May
2001
Canned
Hunts: The Newest American “Sport”
By Diana Norris, Norm Phelps, and D.
J. Schubert
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Adapted from Canned Hunts: Unfair at Any Price
(The Fund for Animals, 2001).
In 1994, an investigator for the Humane Society of the
United States made an undercover video that opens with a Corsican ram
standing tall against the skyline, his head raised to catch the breeze.
Suddenly, a man dressed in camouflage rises into the picture to launch
an arrow from a compound bow that is all wheels and pulleys. At the
twang of the string, the ram jerks his head around and a moment later
the razor-sharp arrow slices into his flank. Letting out a bellow of
pain and terror, he lunges forward into the wire fence that blocks his
escape. The hunter, no more than twenty yards away, reloads and shoots.
Another strike in the flank and another bellow as once again the ram
hurls himself against the fence. The hunter is deliberately aiming away
from the head and shoulders to avoid any risk of spoiling his trophy.
“If you fall,” he yells at the ram, “fall the right way.
I don’t want you bending my arrow.” The slowly dying animal
sinks to the ground and huddles trembling against the bottom of the
fence.
This is the world of canned hunts, one of America’s newest and
fastest-growing sports.
No Kill, No Pay
Canned hunt customers have little in common with the hunters of
American folklore and fantasy. Typically, they live in a city or suburb,
are part of a two-career family, enjoy professional or managerial careers,
and have more disposable income than free time. Accustomed to trading
money for time, they are willing to pay for convenience, and they expect
results. Canned hunts—variously known as “game ranches,”
“hunting preserves,” or “shooting preserves”—give
them both. As North Dakota’s Cedar Ridge Elk Ranch tells visitors
to its website, “If you don’t have the 10 days to two weeks
normally needed to hunt for trophies with someone else, and you want
ACTION, and you want to ‘bring it home,’ then Cedar Ridge
Elk Ranch is the place for you.”
Although they may differ in other details, all canned hunts share two
defining traits. First, they are commercial hunts on private property;
customers pay for the privilege of stalking and killing their victims.
Secondly, the operators have stacked the deck against the animals to
the point that all who lay their money down are virtually guaranteed
success. Do you want the head of a record-class markhor (a sheep native
to the Middle East) to hang on the wall of your den? For $12,500, the
Triple Seven Ranch in Texas will arrange for you to shoot one. If exotics
are not to your taste, Pennsylvania’s Glen Savage Ranch will put
a white-tailed buck with world class antlers in your crosshairs for
a mere $9,995. With this kind of money at stake, canned hunt operators
leave nothing to the luck of the chase. Game ranchers are so confident
that they regularly ply potential customers with some variation on the
canned hunt’s most popular theme: “No kill, no pay.”
“You are guaranteed a pig,” says the website of Idaho’s
European Wild Boar Hunt, “or your money will be refunded.”
Tipping the Balance
Jim Posewitz spent 32 years as a biologist with the Montana Department
of Fish and Game. One of hunting’s most passionate defenders, he
is much in demand as a speaker by hunting organizations and state wildlife
agencies. In Beyond Fair Chase (Falcon Press, 1994), which is widely
viewed in the hunting community as the bible of ethical hunting, Posewitz
makes this statement, “Fundamental to ethical hunting is the idea
of fair chase. This concept addresses the balance between the hunter
and the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally
succeed while animals generally avoid being taken.” Canned hunts
are considered to be unethical by the standards of the hunting community
because they employ four techniques to tip Jim Posewitz’s “balance”
to the point where the hunters always succeed and the animals never
avoid being killed.
First—and this is key to the success of the other three techniques—they
employ full time guides. The guides know every inch of the preserve;
they know where the animals are at all times; they know when and where
the animals like to eat, drink, and bed down; and they know all their
hiding places. The victims may be able to run—at least for a little
ways—but they can’t hide.
Second, most hunting preserves are surrounded by “game proof”
fences. Canned hunt operators claim that if the fenced area is larger
than a few acres, the animals are “free-roaming” and the hunt
is no different than a traditional hunt conducted without a fence. This
is untrue. Prevented by the fence from evading the surveillance of the
guide, the animals are as much “sitting ducks” in a 500 acre
enclosure as in a five acre pasture. A canned hunt will take more time
and effort on 500 acres than on five, but the victim’s chances
of escaping the hunter are about the same either way. All that the larger
enclosure accomplishes is to give the customers the illusion that they
are actually hunting an animal when in reality they are simply slaughtering
with a bow or a rifle instead of the captive bolt pistol used in slaughterhouses.
If this were not the case, canned hunts would not be advertising “no
kill, no pay.”
The third technique hunting preserves use to turn wild animals into
easy targets is the feeding station. A guide places the victims’
favorite food in a trough at the same time every day. The animals are
not only conditioned to visit the feeding station on schedule—so
the customer isn’t inconvenienced by having to wait—they also
lose much of their fear of the human who provides the food. Then one
day the provider shows up with a hunter in tow, and the animal is shot
while waiting patiently for dinner.
Finally, many canned hunts offer exotic animals as victims, including
bobcats, elands, musk oxen, oryx, yaks, and zebras. Most often these
animals are bought from dealers, who in turn buy them primarily from
zoos. These former zoo animals have been hand-reared and are habituated
to humans. They see no reason to flee when the hunter and guide approach.
For all practical purposes, they are tame.
Municipal zoos depend heavily on baby animals to attract paying customers.
When these baby animals grow up, they are typically disposed of to make
room for the next crop who will draw in new crowds of customers. Since
the public would not tolerate the animals simply being killed by the
zoo, they are sold to dealers, who in turn sell them to research laboratories,
roadside petting zoos, and canned hunts. In this way, the zoos can claim
to have no responsibility for the ultimate fate of their “surplus”
animals. This pivotal role of municipal zoos in the inhumane commerce
in wildlife, including wildlife destined to end up in canned hunts,
has been extensively documented by investigative journalist Alan Green
in his groundbreaking exposé Animal Underworld (Public Affairs,
1999; also see interview in Satya, July, 2000).
“Alternative Livestock”
Criticism of canned hunts is growing—both in the animal protection
community and the hunting community—with the result that several
states have taken action to ban them, at least partially. Often, however,
these efforts are woefully inadequate. New York, for example, bans the
hunting of exotic mammals in fenced enclosures of ten acres or less.
Since the ban does not cover native species, such as white tailed deer
(the most popular canned hunt victims), and allows canned hunts of exotics
within fenced enclosures of eleven acres or more, it is largely cosmetic.
The defense of canned hunts comes from an unexpected quarter: state
agriculture departments, which typically refer to the animals as “alternative
livestock” and view them as a way to increase the profitability
of farms and ranches. It is not coincidental that America’s first
canned hunt was created on a cattle ranch (the Y.O. Ranch outside of
San Antonio); that Texas, America’s premier cattle ranching state,
is home to more than 500 canned hunt operations, and that canned hunt
operators brag about using breeding, feeding, and culling techniques
perfected by the cattle industry. But if the wildlife on hunting preserves
are “alternative livestock,” doesn’t this mean that the
customers are not hunters at all, but “alternative butchers?”
And if the preserves are, in reality, “alternative slaughterhouses,”
shouldn’t they be subject to the federal Humane Slaughter Act,
which requires that animals being slaughtered be rendered instantly
unconscious and not allowed to suffer while they die? If the Act were
applied to canned hunts, they would all be shut down immediately, since
there is no way to preserve the illusion of hunting while complying
with that standard.
How You Can Help
In Montana, a major hunting state, a successful voter initiative
on last November’s ballot outlawed canned hunts. The Wyoming legislature
has banned the private ownership of “big game” animals, thereby
making most canned hunts illegal, and Oregon has achieved the same end
by banning the hunting of all “exotic mammals and game mammals”
that are privately owned. In this context, informed, courteous expressions
of opinion from members of the general public can have a real impact
on state legislatures. Please write letters to your representatives
and send along a copy of The Fund for Animals’ report Canned Hunts:
Unfair at Any Price (available from the address below).
Diana Norris is Grassroots Coordinator and Norm Phelps is Spiritual
Outreach Director of The Fund for Animals.
D. J. Schubert
is a wildlife biologist and president of Schubert and Associates. To
receive a free copy of the report from which this article was adapted,
contact Diana Norris, The Fund for Animals, Ste. 301, 8121 Georgia Ave.,
Silver Spring, MD 20910, or email dnorris@fund.org.
