sit down and shut the fuck up.
Having someone else kill your meat for you doesn't put you in any better ethical position than a hunter who kills his own meat. If anything, the hunter has some control over how much pain the animal feels as it dies. You'll need to be keeping a close watch on the slaughterhouse that supplies your butcher to claim the same ability. As someone who had an informal tour of an operating slaughterhouse, I know I can do better with a rifle. And after taking that tour, which showed me just how horrible the process is that puts cleanly wrapped cuts of meat on the supermarket shelf, I took up hunting again.
Regards,
Ross
It's so much more humane to blow the brains out of your food than to ruthlessly rip it out of the ground. Plants have no chance. They have no fight or flight mechanisms.
If anything, I have a lot more respect for someone that hunts his own meat (as long as he/she is a good shot and knows his limitations), than for someone who buys it neatly packaged at a supermarket.
But, people, if you are going to hunt, be responsible and learn to fcking shoot!.
People willing to take a shot at an animal, but not willing to put in the time to be good enough to make a clean kill (or track down a wounded animal whatever it takes) makes me sick.
They're not any better than "internet hunters".
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Among primitive man, nobody who lived very long was a vegetarian, and nobody had the luxury of buying their meat already killed and cleanly presented in the supermarket. If they didn't kill the animal themselves, they knew who did.
Indian culture is vegetarian (India indians, not native americans). As they are the second most populated country with around 800 million habitants (or almost a billion as americans call them) I would say that you can be vegetarian, live long and procriate.
On top of that mankind has another source of proteins that doesnt involve hunting. Man started domesticating animals thousands of years ago.
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
Thank god I mostly eat meat from the grocery store - there they only kill the guilty animals! "whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine." Oh, and I here they only pluck guilty vegitables as well. Don't want to kill the innocent type.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
"though I do dislike a lot of the self-deceptive propaganda you read"
I'm a vegetarian by default, as my wife's a vegan. Critical thought. If you use it then you are going to be fine. Consider your source, find corroboration, etc... You know, the stuff that no one does anymore...
The far bigger problem, as you pointed out, is the sanitized version of eating meat that most enjoy, and take for granted on levels not seen in many other arenas (in other words, self-deceptive propaganda). Coupled with the fact that we do not need to eat meat to survive (our "big brains" have taught us how to eat healthier on a no meat diet) and the "propaganda" swell shifts. While waiting for the next Outback Steakhouse commercial, my wife has stacks of University studies to read showing the health benefits of going veggie.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin