I wonder if there's some sort of safety feature so that you can't shoot the attendant who goes to retrieve the carcass?

Other than Texas, few states have large private forests for hunting (actually, this doesn't seem that large at 330 acres).

It would probably not be legal in many states, too. Most have strict rules about hunting, and the types of procedures that are allowed, even on private lands.

I'm a little doubtful about this as a paying business anyway.

You are surprised?

Ultimately, whats the difference, other than our kneejerk sense of outrage at something obviously strange?

If you're cool with hunting, does it matter how one hunts? Is this any different than bow hunters who look down on rifles? Is a sports fisherman morally superior to a guy who drops a stick of dynamite in a pond?

If you want to call this story a Red/Blue Rorschach, it probably is. But doesnt that just prove that much of the alleged 'morality' divide is simply a matter of perspective, and what one is used to? As opposed to an actual difference in values?

Mark, do you have to stretch yourself very far to be that disingenuous?

Tell me again what the mystique of hunting is supposed to be. I could swear I heard hunters wax rhapsodic about the spiritual benefits of getting out into the woods and reverting back to primal behavior; that the point was not the kill, heavens no, but the cameraderie among fellow hunters and worship of the animal and blah blah blah.

This? Hunting by remote control, not even having to get your precious little feet wet? It has nothing to do with any of the so-called virtues of hunting. It's killing-made-easy.

Christ, I thought those dickless wonders who paid five figures to go blast ranch-raised semi-tame lions were about as pathetic as you could get.

I guess there is indeed no bottom to human degradation.

No, killing-made-easy would be a deer (or a cow) in a metal pen, which would be electrified when you pressed a button in your browser.

You could thusly "hunt" a cow, and have the fresh meat delivered to you.

"Killed it m'self, honey!"

Pay a little extra for a closeup of the cow's sad brown eyes before the fatal moment.

Would that be inappropriate?

the wesson

This is not a red-state blue-state thing at all. I suspect that hunters would probably be among the first to oppose this type of "hunting".

As regarding the morals of hunting, I find the idea of hunting animals by dazzling them with light, or from motor vehicles or from aircraft dubious. Ditto for using dyanmite for fishing. Clearly, there are enough hunters who agree with me that these practices are illegal in most (all ?) states.

Killing made easy?

How about the meat department at the local grocery store?

FYI - Texas is already moving to make this kind of hunting illegal. So, end of story. Nothing to see here. Move along.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/outdoors/tompkins/2889490

What an absolutely disgusting idea. If you are going to kill an animal, go out and kill it. Trust me, if a person can't go out and kill the animal in the wild, they sholdn't be hunting.

Also, who is responsible the first time one of these fools miss and that bullet winds up killing someone a mile down the road? Or they screw up the shot and the animal is merely wounded? Pain for pleasure should be limited to cgi, it should not be brought into any semblance of real life.

"In an age when politics remains a matter of identity and affinity, being against Bush--or for him--is culture war by other means." -Ramesh Ponnuru, The National Review 2003

"[I]dentity is rarely constructed out of thin air. Subjective perceptions of identity often depend on more objective traits assigned to individuals based on physical features, language differences, or ancestry... [It] can be both palpably real and an artefact of the imagination rooted in the recesses of history - fluid and manipulable, yet real enough to kill for. This is what makes [cultural] conflict so hard to understand and contain." -Amy Chua, Prospect Magazine 2003

"Another important factor illuminated in the model has to do with the divisibility of stakes. Wood shows how greater indivisibility (the less divisible the pie), reduces the likelihood of enduring resolution by reducing the range of possible and robust settlements. A good example of this is when one side in the conflict is demanding to name the sole language, a stake that seems to be indivisible." - Lesley S King on Elisabeth Jean Wood's Indivisible Stakes and Distributional Compromises, Santa Fe Bulletin 2002

"In the same connection, look at Figure 2. This time the agents seek only one neighbor of their own color. Again the simulation begins with a random distribution (Frame 1). This time sorting proceeds more slowly and less starkly. But it does proceed. About a third of the way through the simulation, discernible [cultural] clusters have emerged (Frame 2). As time goes on, the boundaries tend to harden (Frames 3 and 4). Most agents live in areas that are identifiably blue or red." -Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic 2002

archer, precisely.

"when one side in the conflict is demanding to name the sole language, a stake that seems to be indivisible"

substitute "language" with "moral value system" and i think we have a winner^H^H^H^H^H pretty good working model of the current situation. when one frames politics as either 'winning' or 'losing' or considers what's at stake in morally 'right' or 'wrong' terms, it's hard to come to a "robust settlement," as you say.

me, i like to think of things as 'working' or 'not-working', which i happen to believe makes problems more tractable! but then i'm clearly in the minority :D

They should have been shooting liberals.

Has it occurred only to me that this might be a joke? I note that the Reuter story doesn't include a URL -- a fairly strange omission, considering its a story about a specific Web site.

I suspect there will be a lot of hunters against this. It's roughly equivalent to having a machine with a bat in the batter's box for you, and controlling it with a mouse and a laptop from the dugout.

My position on this is much like my position on assault weapons for "hunting". If you need an AK47 to hunt, you're a shitty hunter. Stop hunting.

If you can't make it out into the woods to hunt, go down to the store, pick up "Big Buck Hunter" for PS2 (it comes with the light gun, I'm sure) and play at home. You don't need remote controlled guns to pick off animals for you.

"Tell me again what the mystique of hunting is supposed to be."

I'm not defending hunting. Obviously you think the mystique is bullshit. Fine. So if the mystique is bullshit, back to my original question, how does this practice differ materially from blowing an animals head off 20 feet away? The end result is identical, no?

"I guess there is indeed no bottom to human degradation."

Duh.

Remenber the game "Oregon Trail"? That had a "hunting" screen wher your "settlers" killed food. Whats the big deal?

Fascinating. Could prisons use webcam guns in guard towers? Police stake-outs at the corner crack house? Maybe the late shift at 7-11? And about that dog that always shits in my yard when I'm gone...

(too bad the light bulb that went off in his head was so little)

I don't get why some people are so upset by this. Some people like to hunt. They're willing to accept this as the next best thing. Particularly for people who can't go out and hunt.

It's pretty odd, but not something worth freaking out about.

I think the part of the issue here is that with "web-based hunting," few of the customary justifications for hunting apply. Hunters like nature, they like tracking, they like the tradition, the camraderie, etc. That's all great, and very valid.

But with this kind of hunting, you don't really get much of that. What you get is the pleasure of killing (as well as the meat, to be sure) and some people find that unpalatable.

Also, I think the detached, clinical nature of the "click mouse to kill critter" concept is intuitively off-putting to some. Actual hunters at least get their hands dirty-- there's something weirdly sterile about doing it all from a remote location.

"The Wesson"'s analogy is perhaps a fair one-- how would we feel about a "net slaughterhouse" which allowed users to personally bump off penned-up livestock from the comfort of their living rooms? Would it be hypocritical to oppose this kind of entertainment and still buy meat at the grocery store?

This has 'hoax' written all over it.

Remember 'bambi hunting' in Las Vegas? Those hoaxers even got TV news reports made about them, with interviews of the fake bambis.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/bambi.asp