Tag: Hunting

Is Tony Blair Hypocritical on Fox Hunting?

Last week I reported on
the British Prime Minister Tony Blair once again taking up the cause against
fox hunting. The Labour Party previously tried to ban fox hunting, but
had to back down after huge demonstrations by supporters of the sport,
and some observers suspect Blair might pull back from his recent pronouncement.
The theory goes that Blair is using the fox hunting issue to court animal
rights groups, which are significant contributors to Labour, while also
trying to avoid excessively alienating sportsmen and their supporters.

After BlairÂ’s latest statements,
however, supporters of fox hunting point out that the anti-fox hunting
proposal is hypocritical since the British government itself funds the
hunting and killing of foxes in Scotland and Wales. The foxes are killed
as part of a pest control scheme, and all indications are that any ban
on fox hunting will contain a special exemption for the government-sponsored
culling of foxes.

Until the 1970s foxes in Scotland
and Wales were removed by the use of leg traps. The leg traps were banned
because they were alleged to be cruel and so the government
began subsidizing the hunting of the foxes. The animals are typically
tracked with hounds and then killed by rifle shot. Conservative and pro-hunt
member of parliament Paul Atkinson told the BBC that by banning fox hunting
by private individuals while simultaneously subsidizing fox hunting in
Scotland and Wales means “what they want to do is put people in prison
who ride around on horses with red coats,” alluding to the fact that
it is primarily the upper class that hunts foxes in Great Britain.

Tony Blair Says He's Committed to Banning Fox Hunting with Dogs

The last time animal activists in Great Britain tried to ban fox Hunting with
dogs what looked like an easy win turned into an embarrassing debacle
for Tony Blair’s Labor government. Apparently it is not an embarrassment
Blair will easily forget as in a nationally televised debate Blair vowed,

It [fox hunting] will be banned. We will get the vote to ban
it as soon as we possibly can. We had one try last session. It was blocked
by the Conservatives in the House of Commons and the House of Lords
and we’re looking now at ways of bringing it forward in a future session
that allows people to have a vote and actually carry it through.

This pleased the International Fund for Animal Welfare which wants to ban hunting altogether in the United
Kingdom by Jan. 1, 2000. According to Mike Baker, executive director of
the IFAW, “Hunting wild mammals with dogs is cruel and unnecessary and
the government has recognized that it has no place in a modern Britain.”

Courts in New Jersey, Illinois upholds hunter harassment statutes

In separate cases appellate courts in New Jersey and Illinois have upheld statutes
designed to prevent anti-hunting activists from using protests to disrupt hunting.

In the New Jersey case, three New Jersey residents were represented by Anna
Charlton and Gary Francione of Rutgers Law School. Their lawsuit contended that
the statute unconstitutionally restricted the three resident’s right to free
speech. By restricting where and when the activists could protest against hunting,
the lawsuit argued, the state of New Jersey was unconstitutionally impinging
on their right to express their views to hunters.

The appellate court upheld the statute so long as it is used to establish standards
on the time, place and manner of anti-hunting protests rather than being used
to quash all anti-hunting protests altogether. As the court put it,

[t]his construction places a reasonable limitation on the reach of the Hunter
Harassment Statute in that it circumscribes the area where protesters may
not be free to express their anti-hunting ideas, while preserving areas outside
the immediate proximity of the hunting grounds for that purpose . . . By defining
interference as a form of physical impediment, coupled with the general and
specific intent requirements that solely implicate conduct, the statute is
not an overboard regulation of First Amendment rights.

In the Illinois case, a court there granted an injunction to the Woodstock
Hunt Club in Woodstock, Illinois, to bar members of the Chicago Animal Rights
Coalition from protesting on the road outside the club using megaphones, air
horns, sirens and other noisemaking devices. Chicago Animal Rights Coalition
member Steve Hindi was arrested in 1996 for flying a motorized paraglider over
hunters in order to scare away geese. Hindi was arrested and eventually sentenced
to probation for violating the hunter interference statute.

Previously the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a portion of the hunter interference
statute that unconstitutionally regulated the content of anti-hunting protests,
but upheld the portion of the statute that set time and place restrictions on
anti-hunting protests.

Which seems like an excellent compromise to me. Certainly animal rights activists
should have the right to protest hunting and to communicate their opposition
in public. On the other hand, this right to protest can be accommodated while
also preserving the right of hunters to hunt without activists intentionally
disrupting them.

The Makah Get Their Whale, Endure Invective from Activists

The long-running controversy
over the Makah‘s efforts to restore tribal traditions by Hunting a whale
ended recently when the tribe finally managed to get its whale. The Makah
had voluntarily abandoned whale hunting earlier this century, but reserved
the right to resume the practice under provisions of a treaty with the
United States.

The fascinating thing about
the controversy was how quickly environmentalist and animal rights activists
devolved to threats and racist slurs against the Makah. Usually environmentalists
extol the virtues of indigenous cultures, contrasting them with the evil
patterns of consumption and exploitation supposedly unique to Western
culture. But once the Makah deviated from this New Age fantasy, they were
shown little mercy from activists.

There were the death threats
against individuals as well as bomb threats called in to the Makah reservation
school. T-shirts were sold with the slogan “Save a whale, kill a Makah.”
At protests against the hunt, activists were heard calling the Makah “savages.”

The Seattle Times published
a lengthy story printing about a dozen of the more-racist anti-hunting
letters it received. One letter concluded, “these people want to rekindle
their traditional way of life by killing an animals that has probably
twice the mental capacity they have.” Another suggested that, “we should
also be able to take their land if they can take our whales.” Or consider
this gem of a letter that complained, “Natives were often referred to as
‘savages,’ and it seems little has changed.”

As Alexandra Harmon, an assistant
professor at the University of Washington American Indian Studies Center
put it, “Again and again in American history, non-Indian Americans have
demanded that Indians act or live in some way other than Indians have
chosen. The current Makah story is a lesson about how had it is to recognize
and resist that same ethnocentric impulse today.”

Source:

E-mails, phone messages full of threats, invective. Alex Tizon, Seattle Times, May 23, 1999.

Canned Hunts?

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.

Enough with the hunting videogames already

Of all the things to worry
about in the world, the ongoing controversy over Hunting videogames and
their parodies has to be one of the silliest.

A group of hunters is still
upset over Simon & Schuster’s Deer Avenger game which
gives animals guns and has them hunt down human beings. It’s a semi-amusing
parody, but nothing to get worked up about.

Several groups of hunters
including Hunting Trail, Safari Club International, the International
Hunting and Fishing Museum, and Bowhunting.net among others announced a
boycott of Simon & Schuster over the game. Boycotter David Parker
told Wired the boycott is needed “to uphold our reputation
– that we do care for the environment, we do care for children and family
morals.”

Several gay/lesbian groups
also complained about an effeminate character in the game with suggestion
that the character amounted to gay bashing.

Come on guys, it’s a parody
of a video game – get over it already.

Sources:

Hunters blast away at videogames. Pete Danko, Wired News, February 3, 1999.

Videogame’s cheap shot. Steve Friess, Wired News, January 28, 1999.