Recently animal rights
activists seem to be making some inroads into restricting and, in some
cases, banning so-called “canned hunts.” In a canned hunt, animals are
let loose in fenced-in area and hunters pay a fee to shoot the animals.
In April, Oregon’s Fish and
Wildlife Commission voted unanimously to ban canned hunts. The Louisiana
legislature was considering a bill to prohibit canned hunts and similar
bans and regulations are being considered elsewhere.
There seem to be two main arguments
animal rights activists are using against canned hunts.
The first is that the animals,
which are often exotic, nonnative species, could escape and threaten the
local wildlife. Are these the same activists who regularly condone the
release of nonnative species “liberated” from labs and fur farms, and dismiss
fears of threat to local wildlife as anti-animal propaganda? Regardless
of the hypocrisy involved, this fear certainly might call for reasonable
regulation. Requiring those who operate such as requiring establishments
to meet certain minimum requirements might make sense. This
concern alone, however, certainly does not warrant an outright ban.
The argument that really seems
to win people over, however, is that canned hunts are somehow unfair.
As Oregon legislator Ryan Deckart told The Oregonian, “It’s not
[a] fair chase.” If that is to be the standard for killing animals —
that the animal must first be given the opportunity to escape — then
Deckart should introduce legislation immediately banning slaughter houses
which, the last time I checked, rarely allow the animals they kill or
process any semblance of a “fair chase.”
This is a clear instance of
the “muddled middle” at work — it makes no sense to say that a person
can’t fence in land, populate it with animals and pay others to kill said
animals if the animals are exotic and the killers are hunters, but that
the same setup is perfectly okay if the animals are cows or chickens or
pigs and the killers are from a nearby slaughterhouse. Either both situations
are moral or they are equally immoral.
This whole issue seems to
me like a case of legislation by intuition — hunting repulses many who
wouldn’t think twice about grabbing a hamburger at McDonald’s — rather
than by rationally looking at the issue.