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Recently animal rights activists seem to be making some inroads into restricting and, in some cases, banning so-called "canned hunts." In a canned hunt, animals are let loose in fenced-in area and hunters pay a fee to shoot the animals.
In April, Oregon's Fish and Wildlife Commission voted unanimously to ban canned hunts. The Louisiana legislature was considering a bill to prohibit canned hunts and similar bans and regulations are being considered elsewhere.
There seem to be two main arguments animal rights activists are using against canned hunts.
The first is that the animals, which are often exotic, nonnative species, could escape and threaten the local wildlife. Are these the same activists who regularly condone the release of nonnative species "liberated" from labs and fur farms, and dismiss fears of threat to local wildlife as anti-animal propaganda? Regardless of the hypocrisy involved, this fear certainly might call for reasonable regulation. Requiring those who operate such as requiring establishments to meet certain minimum requirements might make sense. This concern alone, however, certainly does not warrant an outright ban.
The argument that really seems to win people over, however, is that canned hunts are somehow unfair. As Oregon legislator Ryan Deckart told The Oregonian, "It's not [a] fair chase." If that is to be the standard for killing animals -- that the animal must first be given the opportunity to escape -- then Deckart should introduce legislation immediately banning slaughter houses which, the last time I checked, rarely allow the animals they kill or process any semblance of a "fair chase."
This is a clear instance of the "muddled middle" at work -- it makes no sense to say that a person can't fence in land, populate it with animals and pay others to kill said animals if the animals are exotic and the killers are hunters, but that the same setup is perfectly okay if the animals are cows or chickens or pigs and the killers are from a nearby slaughterhouse. Either both situations are moral or they are equally immoral.
This whole issue seems to me like a case of legislation by intuition -- hunting repulses many who wouldn't think twice about grabbing a hamburger at McDonald's -- rather than by rationally looking at the issue.