Jamie
10-04-2007, 01:33 PM
Hey guys, I found this on another site and I thought I would post it up for discusion
Enjoy
Jamie
There is no such thing as ethical hunting.
by Hugh Randall
This is simply because one man’s ethics is another man’s crime.
Some believe that shooting a standing animal is unsporting while others believe that you should not shoot a running animal because of the potential of wounding. Some even believe that you should never take a shot over 200 metres while the opposition would say if you can’t successfully shoot a buck at over 200 meters then you can’t shoot and shouldn’t be hunting
Many believe that hunting with dogs, lying in wait at a waterhole or over bait, shooting from a vehicle, sniping at long range or hunting on fenced farms is unethical while other may hold an opposite view.
Therefore if you are in the Eastern Cape you hunt bushbuck with beaters and dogs and shoot running animals at 300 meters. In Namibia you shoot springbuck of the back of an Uri and in Zimbabwe you hunt leopard with dogs or over bait.
Essentially ethics appear to be a set of rules developed by an individual or groups of individuals to make the hunt more challenging and therefore more enjoyable. These so called ethics are dependant on the circumstances or environment in which the hunt takes place. They are designed to meet the hunter’s needs not that of the animal. If you asked an animal what it wanted given that death is inevitable, I believe the animal would say that it wanted to live a good life and die without suffering. While I am not a trophy hunter it appears to me that trophy hunting fulfils this – the animal lives long to be a trophy and because of the cost is shot with precision.
I have always been of the opinion that there is no such thing as ethics when you kill – there is only an objective and that is to kill quickly.
In the final analysis hunting is killing – flat shooting rifles with perfect bullets, high powered scopes, ballistic tables, range finders, and rests make bullet delivery to one third of a minute of angle very possible.
I recently saw a video of a resting deer being taken at 860 meters. The buck was clearly hit in the spine and killed very quickly. I have to admire the shooting and the fact that the hunter knew the bullet drop and the wind conditions to be able to make the kill. That takes an enormous amount of practice and tests to achieve that. However many would be horrified with the range and the fact that the buck was lying down.
As to the issue of hunting, there is no doubt in my mind that hunting = conservation and this is easily empirically proven.
In this economically driven world, if you want to conserve something give it an economic value.
The result of this has been an explosion in the number of kudu in SA – especially in the Eastern Cape.
It is a fact that conservation starts with the soil, then the flora and finally the fauna.
There are 300 new game farms a year in SA which have to conserve the environment (soil and flora) for the game to exist.
Without the game having an economic value in terms of the eco tourism, hunting and culling (trophy, skins and meat) the reason for their existence would disappear.
And then there is the fact that there needs to be a replacement for natural predators such as lion etc. and that replacement is the hunter and is man not part of nature?
Man is a predator or at least those of us that kill and eat our own meat are.
The rest are scavengers, eating what others kill for them.
Of course we kill millions of chickens, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle (even day old calves) a day in SA and no one has a problem with that except the animal rightists.
The maybe 500 wild animals that are shot a day is insignificant in the overall scheme of things and just like the domestic animals this is sustainable killing.
Finally, we get excited when we see a wild animal like an antelope – why?
This is instinctive – we are essentially still cave men and that excitement is because we are seeing potential.
We get even more excited when we see other predators because we are seeing competition.
So I say to people who are critical of hunting but eat meat that they support killing and therefore cannot criticize the killers. Those that only eat fish are just as bad because millions of fish die a suffocating death every day and those who are vegans are proposing the extinction of all animals because they will have no value which will mean the end of the need to conserve natural fauna and the soils because they will only be valuable if they are edible or arable.
I recently shot a bushbuck ram in the head running at 75 which had been flushed by beaters and chased by dogs and I used a rifle that cost R20 000 firing a bullet that had been turned on a CNC machine which I had loaded using precision electronic equipment – it was premeditated conservation!!! (and I flew 1000 km to do it)
So let’s call a spade a spade – hunting is killing and I am not sure that killing is sport.
Predators don’t kill for sport – they kill because they are predators.
As humans we should be as humane about it as defined by our so called civilization.
“Canned hunting” is another of my hobby horses.
It is economic killing just like it is with domestic animals.
Whether a farmer breeds a cow and sends it to the abattoir or breeds a lion and has a foreign hunter come and shoot it through a fence, the result is the same.
He gets paid, an animal dies and part or parts of the animal are utilized by man.
I cannot understand why emotion trumps logic in these issues. Maybe we need to start looking at these issues in terms of hard facts and hunters need to understand their role in nature and not be so critical of one another.
Here endeth the lesson………
Enjoy
Jamie
There is no such thing as ethical hunting.
by Hugh Randall
This is simply because one man’s ethics is another man’s crime.
Some believe that shooting a standing animal is unsporting while others believe that you should not shoot a running animal because of the potential of wounding. Some even believe that you should never take a shot over 200 metres while the opposition would say if you can’t successfully shoot a buck at over 200 meters then you can’t shoot and shouldn’t be hunting
Many believe that hunting with dogs, lying in wait at a waterhole or over bait, shooting from a vehicle, sniping at long range or hunting on fenced farms is unethical while other may hold an opposite view.
Therefore if you are in the Eastern Cape you hunt bushbuck with beaters and dogs and shoot running animals at 300 meters. In Namibia you shoot springbuck of the back of an Uri and in Zimbabwe you hunt leopard with dogs or over bait.
Essentially ethics appear to be a set of rules developed by an individual or groups of individuals to make the hunt more challenging and therefore more enjoyable. These so called ethics are dependant on the circumstances or environment in which the hunt takes place. They are designed to meet the hunter’s needs not that of the animal. If you asked an animal what it wanted given that death is inevitable, I believe the animal would say that it wanted to live a good life and die without suffering. While I am not a trophy hunter it appears to me that trophy hunting fulfils this – the animal lives long to be a trophy and because of the cost is shot with precision.
I have always been of the opinion that there is no such thing as ethics when you kill – there is only an objective and that is to kill quickly.
In the final analysis hunting is killing – flat shooting rifles with perfect bullets, high powered scopes, ballistic tables, range finders, and rests make bullet delivery to one third of a minute of angle very possible.
I recently saw a video of a resting deer being taken at 860 meters. The buck was clearly hit in the spine and killed very quickly. I have to admire the shooting and the fact that the hunter knew the bullet drop and the wind conditions to be able to make the kill. That takes an enormous amount of practice and tests to achieve that. However many would be horrified with the range and the fact that the buck was lying down.
As to the issue of hunting, there is no doubt in my mind that hunting = conservation and this is easily empirically proven.
In this economically driven world, if you want to conserve something give it an economic value.
The result of this has been an explosion in the number of kudu in SA – especially in the Eastern Cape.
It is a fact that conservation starts with the soil, then the flora and finally the fauna.
There are 300 new game farms a year in SA which have to conserve the environment (soil and flora) for the game to exist.
Without the game having an economic value in terms of the eco tourism, hunting and culling (trophy, skins and meat) the reason for their existence would disappear.
And then there is the fact that there needs to be a replacement for natural predators such as lion etc. and that replacement is the hunter and is man not part of nature?
Man is a predator or at least those of us that kill and eat our own meat are.
The rest are scavengers, eating what others kill for them.
Of course we kill millions of chickens, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle (even day old calves) a day in SA and no one has a problem with that except the animal rightists.
The maybe 500 wild animals that are shot a day is insignificant in the overall scheme of things and just like the domestic animals this is sustainable killing.
Finally, we get excited when we see a wild animal like an antelope – why?
This is instinctive – we are essentially still cave men and that excitement is because we are seeing potential.
We get even more excited when we see other predators because we are seeing competition.
So I say to people who are critical of hunting but eat meat that they support killing and therefore cannot criticize the killers. Those that only eat fish are just as bad because millions of fish die a suffocating death every day and those who are vegans are proposing the extinction of all animals because they will have no value which will mean the end of the need to conserve natural fauna and the soils because they will only be valuable if they are edible or arable.
I recently shot a bushbuck ram in the head running at 75 which had been flushed by beaters and chased by dogs and I used a rifle that cost R20 000 firing a bullet that had been turned on a CNC machine which I had loaded using precision electronic equipment – it was premeditated conservation!!! (and I flew 1000 km to do it)
So let’s call a spade a spade – hunting is killing and I am not sure that killing is sport.
Predators don’t kill for sport – they kill because they are predators.
As humans we should be as humane about it as defined by our so called civilization.
“Canned hunting” is another of my hobby horses.
It is economic killing just like it is with domestic animals.
Whether a farmer breeds a cow and sends it to the abattoir or breeds a lion and has a foreign hunter come and shoot it through a fence, the result is the same.
He gets paid, an animal dies and part or parts of the animal are utilized by man.
I cannot understand why emotion trumps logic in these issues. Maybe we need to start looking at these issues in terms of hard facts and hunters need to understand their role in nature and not be so critical of one another.
Here endeth the lesson………