Internet Hunting Banned in California 984
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."
Wait... Logic Check... (Score:1, Insightful)
I am not supporting internet hunting but come on guys, can you REALLY call any modern day hunting a "real hunt", there is NO challenge.
Snide remark (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Desensitisation (Score:1, Insightful)
as sitting at your computer and clicking away
desensitises one to the actual action of killing
a living creature. Desensitisation of this sort is _never_ a good thing.
Back under your bridge (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
spears only! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does there need to be a law for everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Haha, "sport" hahaha (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Back under your bridge (Score:3, Insightful)
The midwest is more infested with humans than with deer.
Where can I apply for a human hunting license?
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, that wasn't inflammatory.
News... (Score:2, Insightful)
whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine
appended to the end of this story? I really don't have an opinion about hunting, but trolling the front page (to get more ad impressions from comment posters?) isn't cool.
Re:Why does there need to be a law for everything? (Score:4, Insightful)
You see, they don't want unlicensed people using firearms in the state of California, especially when said persons aren't even IN the state but are using Video over IP and a computer to aim and fire a real gun.
Internet hunting is, form a safety perspective, a very dumb and dangerous idea.
Re:Priorities -- what can you say for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
dupes don't bother me, and the trolls... well I know what I was getting myself into.
But yeah, this pushing of your ideals on the rest of us is bullshit.. even if I agree with you about sport hunting. (you want to hunt for food/clothing, that's a different story).
Headlines with political bias should be edited.
Re:News... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
grocery store hunters (Score:2, Insightful)
If so, while I disagree with you, I can respect your feelings.
But if not, you're a grocery store hunter and a fucking hypocrite.
I don't hunt. I do eat meat. And I'm smart enough to know that, regardless of method used at the slaughter house, it ain't "sporting", and an animal died for that nice t-bone steak I'm having for dinner tonight.
Re:Snide remark (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the submitter was probably cricitizing the concept of killing an animal with a high-powered rifle from a hundred feet away when it has no hope of ever killing you as a "sport", let alone one that could be disgraced. It's kind of like saying that long range deployment systems "disgrace the sport" of pressing a big red button that launches a nuclear missile. The concept of "disgracing the sport" is sort of dubious because there isn't really a "sport" to begin with. You press the "I Win" button and you're done.
Re:Snide remark (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess it's all in the head of the hunter. Personally, I've eaten everything I've ever hunted and killed and have baited nary a one.
I don't see the sport in baiting and animal, hiding in a tower and then shooting him from above. I don't get the people like Ted Nugent who think they have to show themselves as the ultimate predator and hunt elephants (I actually caught part of that on TV, how sporting can Ted be to have a bunch of Africans trap an elephant so he can shoot it with a god-caliber rifle up close?) and I don't believe shooting caged animals is hunting.
It's more "sport" to drag your ass out of bed at 3AM (or your equivalent of 0 dark thirty) drive way the hell out into the woods, hike to your hunting grounds and wait for the sun to come up so you can start hunting your prey. (We have a no fire before sunrise law in WA)
Hunt with a bow, that's a challenge.
Re:Hunting is NECESSARY (Score:3, Insightful)
The most "humane" thing to do would be to stop encroaching on their environment and leave them be.
Re:Back under your bridge (Score:1, Insightful)
Football is a sport. Hunting is not. (Score:1, Insightful)
I am a hunter. When I hunt animals, I am out in the woods with them. Sometimes I find game and sometimes I do not...it all depends on how quiet I am, if I'm tracking correctly, and how well I know the behavior of the critter I'm looking for. It is NOT a sport.
I am out out there to get meat to put on the table. If I can't eat it, I won't kill it. If I kill it, I eat it. It's as simple as that.
Any yahoo who would take part in in such an abomination as this deserves jail time.
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, but you didn't read the last paragraph of the article, which says:
Supporters have suggested the remote hunting could be beneficial for hunters with disabilities
Apparently it's some God given right to be able to sit at home in a wheelchair and kill shit.
Innocent animals? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude...don't you know what site you're visiting? But I have to say, it's refreshing to see a bias AGAINST cruelty on here for a change. Check out the majority of responses to this story for the typical Slashdot reader response: Beef is yummy. Let's eat meat. Screw PeTA. Etc.
But this time, here's a clear-cut case of something grotesquely cruel. I mean, how could a decent person say that it's OK to artificially stock animals in small fenced areas, and then have a remotely fired gun so people can blast these creatures through the Internet? Sorry, that's just flat-out wrong, and even most hunters would say so.
I thought I'd pass along a couple hunting-related links, taken from just the past couple of days. First, be sure to read Matthew Scully's superb article "Fear Factories," [cok.net] in this week's American Conservative. Animal rights is often incorrectly thought of as some fringe cause, only embraced by people on the left. Here, Scully writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue.
I publish Vegan.com, and I have some commentary on Scully's article on my podcast [vegan.com] from yesterday. You might want to listen to that as well.
And, what the heck, here's another article [fark.com] taken just today from Fark. One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter. Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming: Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Snide remark (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hunting on foot much safer (Score:1, Insightful)
fox hunting was completly banned for a year in the uk while we had a foot and mouth outbreak among cattle, to prevent its spread. Was there any increase in fox population / attacks by foxes on livestock? no.
this arrogance among hunters and farmers that only they can manage the countryside / population of animals is completly moronic, the world has managed for millions of years just fine without you interfering deciding that creatures need culling.
Re:Can't control offshore shooting (Score:3, Insightful)
It is so sick, yet I think it is way too early to consider banning it, and I don't buy the "less noble than 'real hunting' concept".
Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hunting (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not against hunting deer. Nor against hunting deer via robot hunters as long as the venison is taken with the intention of consumption.
But the argument that it is either hunting or letting the big bad wolf eat your children is not going to scare all of us. People can exists with cougars and wolfs just fine with the proper precautions.
The results of killing all the wolves has had bad effect in the hundred years since their elimination. As you say biodiversity has been harmed by largely unrestrained deer populations in some areas, but increasing hunting allowances is not the only answer.
Re:Hunting (Score:1, Insightful)
The old 'kill the deer to save it from dying' arguement.
I wonder how the ecosystems of the world managed at all for so many millions of years before humans came around to 'balance' it all.
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, what really pisses me off is hunting wolves from aircraft in Alaska. Where the hell is the sport in that, I want to know.
Re:Hunting (Score:5, Insightful)
Wolves have been driven to near extinction in a great chunk of Asia, Europe and the Americas. Nobody likes living with large predators on their doorstep, and for that reason, they've been trapped and hunted to a shadow of original population levels.
Yes, we caused the problem, but our options right now to fix it are as follows: reintroduce high end predators to areas now contested for use with humans ( I favour this approach, and some places like the Algonquin Park have a blanket ban of wolf hunting, but not all agree ) or manually cull deer, etc, numbers. It's really that simple.
Of course, yes, the ecosystem will eventually rebalance to a new, diversity-poor, deer-heavy state if we do nothing - just as it has for 'so many millions of years' - but I like the ecosystem we have now, and I'd like to see steps to see it preserved.
-- YLFI
What the F? (Score:1, Insightful)
What simple-minded zealots modded this unbelievably stupid straw-man "argument" as insightful? This is why it's so hard to be liberal these days. I don't want to be on the same side as these assholes.
ethics of hunting (Score:1, Insightful)
However, I think that the stance in this post:
shows some fuzzy thinking.
Like most /.-ers, I'm an omnivore. I'm known to eat the occassional burger, ham sandwhich, carnitas burrito, etc.
I consider it far more moral, as a consumer of animal protein, to harvest animals that have lived full natural lives outdoors, than it is to outsource the process, and delegate to others the raising, handling, and slaughter of animals in factory farms ("there are vast fields, Neo, where...").
The more I think about it, the more I think that I should start hunting, and should ONLY eat meat that comes from creatures that got to live outside.
Think if it from a hunter's perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What the F? (Score:2, Insightful)
Allow me to go so far as to also say that if they were starving each other out, it still wouldn't be ok to shoot them. :-)
Overpopulation (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, death by overpopulation, malnourishment, and disease is much better for the "innocent" animals than feeding my family after I spend months developing an effective load to cleanly kill them, years target practicing, and weeks tracking the animals in the outdoors to get the perfect shot.
Re:Hunting (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in BC, in the woods. We have wolves, bears, and cougars. There was a steaming pile of bear shit in my yard 2 days ago. The thought of needing a shotgun to protect myself is ludicrous.
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:1, Insightful)
The other option that you seem not to have picked up on is simply to stop buying animal flesh at the supermarket.
Sadistic people (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hunting on foot much safer (Score:1, Insightful)
Hunters only replaced the other predators (that the hunters killed)
Re:A good use for this. (Score:1, Insightful)
Thanks for the info!
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A good use for this. (Score:2, Insightful)
We should all just up and die.
In that line of reasoning we shouldn't try to fly
either since we have no wings.
Our bodies make us excellent hunters, in fact.
So good, the ballance is tipped so strongly in our favor we could cause the extinction of the prey species.
That hideously bulbous skull on your shoulders is there for a reason.
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:4, Insightful)
Way to completely miss the point. He wasn't asking for the deer's approval, just like you don't ask the cow. He's merely taking personal responsibility for the killing, which you appear to object to.
There is a school of thought among hunters that personally using the resources provided by an animal you killed provides meaning to the death. Death is a part of life. If taking an animal's life helps to sustain my own and if the animal felt as little pain as possible during that death, I'm not going to feel the slightest bit guilty about my actions.
And that doesn't only mean I'm comfortable buying meat at the supermarket that someone else killed for me. I also include hunting for meat myself, exactly like the poster you replied to.
Regards,
Ross
Re:Stay Home? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A good use for this. (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be fair fight, at least with a deer.
I wouldn't class fighting against a herbivore at all as fair, but go figure.
Re:Wait... Logic Check... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sadistic people (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, that 300lbs black bear I bagged 3 seasons ago would have just been royaly pissed off to be pelted by a paintball gun. Bad enough it was able to move about 10 meters before giving up the ghost when hit with a heavy broadhead arrow (scarry! No firearms allowed to be carried afield durring bow-hunting season.)
Re:Stay Home? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stay Home? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Priorities -- what can you say for it? (Score:2, Insightful)
For a law against internet hunting? My argument against that is that it is not the job of the government to teach ethics and morality.
If you actually think internet hunting is bad then talk to your friends and neighbors about it. Participate in protest marches. Pass out flyers on the street corner. Even make posts on slashdot if you have to. If you make a convincing enough argument I will agree with you. But please please do not go to the government and use the government for force me to agree with you. That is not what the government is there for.
Re:Snide remark (Score:3, Insightful)
A vegetarians perspective... (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Those are clearly off-topic rants by people who confuse a desire to prevent random acts of creulty with an inability to cope eating animal flesh. Change your filtering to a threshold of 2 or 3, and most of that problem goes away.
"[... a conservative] writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue."
Animal agriculture is also clearly an off-topic subject having nothing to do with the issue of point-and-click animal slaughter.
"I publish Vegan.com"
Ah... I guess I should have heard the other shoe dropping....
"One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter."
Ok, stupid hunter. That, by the way, is called manslaughter and as you say, "most hunters would agree with that."
"Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting."
I really hope you don't think that anyone thinks this way. Hunting accidents are almost always the fault of some lame-brain who can't tell his head from a moose, and no one is going to defend that kind of thing. Painting all hunters with that rather agregiously wide brush is rather unfortunate, however and borders on a straw man.
"Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them."
You understand that this is a collection of straw-man arguments and highly argumentative, right?
What exactly was the goal of your post? Were you just trying to get a few vegans riled up so that they would read your site, or were you actually trying to engage in some kind of rational discussion?
If the latter, please try again. Your frist attempt was buried in too much noise.
Re:You're violating my rights! (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:A good use for this. (Score:1, Insightful)
I've been hunting since I was 5 (though I was only carrying meat, not using a gun myself until quite a few years later), and I have to say that that's the most thoughtless argument against hunting that I've ever read. If you're actively trying to turn it into a fair fight, you've already missed the point of hunting. You don't try to make it 'fair' unless you're doing it just to get your kicks by stretching the act of killing something to be as entertaining as possible. Anyone who goes out of their way to make their hunting trips 'fair' is seriously fucked up.
Now, while your parent might not have presented his position with amazing eloquence, I do understand what he's trying to say. An important aspect of hunting is making or witnessing the kill firsthand. The main reason for this is that you gain some understanding of the value of life. You are directly confronted by the reality that your existence is maintained by the sacrifice of other lives--an important truth that is concealed from most people behind cellophane and foam.
The reason that most hunters I know* find this point-and-kill deal disgusting is that it removes all of the values and lessons learned through the experience and reduces it to pure, effortless entertainment. For the 'hunter', the fact you've just extinguished a life is, at best, surreal.
*Any hunter that reads hunting magazines knows about these operations, as practically all of them have had several articles on the subject.
Innocent animals? Get a grip, Timmy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hunting is a NORMAL part of human life. Remember evolution? We're carnivorous Timmy. We have carnivore teeth. Animals are attractive because they are food. Only dumbass urban dwelling, Smartcar driving bunny huggers think deer are cute, mostly because they've never seen deer except in the zoo.
So Timmy, you ignorant city slicker, how cute is it when Bambi and her mummy step out in front of your car at dusk on the highway and freeze in the headlights? You're doing 70 mph in your environmentally friendly Smartcar, and Bambi is coming right in there to share the front seat with your animal loving self plus whoever else is in the car. Wife, kids, girlfriend... Happens every single friggin' day on the highways around New York City. Because why? Because no hunting therefore too many deer, that's why.
Or how cute is it when you see Bambi and her mother and brothers, sisters, cousins, second cousins twice removed and a whole passle of others standing in the middle of a denuded forest where there's nothing green less than seven feet off the ground. The deer are nothing but skin and bone, they have putrescent sores, and they smell like an uncleaned hamster cage. That cute? Happening right now in the Pennsylvania woods around Philly. Because why? No hunting, that's why.
How about Lyme disease? Cute eh? Explosion of deer ticks EVERYWHERE in the Northeast to match the deer explosion, you can't wear shorts in your own backyard. Because why? Because guys like Timmy insist on gassing off about "innocent animals" and smearing the morals of hunters. You can't hunt or even target shoot in the urban Northeast without being a social pariah.
Now think about the legions of Canada Geese on ever goddamn lawn in the USA. And goose poo. And West Nile virus. Be brave Timmy, you can think it. Yes! Congratulations Timmy you have got it in one. No hunters = bad things happen.
Timmy, your religious views are getting people killed in car wrecks, ruining the environment and spreading disease. Actions have consequences, you should maybe think about that a bit.
And yes, web hunting is unsportsmanlike. Get out and look it in the eye when you shoot it. And eat what you shoot.
Re:Hunting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A good use for this. (Score:2, Insightful)
Murder by Internet Proxy? (Score:3, Insightful)
How long before a real-life hunter walks into the frame, and some jackass takes a potshot, killing a human being by clicking their mouse? Will it really matter all that much (aside from lawyer wrangling in the court) whether the murderer-by-click is a snot-nosed prepubescent who figured he'd never get caught and it would be "cool to draw real blood," or a self-righteous anti-hunting zealot who thinks offing a hunter would "serve the cause?" Frankly, to the victim and their family, probably not.
I have no problem with hunting for meat. I like meat, and I love venison (though to be fair, I don't much care for hunting. Sweaty, dirty work and not very entertaining for me, but then, I'm not much of an outdoorsman. That, however, is a question of personal taste) and frankly, the better the herds of deer are culled, the better off the entire eco-system is. But allowing anyone with a computer and an internet link to operate a deadly weapon is criminally stupid. Eventually it will be used to kill a real human being, by some amoral fuck (and the Internet is full of those) who thinks, for whatever reason, it would be real cool to click on that link and ice the guy in the orange vest who happened to walk across the video feed.
Re:Hunting (Score:2, Insightful)
I would never dream of living where I live without a shotgun. We had a rabid fox attack 2 children and 3 adults just less than a year ago.
If it weren't for shotguns, there would be even more rabid animals running around attacking children.
Needless to say we stopped that rabies outbreak . .
Re:A good use for this. (Score:3, Insightful)