The November/December issue of the Audubon Magazine has an article titled “Real Hunters Don’t Shoot Pets” with a byline that reads: “There’s no ‘thrill of the chase’ if there’s no chase. But with canned hunts, there’s no effort either, and that’s the selling point.” The author gives an in-depth look into canned hunts from, get this, a hunter’s perspective. Here are some exceptional snippets from the piece, things that should convince everyone that canned hunts are wrong and should be illegal…

It’s fake and fraudulent:

“In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild.

[...]Some bucks are plied with antler-growing concoctions and as they age are kept on life support with meds and surgeries. Their function is to produce semen for other breeders [...]there’s additional income from photographers who sell phony wildlife images to outdoor magazines and calendar publishers.”

These animals are quite literally pets:

“Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas.”

Canned hunts and the breeders that supply them are spreading disease:

“Game farms and the canned-hunting operations they supply are spreading bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, chronic wasting disease (the wildlife version of mad cow), and brain worm (carried by white-tailed deer and fatal to ungulates that didn’t evolve with it, such as moose, elk, caribou, and pronghorn).” [...
In 1996 chronic wasting disease (CWD) appeared on a Saskatchewan game farm[...] While humans don’t appear to contract it, that could change fast. In Britain CWD’s first cousin, mad cow disease, jumped the species barrier to humans. And in the United States, CWD, spread by saliva and most likely urine, probably jumped from domestic sheep to mule deer, whitetails, and elk. “It’s entirely possible that CWD in deer will jump to humans,” warns Valerius Geist, among the world’s foremost authorities on wild ungulates. “At that point kissing another person can pass on this fatal disease.”

Though the piece was written before the election and was likely intended to influence voters to vote for canned hunt bans, it’s still well worth reading today. You can read the whole article here >>

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Sections: Vegan Et Cetera
Topics: audubon, breeders, canned hunting, hunting, pets, Vegan