Defeat, defense and detail:

A minor treatise on the ethics of “canned shoots” and the future of hunting

By John C. Street

There’s a hackneyed word puzzle that asks, “Can you use the words defeat, defense and detail in the same sentence?”  And the response is, “Sure, de’ feet went over de’ fence before de’ tail.”  Figuratively and literally, to both the advocates and opponents of high fence hunting, there is something to consider in this corny old saw.  It explains a great deal about the present and the future of hunting.  And, pun most definitely not intended, when it comes to high fence hunting, ‘de feet can’t get over ‘de fence and that’s an important detail.

Hunting behind fences - “preserve hunting” to its advocates, “canned shoots” to its opponents - is a subject that has no middle ground.  Like degrees of pregnancy, either you are - for it - or you’re not.   Unfortunately, however, despite the moral high ground being claimed by both sides in this escalating debate, preserve hunting is the end result of a causal relationship that casts a wide net of blame and there are very few innocent bystanders.

Researchers claim that the number of hunters is declining, both in total numbers and as a percentage of our greater society.  Currently, only about six percent of the population purchases a license each year.  According to these same researchers, over the next twenty years this number will continue to decline, some even speculate (due to the double whammy presented by an ever increasing urban population), it may be cut in half in that time.   

Numerous reasons are cited for this decline, things like the loss of open ground (to residential and commercial development), the increasing number of people who are city born and raised (and never exposed to hunting) and the growth of spectator sports (auto racing for instance) and electronic pastimes (computers, television and video games).  Researchers are also quick to cite other self-explanatory reasons like the growing number of single parent (predominantly female) households and, of course, the anti-hunting movement which is picking up momentum every year.

Countering this backdrop of a shrinking land base, changing demographics and the shift in leisure time activity, the proponents of high fence hunting believe - as a cursory review of their advertising literature reveals - they are offering a real service; a quality place to hunt for quality animals.  To the people who abhor the very idea of these “canned shoots,” however, when a wild animal is pursued behind a fence, regardless of the number of acres enclosed, applying the word “quality” to the experience is a heinous oxymoron. 

Cervid farming (for this treatise, primarily elk and whitetail deer) is one of the fastest growing agri-businesses in the nation.  For instance, here in the state of Pennsylvania alone, there are nearly 800 registered “deer farmers.”  Tellingly, though, while some of the “products” grown on these farms are shipped to the big cities to be served up in trendy restaurants, the primary objective for most of these farmers is growing antlers – “shooter bucks” – for the hunting preserve market.

To the clients of the preserves, time, as opposed to money, is of the essence.  For them, paying thousands (anywhere from $2,000 for a 130 B&C class buck to $20,000+ for something in the 190 range) to shoot an animal on a game farm amounts to the same thing as hiring a guide.  Integral to this treatise, however, while a week in a noted whitetail state under the tutelage of an experienced guide might produce a buck that would make “the book,” a day or two on a preserve is almost a guarantee (even though neither Boone and Crockett nor Pope and Young will permit antlers from a buck taken inside a fence to be entered).

Ironically, however, according to the original research of Dr. Stephen Kellert from Yale University, this insatiable quest for big antlers is precisely the point where hunting begins to lose support from the larger, non-hunting segment of our society.  Therefore, as a part of the ethical and moral collage of a “sport” that is legitimate to many Americans only when “done for food…and [to] manage game populations,” preserve shoots, like guided hunts for “trophy” animals, gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “you can’t eat the horns.”

Most people – this writer included – may hunt for a lifetime without seeing, let alone taking, a buck of the size common on shooting preserves.  And for some people – again, this writer included – that’s OK.  Someday, having hunted well and fairly, this writer would like to have the totem of an enormous buck hanging on his wall but until that day comes, “making my winter meat,” as hunter and author David Petersen said, is the primary reason for being out there. 

Obviously, however, this approach to hunting doesn’t jibe with the image presented in our outdoor press.  When was the last time you saw a doe (or even a smallish buck for that matter) on the front cover of your favorite bulls and bullets magazine?  To the owners and publishers of the outdoor press, therefore, it’s a matter of economic survival.  Spike bucks on the cover won’t entice people to subscribe – or buy at the newsstand – and low subscription and sales numbers don’t entice advertisers.  In other words, big bucks beget big buck$.

For a large segment of the hunting population (as witnessed by the burgeoning membership in “mighty hunter” organizations like Safari Club International), the trophy hunting message has come through loud and clear.  We are conditioned – brainwashed? -  by the outdoor magazines to believe that “bigger is most certainly better.”  Is it any wonder there is no shortage of clientele for hunting preserves?  In a free-market society, supply meets demand; the end (large racks) justifies the means.

Importantly, however, aside from the “fair chase” issues and the culpability of the outdoor press in the promotion of “trophy hunting,” there are other – far more pragmatic - reasons for opposing high fence hunting.  In a June 2, 2002, editorial in the Denver Post, Hal Herring from Corvallis, Montana spelled out what a lot of people have been thinking lately.  “[Chronic wasting disease],” Hal advised, “is being moved around in ….. game farms and it is leaking out into the wildlife.  Until you close down the game farms, you can kill all the wildlife you want and you will not halt the spread of this disease.”

Hal was referring to the actions of state wildlife agencies that are in the unenviable position of having to exterminate wild elk and deer herds in areas suspected to be carrying the dreaded CWD.  To date, these extermination hunts have been conducted in three western states and Wisconsin. 

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that state wildlife agencies are pointing the finger of blame squarely at deer and elk farmers for the spread of CWD.  And they are not alone in this castigation.  “Chronic Wasting Disease,” Susan Campbell Reneau claims, “has been found in alarming levels within the confines of elk and deer game farms throughout Colorado and other captive deer and elk farms throughout North America,”  Susan, a well known and highly respected outdoor writer, is a vocal opponent of what she refers to as “canned shoots” and, consequently, she has worked tirelessly for the passage of Initiative 1-143 (legislation that, in effect, shut down game farms and shooting preserves) in her native state of Montana.      

Although Susan Campbell Reneau – and state wildlife agencies - have a legitimate argument against high fence hunting when they cite the prescriptions of “fair chase” and the perceptual dis-ease it creates in the non-hunting public, cervid farmers seem to have a valid case for crying foul over the accusations pointed at them for letting the evil Jeanie of CWD out of the bottle.

The truth is that no one (not even the National Institute of Health nor the Centers for Disease Control) knows for a certainty how it got started although there is a feasible theory and it – the point of origin - was not commercial deer farms.  The first identified case (and presumably that point of origin for all the ensuing outbreaks) of Chronic Wasting Disease was discovered at a state-run wildlife research facility at Fort Collins, Colorado in 1967.  Further evidence of the culpability of this state wildlife agency, cervid farmers claim, can be found in an incident that took place in 199l, fourteen years after Chronic Wasting Disease had been identified but prior to the disease being discovered in wild, free-ranging herds. 

In that year, the Colorado Division of Wildlife confiscated a number of wild elk that had been illegally captured and they held these reclaimed elk in an enclosure that was known to be a CWD positive facility.  Those elk were then traded by the Colorado Division of Wildlife to game farms in return for red deer (a European species of elk) they were interested in studying.  Historical evidence suggests these “trades” were the “immaculate conception” for the introduction of Chronic Wasting Disease into captive herds on private farms.

The game farmers’ assertions, however, only make sense if the premise is accepted - and some wildlife researchers do - that CWD mutated from another “transmissible spongiform encephalopathy”” (brain diseases that include Mad Cow and Creutzfeldt-Jacob as well as CWD) that had heretofore been found exclusively in sheep.   According to this premise, “scrapie” is believed to have jumped the species barrier at the Fort Collins facility where the reclaimed elk and the infected sheep were penned together. 

Regardless of what our state wildlife agencies’ rule books - or even the edicts of the “Record Books” - may permit, the irrefutable precept of hunting is the death of one animal for the survival of another.  While this precept may seem to be the crossroads where hunters and anti-hunters diverge, ironically, Dr. Kellert concluded from his research, and Ted Kerasote reported in his book, Blood Ties, that “only 4.5% of  anti-hunters objected to all forms of hunting, including hunting for food.”

On this one point, everyone (hunters, non-hunters and anti-hunters alike) can agree.  While the argument of survival - outside of the few remaining tribes of true subsistence hunters - would make a difficult defense, the justification of “hunting for food” strikes close enough to the universal human experience to obtain legitimacy.  It is in Kellert’s qualifier, “all forms of hunting,” that the defense begins to unravel.

The emotional red flag issue is, of course, “trophy” hunting.   And that, without either exception or mitigating circumstance, is what high fence shoots are all about; “a big set of horns.”  Therefore, if we can intellectually grasp - without completely abdicating personal responsibility - the argument that societal mores influence current events, that violence in the movies and on television promotes dysfunctional behavior, then we might also begin to assign culpability for our “antler madness” where it rightfully belongs; the pictorial and written content of the outdoor press. 

Sound rationales can be espoused for the biological desirability of culling older animals from the herd.  And done as a part of the legitimate process of “hunting for food,” these rationalizations might stay within the boundaries of the larger (non-hunting) community’s sensibilities.  However, done for aggrandizement, as they are currently portrayed in the scripted pabulum of outdoor magazines, they damn us all.  

Susan Campbell Reneau may well be right when she claims that “high fence hunting is the number one threat out there to our hunting heritage.”  Arguably, what she calls “canned-shoots” are a highly visible aberration of “true hunting” and undoubtedly contribute to the anti-hunters’ claim that we are nothing more than “sadistic murderers.”   No matter how logically framed or eloquently delivered, any mitigating rational for hunting behind a high fence cannot escape this glaring – and damning - detail; de’ feet can not get over de’ fence.

But hunting preserves – and the deer farmers who supply the “genetically altered mutants” (to quote Susan, again) that people pay large sums of money to shoot – are nothing more than physical manifestations of the objectives presented over and over in the national outdoor press.  So, if we’re going to take the “canned shoot” industry to the woodshed, then we damned well better be willing to take their accomplices as well.

We may sit back, sacrosanct in the righteousness of our rule and record books, repeating the mantra of published regulations while the abrasion of perceptual tarnish erodes our heritage and the anti-hunting hounds with their bumper sticker philosophy deplete our ranks.  Or, we can address our differences and explore in mutual inquiry the validity of our insane fixation on “trophies.”