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Drone-Assisted Hunting To Be Illegal In Alaska
garymortimer (1882326) writes in with news about rules for hunting with drones in Alaska. "At its March 14-18 meeting in Anchorage, the seven-member Alaska Board of Game approved a measure to prohibit hunters from spotting game with such aircraft, often called drones. While the practice does not appear to be widespread, Alaska Wildlife Troopers said the technology is becoming cheaper, easier to use and incorporates better video relay to the user on the ground. A drone system allowing a hunter or helper to locate game now costs only about $1,000, said Capt. Bernard Chastain, operations commander for the Wildlife Troopers. Because of advances in the technology and cheaper prices, it is inevitable hunters seeking an advantage would, for example, try to use a drone to fly above trees or other obstacles and look for a moose or bear to shoot, he said."
Because at some point you can't call this "hunting" anymore. Good for Alaska.
Just because you call it game doesn't make it a sport. I really do not understand the appeal of killing animals for fun. To get a meal? Sure. To deal with a pest? Makes sense. To protect yourself? No problem even though it rarely happens. For environmental stewardship? Great. But just for fun? With high powered rifles and drones? That makes that person a sadistic asshole. We're already WAY too good at killing things. If you are out to kill things for "fun" then make it a level playing field and do it with nothing more than a knife.
Someone who would use a drone to hunt is like someone who plays a game with "god mode" enabled. They're completely missing the point. The point isn't to kill the animal at any cost. Someone who can afford a drone isn't doing it for their next meal. They're just killing to get their rocks off. Pity we aren't more evolved than that.
In Maine it's legal to bait an area until bears come to it, then chase them up a tree with a pack of dogs, then walk up and shoot them out of the tree.
This pervasive mentality (shooting wolves from a helicopter) and now this new drone thing is what gives hunters a bad name.
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ah, you sound like one of those civilized types that prefers his animals to live shitty lives with no freedoms and then nicely packaged up for others to feast on. Strangely, exactly the same way a civilized person lives and dies.
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Citizens should have the right to arm bears
How is shooting something from hundreds of feet away with a high powered rifle any kind of sport?
That's because by the original rules the deer got the rifles every alternate week. Ever since we changed things around I've boycotted the sport.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Actually, you might be surprised how much of the US population still hunts for food. Granted these are generally poor rural people and thus are poorly represented on the internet and media so they are somewhat invisible, but there is a significant number of them spread around the country and they hunt more frequently then the recreational crowd.
Is it legal to hunt drones in Alaska?
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Do you understand the appeal of first person shooters?
There is a HUGE difference between doing something imaginary in a video game and killing a real, live creature or a real live person.
Yea, namely that one is a method of food acquisition that requires training, certification, and licensing, and the other is a way for little kids (or people with little kid mentalities) to play up fantasies about murdering other humans.
Here's a hint, in a video game no one actually dies and all the participants know that.
No one actually dies when hunting either. At least, you hope no one actually dies, but accidents do happen.
Trouble is, if a kid's only interaction with firearms is playing a fantasy game where "no one dies," if/when they encounter a real firearm they aren't going to understand just how dangerous of a tool it is. Kids who hunt know the difference.
It's one thing to fantasize about something and quite another to actually do it in the real world.
True. Now apply that to your own thought process: your fantasy about what hunting is, and how hunters are motivated, is one thing, and reality is another.
We're talking about people getting amusement from the real world suffering of another creature.
Proof that you don't know jack about hunting, other than what [insert preferred 'envronmentalist' group] told you to think. FWIW, most hunters try to avoid causing the animals to suffer.
That's why we invented target practice.
I hope you can actually understand why that is very very very different.
I do. I hope you can understand how unreasonably uninformed you are presenting yourself as.
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Probably less affluent hunters. Using aircraft (or FPV drones) would allow wealthy hunters to potentially lock out subsistence hunters who have little to no income, or perhaps for whom this is an important cultural activity, rather than a fun trip for the weekend.
its also because hunting is supposed to be a 'sport'. Hunters constantly are getting access to better and better technology, the Moose, and deer not so much. They playing field is already plenty slanted.
Over hunting can ruin things for everyone, even non hunters. There is a legitimate social interest in NOT allowing hunters to become more effective.
In some ways hunting on public game lands is like an MMO. Some people might like to use cheat codes, to avoid the grind of tracking and stalking or sitting and waiting, potentially spending all weekend and coming home without a prize, etc. If you let some people do this though it would ruin the 'game' for everyone.
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Alaska does a really good job managing its fisheries; probably the best in the world. Commercial fishing "season" is not just a "catch as much as you can" free-for-all. It starts on a specified date, each ship is allocated a certain tonnage it's allowed to catch, and they have until a certain date to catch it. The use of spotter planes (actually I'm not sure they use those in Alaska, but hypothetically) would allow a ship to meet its quota more quickly, thus minimizing cost and risk to the lives of those at sea.
If there were commercial hunting, then it'd be the same. Drones would make sense because it would make the activity safer and more cost-effective. However, "commercial hunting" turned into cattle ranching several thousand years ago. The only remaining forms of hunting are sustenance and recreational. While an argument for drones could be made for sustenance hunters (people living in remote areas who have to kill wild game for their food), it contradicts the rationale for recreational hunters who are presumably doing it for "the thrill of the hunt."
From what I recall from the hunting laws, you had to have a 72-hour "cooling down" period after using a helicopter or aircraft to spot animals.
Honestly, we (my father and I) were more interested in terrain issues than we were the animals. You want to try to find the path of least resistance, and also making sure that we could actually cross specific rivers, and at what points they were broken open during the winter time. At some places the snow would be so deep that if you stepped wrong, you would be up to your neck almost instantly. That doesn't even count making sure that you weren't in a hunting route for a grizzly bear, which makes things even more difficult. Having something that is the size of a VW beetle running at you full-bore at around 40 MPH is not something I want to ever repeat. It was hard living. It was more a survival thing for us.
Every winter, there was a herd of about 400,000 caribou that would come within about 50 miles of town. Honestly, getting to the animals was the hard part. Getting one was as easy as taking a 200 yard shot with a high-powered rifle.
Keep in mind that where I lived, we were 500 miles away from any major city, and the only way in and out was by aircraft. We actually lived off of what we killed and made use of it. We weren't out there looking for the big racks. We were doing it for survival, and we also followed the rules.