Shooting Fenced Animals

An eastern hunter with a shiny new rifle books a guided elk hunt in Idaho, sixty miles from Yellowstone National Park.  He pays his money and in return, the outfitter guarantees the hunter an opportunity to shoot a trophy elk.  No trophy, no payment – that’s the deal.  In fact, the hunter can receive a guaranteed opportunity to shoot a larger elk if he pays more, or a guarantee for a smaller elk if he pays less.  This is a “hunt” from which uncertainty has been removed to the maximum extent possible.  So when the hunter reaches the headquarters of Canyon Creek Outfitters near Teton, Idaho, he is confident that he can make a kill.  He is confident even if he has never fired his rifle; he is confident even if he is too out of shape to spend the predawn hours climbing ridges.  His confidence soars when, clad in camo and rifle in hand, he enters a fenced area from which the elk cannot escape.  The fence, the outfitter’s website carefully states, is "to maintain superior genetics.”

It’s called a canned hunt, and like most hunters, I hate that such hunts exist.  There is no “fair chase.”  The hunts turn my stomach.  I have never met a hunter who spoke well of them.  The public at large despises them, and anti-hunters use the events of canned hunts as fodder against all hunters.  It’s an effective tactic.  To most of us, there is something unsettling about an animal with no means of escape being approached by a human intending to kill it.



But of course that’s exactly what happens with every package of meat supermarket freezer.  To generalize: a cow is driven into a confined area.  A “captive bolt stunner” is pressed to its forehead and a bolt fires into the cow’s skull, stunning the cow and rendering it unconscious, but not shutting down its circulatory system.  The cow’s neck is then cut so that the cow bleeds out – i.e., is “exsanguinated” – which helps prevent meat spoilage.  At no point did the cow have a chance to escape, and at no point did the commercial slaughtering facility follow “fair chase” guidelines.

What’s the difference?  What is the moral distinction between a canned elk hunt and a slaughtered cow?

I’ll be honest; I can’t find one.  One person told me that because the hypothetical cows mentioned above had been born only to provide meat, they were not entitled to “fair chase” protections.  I think that argument misses the mark for two reasons.  First, if there is such a thing as an elk or cow’s right to a fair chase, that right belongs to the animal.  Since the right belongs to the animal, it cannot be waived by a human progenitor, even if the human who organized the breeding of the animal always intended for the animal to serve as food.  Phrased differently, it makes no difference to an elk or cow in danger of being killed whether humans always intended to kill it, or only had that idea after it was born.  Second, most of the animals offered to high-paying consumers of canned hunts were bred for the purpose.  It’s not as though the operators of the canned hunt went into the wild with a nets, captured elk, then brought them back to enclosed areas.  Instead, the prey animals come from game farms, where they were bred and raised for the same purpose for which most domestic cows were raised: to be killed and eaten.  The only difference is the manner of execution.

So in with both a canned elk hunt and a cattle slaughterhouse, animals born and raised for the purpose of being killed by humans are put to death, cut up, then eaten.  And yet Americans are morally outraged at canned hunts, but unfazed by slaughterhouses.  Why?

I don’t know, but this is what I suspect: it’s because we ignore the death that produced those meat-filled styrofoam trays at the supermarket, but focus on the death associated with a canned hunt.  When most people take home 1.14 pounds of ground round from Kroger, they don’t pause to think about the once-living cow that died to produce it.  They think of food, not death.  But when Americans consider canned hunts, they imagine the death of an animal.  They reflect on the termination of a life that, but for the hunter’s actions, might have continued.  They don’t consider the elk patties that sizzled on the grill afterwards.  They think of death, not food.  And death is unpleasant, so they resent canned hunts.

Don’t get me wrong; I still hate canned hunts viscerally.  I will never, ever, participate in one.  But when I go to the grocery store and toss a pack of flank steak into my cart, I ought – if I’m being objective – to recognize that it’s about the same thing.



The foregoing arguments apply to canned hunts carried out in accordance with governmental regulations designed to ensure humane hunts and prevent the spread of disease among farmed animals.  Many canned hunts, however, are not carried out in accordance with those regulations.  Recently, authorities prosecuted a provider of illegal canned hunts, and as a result of the prosecution, video footage of several hunts became a part of the public record.  Using that footage, the Indiana Wildlife Federation – a group that opposes canned hunts but supports legitimate hunting – made this excellent and apparently objective video.