Oh, the horror ..
Posted on 02/13/2006 9:17:35 AM PST by Borges
Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.
"This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets."
The Humane Society of the United States deplores the shooting of captive birds and animals where traditional "fair chase" hunting ethics are discarded and kills are guaranteed. We are campaigning to outlaw canned hunts through federal and state legislation and our opposition is more thoroughly delineated in an opinion page essay by Pacelle in today's edition of The New York Times.
See the essay at www.nytimes.com/2003/12/09/opinion/09PACE.html.
Hmmm . . . no concern for the HUMAN who was shot.
hmm, I personally love to hunt ruffed grouse and deer and challenge them in all their wildness. Cant do the canned hunts, myself
Isn't 500 birds an awful lot for 10 people? Is this number for real?
These same folks vote for the abortion party!!
Oh, the horror ..
Same here.
I'm not a hunter and agree with you. I consider canned hunts unfair and unsportsmanlike The lazy person's way to hunt.Shooting fish in a barrel !!!!
love my kentucky flinter for deer and my old spanish 20 guage side by side hammer gun for grouse. Minnesota and northern wisc have some of the best bird hunting
I know security is an issue with high ranking officials. Could this be why he was hunting in this fashion?
I grew up on a farm I used to hunt pheasant and partridge in fall. I loved getting out in woods and fields as much as I enjoyed the hunting.
 This White House briefing on Dick Cheney's accident is quite amusing. David Gregory just said, and I'm quoting: "Human beings are not this inefficient. Was the Vice President immediately clear that he had accidentally shot his friend or did that information become available later."What a dumb f*&^ing question! Like the VP didn't know this guy was shot until he got a briefing or something. Some other dumb$$$ was asking how Scott can "square" the fact that one person said the shooting happened at half past the hour and another said 30 minutes after the hour. Another is asking if it is appropriate for a private citizen to be the one to report the accident. Like the Office of Protocol has a policy for specifically for this. There's definitely a cover up in the making, lol, maybe Dick should call Ted. |
No one I know has hunted wild pheasant for years. Avain flu got most of them and new farming methods leaves nothing for them to eat.
We tried buying and releasing pheasants on our property and the foxes were very happy.
This is not about last weekend's incident.
SD
Oops. My bad.
Why don't you come to South Dakota, best Pheasant hunting around. None of them pen raised.
Republicans should respond that in all sports there is the risk of danger. Gun sports have no higher a injury or death rate than rock climbing, football, boxing or wrestling. It probablys has less injuries than soccer.
Pheasants have no native habitat in North America. They are a Eurasian species. Most American pheasants are mostly Chinese in origin, but they have a little of the English variety in their ancestry as well. The first attempts to introduce the species where in the East and used the English variety. The Chinese variety was at first used to stock game farms, of the sort described in such lurid terms in this story. My Dad used to raise pheasants to be stocked at a local game farm. That would have been in the dirty 30s sometime. There were no "wild" pheasants to speak of in those days, not even in Nebraska, which is now one of the hot spots for pheasant hunting. Many of the wild birds started out as escapees from the game farms. The farm that my Dad supplied was still around when I was a kid, although it's use was declining. Now it's a trap and skeet range (that was there when I was a kid, it's now where my nephew shoots trap), a scientific equipment manufacturer, and various other urban things. It also happened to be across the road from Dad's Uncle's farm, and it's possible that the land once belonged to Dad's Mother's family, either the Lees or the Harrisons, since both families had land in the general area in the '60s, and some still do. One of them, of my generation, attended Dad's funeral in 2004.
Even these pen raised pheasants had a better chance than the chickens whose wings I ate for supper had.
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