More on the hunting “debate”?

By Charlie • March 25, 2007 • No comments yet

I was logging into my Yahoo account just now and I noticed - at the bottom of the page - this charming mail from a concerned citizen (”They Can’t Deport Us All” - who in his Yahoo profile calls himself “a crazy mexican”) wondering whether shooting a fly-over Wood Duck in the way he did is legal or not: it’s an interesting query given the unusual circumstances our bird-loving correspondent found himself in…

Oh, tell you what, I’ll let him tell the whole (unedited) story…

“I axidently shot a wood duck?

o.k this is what happend,
i was in my back yard shooting small birds with my powerfull
760 pumpmaster bb gun.
all of a suden a flock of ducks pass on top of me(very low) . i just aimed up and shot. next thing i know their was a pretty big sized wood duck in my yard. i hit it in the neck. to end it’s suffering i shot it once more from close range in the head.
well i just wanna know if what i did is legal
and i wanna know if i can eat the duck wihtout getting sick?”

A “powerfull 760 pumpmaster bb gun”? I had no idea what one of those was, but to quote from www.airgunsbbguns.com: “The Crosman BB Gun 760b It’s dependable, it’s fun, and it’s been Crosman’s favorite for three decades, with over 7 million sold. It does double duty as a BB repeater or a single shot pellet gun. The Crosman 760 is light easy to pump and only 33.5″ long this a great airgun to start with.“

Well, now I know - “it’s fun”, and there are over 7 million of them out there, many - possibly - in the hands of nice guys like TCDUA who enjoy killing small birds in his back yard.

You know, every time I question whether hunters (backyard or otherwise) are really the conservationists they claim to be I get a volley of mail telling me what fine, country-loving chaps they are who respect their prey and just like getting outside with their mates. And then I usually stumble across something like this that just seems to me to reinforce the supposition that giving morons some sort of pseudo-legitimacy by quoting “tradition” and calling them hunters is just plain wrong. No doubt ‘real hunters’ will say that the story above has as much to do with ‘proper’ hunting as firing arrows at tethered turkeys has to do with “sport”, but the end result is the same - yet more dead birds - and a culture that promotes gun-ownership and hunting so totally is guilty as charged to my mind…

Yes, a lot of “folks” out there don’t agree. But many of these would be the same people who believe that George W is really interested in democracy, so that’s only to be expected. Oh well. The email address is at the top of the page, and I’ll wait for the usual comments…

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About the Author

Charlie

Charlie works for an airline and has birded all over the world for twenty years. He wants to be a writer, and thinks no-one would believe his life could be so charmed if he didn't take photos of as many of the birds he sees as possible. Blogging with 10,000 Birds fits his aims, needs, and insecurities perfectly. Really - do birders get much more fortunate than this?

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