‘Fur and Feather Shoot’, Argentina
By Charlie • July 13, 2009 • 13 commentsOne of the dilemmas of having a popular blog (in bird blog terms anyway - Arianna if you ever feel like rubbing some of your magic off on 10,000 Birds let me know) is that you reach a point where - to an extent - the blog has gone beyond just being somewhere to record your thoughts. You have a readership with diverse views on many issues, and out of respect for the team you work with and for people you may have never met but do communicate with on a semi-regular basis a blogger does feel some sort of self-constraint.
However - and this is a big however so feel free to hit the ‘Close’ button right now, and yes, I take full personal responsibility for what follows - some issues just make my blood boil so much that the alternative to risking offending my colleagues and a few readers is blowing an internal gasket and spewing pent-up venom across the whole of western England…
Pre-warned? Good…
Spam is of course now a staple of the internet (a report in Aug 2008 concluded that “about 70% of the 210 billions emails sent each day is SPAM”). The internet is actually slower because of spam mail grabbing bandwidth. Pleas from dying Nigerian nuns or oil barons willing to share fortunes or from Google Promotions promising mugs hundreds of thousands of dollars are part and parcel of modern life, but what I don’t expect - and certainly 100% don’t appreciate - are emails from primitives who’ve relocated to Argentina from Michigan and who wonder whether I want to spend a week blasting South America’s avifauna out of the cold, blue skies with them.
Monday mornings are not my favourite time of the week as it is, but to open my inbox and find this incubus slavering over my slumbering mails, this advert to join the detritus who make up “traveling sportsmen’ grinning up at me, just re-invigorates every strongly-held belief I have that ‘tourist-hunters’ are a faecal smear on the planet and makes me really, really angry….
We have put together an interesting package for an affordable action packed shoot. This package combines pigeon and dove shooting with driven shoots for the native big game of Northern Argentina.
ITINERARY:
day 1: arrive at airport and transport to lodge, warm up dove shoot (time permitting) and dinner.days 2,3,4,5,6,7: half day of driven hunt for brocket deer, peccary, fox and puma. You never know just what the dogs and drivers will push out to the guns. Followed by a half day of high volume dove and pigeon shooting.
day 8: flight out from RES
Package includes 2500 shells, airfare from Miami to Buenos Aires and connecting flight to RES, lodging, food and drink, transport to and from the airport, all trophy fees, tags and license. We serve wine or beer with meals but prefer to take soft drinks and bottled water to the field while guns are being used.
Our lodge has 5 rooms, each with private bath and is staffed with maid cook and English speaking hostess. There is internet and phone service at the lodge.
In the months of September and October the brocket deer can be walked up and flushed from the waste high [sic] grass as an option to the driven shoots.
Hunting dates for this package are from May 1 to Sept 30. Price is $3900. 50% to book and balance 30 days before the hunt.
minimum group 3, maximum 6.
please see our site [....] and e-mail me with any questions.
Kind regards from Argentina.
John [...]
Here’s a question: why would ‘John’ or any other emotionally retarded individual think for one fraction of a second that I would respond favourably in any way at all to receiving this?
Yes, I know, this was just spam, my address collected by a harvester, spewed across the internet by a robot on behalf of a ‘John’ who doesn’t care who he offends, but nevertheless, John, I actually do have a question for you:
Why the Hell would you think under any conceivable circumstances that “The opportunity to shoot game birds at a rate of over 500 shots an hour is not only possible but expected by our repeat clients. This is bird shooting like it was many years ago for traveling sportsmen” is something that the vast majority of people - let alone a writer for a bird blog - might want to receive?
What you go on to describe is slaughter, unredeemable and inexcusable, and I don’t ‘do’ slaughter and neither do most right-thinking people I know…
What this poorly-written spam mail is, of course, is an unsubtle call to the (as we’re repeatedly told) ‘respectable hunter’ to travel overseas where hunting regulations are so lax as to be non-existent, where environmental concerns barely enforced or noted, and to take every gleeful opportunity to behave like the blood-thirsty unthinking throwback that I have long known he is. I’m hoping you’re ‘business’ is tanking, and in desperation you’re emailing anyone and everyone. By sending it to ME though, John, you’ve triggered a rage that I can barely control (though unlike your clients I’m obliged to of course). Why? Because I’m continually being told via comments on this blog that there needs to be respect between hunters like you and birdwatchers like me and you’ve just stuck it to me one more time and proved yet again that there can’t be.
You know, I am really sick of being asked to respect aggressive people like you and I think it’s about time I nailed my colours firmly to the mast.
Here it is then. I don’t respect hunters like you, I don’t respect your views, and I don’t want to be told over and over again that in effect your right to kill is more important than my right not to kill and that there’s f’all I can do about it. Because that is what the argument between birders like me and hunters boils down to: I get to write a few paragraphs of bad-tempered text and legally I can do nothing else whatsoever; you get to shake your head at the ‘angry Brit’ and get to go kill again whenever you feel like it. You hunters are completely free to ignore my sadness and despair, and dismiss the physical revulsion I feel when I see a bird being shot out of the sky. Your elation over filling yet another dove or duck with pellets is my deep pain at seeing a Mallard, Pintail, or Wigeon smashed into tangled wreckage. And you couldn’t care less. Respect you? Not in this lifetime or any other…
As for you specifically, John, with your invitation to wreak destruction and havoc on wildlife you didn’t grow up with, don’t care for, and don’t respect I despise you with every fibre. Hunting on this scale is not about necessity or sport, it’s about an unthinking blood lust that many of us have reasoned out of our lives. We’ve rationalised ‘killing’, we’ve thought things over, and we’ve reached a conviction that will never be changed. You on the other hand are not open to discussion, argument, or reason. I’m supposed to continually bend over and accomodate you, but why should I? You don’t care what people like me think or feel, yet I’m supposed to ‘care’ about what you ‘think’? I don’t John, I really don’t. You are the sort of backward-thinking ‘man’s man’ that I don’t even want to be on the same continent with. You disgust me, John. You make me ashamed to be human.
When I see photos like the ones I’ve posted below (which come from your website) I hurt John. You’re hurting the things I love and that causes me genuine pain. You’ll just laugh at me when you read this - and that’s why you and I will never, ever be ‘on the same side’, and why I will never respect you. You and your sort, John, don’t respect me in even the smallest way, don’t respect the things I care for, and just knowing you’re out there shouting, killing, gloating, bragging, and trampling over a planet you’re not fit for makes me more angry than I have time this morning to explain…’Hate’ is a strong word, John, but to describe how I feel about people like you right now it’s nowhere near strong enough…
That’s disgusting and I can’t imagine that this is legal in Argentinia.
Who isn’t reminded of the demise of the Passenger Pigeon by these disturbing images?
Thanks for your post, Charlie.
are these triggerhappy people deprived or overcompensating for something?
I am one of the people who believes the best way forward for conservation as a whole may well involve working with hunters…….that said this is disgusting, inhumane, unsporting and plain wasteful and yes the passenger pigeon comparisons above are absolutely relevant (also driven puma hunting FFS?). If hunters want people like me to play ball and to maintain a seat at the table then they simply need to stamp this kind of behaviour out of their own community.
I think what really amazes me, is how many of these “STAGED” hunts still exist. Whether it be local hunting clubs that buy 500 or 1000 pheasants, release them with a varying head start (hours) and then start hunting them, or safaris to Africa,or deer hunting in the mid-west and Texas it certainly is not sportsmanship. Nor is it particularly challenging. This is not even touching the atrocities on Malta and other Mediterranean Islands/countries, or anything from the Asian countries.
It is a miracle or a tribute to the toughness/adaptability of wildlife in general
I admit to having a somewhat more measured take on hunting than you, Charlie. If you lived in a country where all your ground nesting songbirds had their habitat eaten out from under them by deer who are really nothing more than untethered goats with good PR, you, too, might even advocate responsible, regulated bag limits.
But for staged hunting, pigeon shoots, and especially taking predators, I share your outrage 100%. Good post.
Nate - I’ve deleted my last comment: it was intended to be light-hearted but my typical sense of world-weariness obviously didn’t come across in print and it read (I’ve been told) as a personal attack - which would be unacceptable, rude, and uncalled for AND 100% not intended I assure you. You’ve been a friend of 10,000 Birds for many years and my response to your comment was meant to be read in the world-weary, bah-blah-blah tone of a 48 year-old who has been around the world far too many times to NOT understand what you’re saying. I would also like to say that I absolutely invite comment when I write posts like this, and I unreservedly apologise if you felt I was somehow telling you (or anyone else) that your comment wasn’t welcomed or required.
Regards
Charlie
I certainly wasn’t intending to start a flame-war either because I agree with you far more than I disagree. I just have a spot that used to be fantastic for Hooded and Kentucky Warblers that’s now completely stripped below six feet by hungry deer. Needless to say, no warblers anymore.
Besides, I came back too late and didn’t even see the offending piece anyway so no harm done. So if it wasn’t a foaming at the mouth, put me in my place and keep me there comment of epic proportions as I imagine it to be, I’ll be very disappointed.
Cheers.
I think Charlie raises one important and general point in his post that reaches far beyond the excessive shooting in Argentina:
Birders/conservationists are often asked/expected to tolerate, respect or even support (duck stamps) hunters and cooperate with them for the “greater good” of nature conservation which supposedly is a common goal.
But how much does the “other side” (the hunters) tolerate, respect and support us, the non-hunting or non-fishing nature enthusiasts?
If birders buy duck stamps, do hunters donate to nature conservation organizations?
If birders respect hunting seasons by staying away from certain areas at certain times, do hunters step back from certain hunting opportunities to allow for better birding in those areas during certain times?
The more I think about it (and I know at least the German hunting scene quite well as I grew up in a forester/hunter family), I’d say tolerance, respect and cooperation amongst birders and hunters is very much a one-way street.
Nate: No, sorry, you’d have been disappointed
I do understand the point you’re making about White-tailed Deer, of course. Mike and I talk about the subject quite regularly, it usually crops up when I visit Jack Cole in San Jose, and I’ve visited a lot of areas in North America where deer are increasingly coming into contact with people. I tend to differ with many people in the stress I place on finding an answer in the long-term vs the short-term. It’s a whole other post, but my sticking-point is that we need to find a long-term answer to increasing deer numbers, extirpated predators, and a human population forever expanding into new areas and then coming into conflict with deer who are usually already there. Unless you declare open season on deer in the same way our ancestors did with the Buffalo or the European Wolf hunting a few deer here and there isn’t really going to have any significant, long-term impact on the problem - which for most people I speak to seems to be the risk of damage to cars and property. And if you’re being entirely fair you do have to ask too (as I’m sure you will have done) which is proportionately more important: the loss of ground-nesting warbler sites to hungry deer or habitat loss through new house builds (again a question of an ever-expanding human population)? This imbalance in the environment is a problem of our own creation and if we actually want to solve it then (in my opinion) it’s going to need a much more complex and long-term answer than ‘hunting/killing’ - which does seem to be the stock, short-term answer to most animal/human conflicts around the world.
Jochen: Thankyou - that was precisely one of the points I was making.
Charlie, you’re absolutely right. It’s a long term vs short term thing. The places where human/deer interaction are their most problematic are almost exclusively areas of high human density.
Great post Charlie, extremely thought provoking. So much wrong it’s hard to know where to start although a few leteers to the various Argentinian Embassies might not go amiss. Isn’t it time there was some sort of WIldlife Kyoto or other Global agreement that practices like this would be stamped out. Not everyone will sign up but it has to start somewhere.
Alan: Thanks for the comments. I thought about mailing embassies too, but a quick Google of dove+hunting+argentina just shows how incredibly widespread this obscene ‘day out’ really is. That suggests to me that is all quite legal sadly. If that’s the case than any mail would have to take that into account and address other avenues. As I don’t (yet) know the situation in Argentina regarding campaigns against this sort of unregulated hunting - or even whether this is a conservation priority - I’ve emailed Aves Argentina and a few other contacts to find out. If it is something that local groups would like 10,000 Birds to get involved with and they have advice what they’d like us to do (eg mailing embassies) then I’ll post about it again immediately. I certainly want to help in any way I can, so this isn’t an issue I’m going to let fade away…
Re Kyoto type-agreements: maybe the process can start right HERE!
Ever see that Monty Python skit, with Eric Idol, where he plays a big “manly” hunter and says, “I love animals, that is why I like to kill them”. (he is actually hunting mosquitos, lol!, and he did a great job of making hunters look like the fools that they are).
As for Charlie’s blog on the whole subject, well done! But I am depressed now, so I am going to go look at some of your website’s robin pictures to cheer me up!
Kelly from Canada who loves birds lots (esp robins for some reason!)
p.s. Nate, your comment is confusing. Some might call humans untethered goats. Did you eat dinner tonight or did you go hungry like the deer apparently should? Guess you are lukcy, you are human, I don’t think any animals are planning on ‘bagging’ you (responsibly of course)for the crime of existing and being hungry.
All creatures great and small.