One of HSUS’s big targets is preserve hunting, where they try to make it sound like you’re shooting these caged up animals. The sad thing is, other hunters join in condemning this.  The Boston Globe article actually manages to be pretty balanced:
abral shot a hairy Russian boar inside the Hillside Game Ranch, 400 acres enclosed by a 6-foot wire fence in this speck of a town between Bangor and Calais. It is one of 11 big-game shooting preserves that operate with little notice in northern New England, drawing people with the promise of killing a European red stag, say, or American buffalo, held within the compound.
Four hundred acres is hardly what I’d call confined. If you look at the descriptions of how people are hunting in these preserves, it looks an awful lot like hunting outside of these preserves:
The camouflage-clad Cabrals climbed into a tree hunting stand, knelt down, and silently waited. Mulgrew climbed into one a few hundred feet away.
And now, you have hunters who are siding with the animal rights whack jobs:
Nuse is president of Orion – The Hunter’s Institute, a Montana-based group dedicated to the preservation of ethical hunting. The group supported a 2000 ban on captive hunting in that state.
“Is it the same as wild hunting? Absolutely not,” said William Hart of Pembroke, an avid hunter in the wild and in game parks. “But there are people who have huge mortgages and not a lot of time, but they want to hunt . . . so they go to the game preserves.”
HSUS is using the same tactics on hunting that the anti-gun groups used on assault weapons. Divide one politically weak portion of the community away from the main body, destroy it, and then go back and do the same. Repeat until you have what you want: total prohibition. Unless hunters bind together, and stand up for all lawful hunting, they are finished. HSUS will succeed in what they are trying to do.
I don’t think there is anything unethical about hunting on a large game preserve, provided the animals are free to move about, and the hunts are in accordance with standard practices. If we can raise animals on a farm for slaughter, I don’t see the problem with raising animals to be hunted. If you outlaw one, how long before HSUS begins questioning the other?
If I have a farm raised elk and I can get someone to pay me $10,000 to let me shoot him in an 1/8 acre pen so he can put the antlers on his wall without getting cold and tired, what is the problem with that?
This is just another attempt at a wedge issue. Horn hunters vs. meat hunters, low fence vs. high fence, turkey hunting with rifles vs. shotguns, antler restrictions vs. no antler restrictions, etc. They are all tools to try and divide people that have similar attitudes.
Could one pay to use the stun gun on cattle in a slaughterhouse? I would bet “Yes” and the price would be less than a canned hunt.
Can one hunt over bait? Usually not.
Can one hunt over a regular feed station in a large fenced area? Usually yes.
Ethics of hunting including fair chase are blurred in the canned hunts, but that is for the hunters and ranch owners, not the government, to decide. The state benefits from a tax or fee on a hunting license, and regulates hunting to promote more of it. So the state can leave this to the hunters to decide for themselves.
Don’t want to shoot an animal on a fenced game ranch? Then you don’t have to.
The boar in the quote almost certainly has a home range that is normally larger than 400 acres, while other animals would have a natural home range that would keep them from ever seeing the fence.
Does that matter? Not really. You can’t ask someone that wants to ban all hunting if any particular type of hunting is acceptable. To them, it’s all bad.
Last I checked the King Ranch in Texas was bigger than Rhode Island. It’s certainly bigger than many many real islands where hunting is allowed. Are natural enclosures okay while man made ones are not?
Last I checked the King Ranch in Texas was bigger than Rhode Island. It’s certainly bigger than many many real islands where hunting is allowed. Are natural enclosures okay while man made ones are not?
That’s a damned good point.