Illinois Law Grounds PETA Drones Meant To Harass Hunters 370
schwit1 writes "Illinois passed a new state law that set back the efforts of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), making the use of drones to interfere with hunters and fishermen prohibited. The law was created in response to PETA's plan to employ drones called "air angels" to monitor outdoors enthusiasts engaged in hunting and fishing nationwide."
Land of the Free! (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange - people fishing should be "free" to fish unmonitored... ...people hunting should be "free" to hunt unmonitored... ...people on the Internet should be "free" to be monitored at will...
To me that sounds like future terrorist plots could best be discussed on a hunting trip, because you have the gun lobby ensuring that you'll be undisturbed...
Re:Land of the Free! (Score:5, Insightful)
Land of pirates: gratuitous "r" inserted. Was supposed to be "land of the fee".
In the US, you are free if one of two categories applies:
1) You have the money to pay people with the power to make you less free;
2) Nobody is listening to you anyway. Lip service costs nothing.
In fact, most people come under category 2 - and this is where dictatorships have all gone wrong: out of paranoia, they silence even the people who would do no harm if they could speak. The illusion of freedom is Western civilisation's greatest gift to human psychology.
Re: Land of the Free! (Score:2, Insightful)
Good. Peta are hypocritical arseholes. Anything that is bad for them, I'm in favour of.
Re:clearly... (Score:5, Insightful)
peta cares about animals (does that mean they don't care about humans?
My experience with PETA is that the only thing they care about is themselves. They've done way more to serve their own smug senses of self-importance than they've ever done to help any animals.
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4D1godY4vI [youtube.com]
Comments are missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, those who are comparing PETA to the NSA and other government agencies are making a false comparison. PETA is a private organization that would be violating the privacy and personal freedom of people. They are not a governmental agency and most of the governmental agencies in the comments so far do not fall under the jurisdiction of state governments.
Re: Land of the Free! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm more in favor of not infringing on PETA's rights to harass hunters with drones. But I'm also in favor of the hunters destroying PETA's drones, especially if they are harassing the hunters on private land.
Also depending on the level of harassment and monitoring, I am also in favor of the hunters and fisherman pressing charges against PETA.
Solution for population control (Score:2, Insightful)
Does PETA have a working solution for maintaining a sustainable population of game? Like some type of birth control or are they happy with uncontrolled heards getting bigger and bigger and expanding? Times have changed, there is no longer a natural balance of various wildlife to maintain populations in check. Until some other method of control comes around, PETA has no chance of stopping hunting. Hunting is beneficial in many areas, that is why there are a set number if hunting licenses and specific time frames for each type of game.
I assume PETA believes the wild boars should be able to expand as needed unchecked as well.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, never met one. Course, the hunters I know are the strict "no alcohol Christian" types.
Nope, never met one. Course, the hunters I know are mostly farmers.
BLOCKQUOTE> And now to the one that bugs me the most: as a target (only) archer, I don't know how many really terrible "archers" I've seen hanging around the shop/range bragging about "yeah, I hit him, but then lost the blood trail after an hour...".Bow hunters injuring and maiming animals is just a dirty little secret of the sport.
Where I come from, those guys are known as "liars". That's what you say when you miss.
BLOCKQUOTE>Of course, rifle/slug hunters always go for the heart/lung shot, because all they care about is the head. If they were hunting for meat, they'd go for the head shot, where you get either a clean kill or a clean miss.
Umm, no. Only an idiot goes for a headshot. And the hunters I know hunt for meat, not for trophies. And still aim for center-of-mass, just like you're taught in any marksmanship course.
Re:Solution for population control (Score:0, Insightful)
PETA won't even broach such topics, as they have no logical answer that falls in line with their bogus agenda. If they say "culling the herds is okay as long as it's done humanely", they catch flack from their celebrity sponsors and lose money and credibility from that arena. If they say "let the animals live and breed no matter what" they show a severe lack of understanding of the way nature works, and again they lose credibility with their sponsors. So they ignore the issue and continue to harass and intimidate people so the money and fame keep rolling in from Hollywood.
Re:Land of the Free! (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate people who assume most hunters hunt for sport. Every hunter I've ever known hunts for food.
Re: Land of the Free! (Score:5, Insightful)
So in a way, what this law has done is made it illegal for a group with a weak lobby to determine how badly a group with a strong lobby is breaking the law.
Sad thing is, I suspect the push behind this law is not coming from hunters but from private industry. There has been a lot of grumbling at how it is increasingly easy for local watchdog groups to catch environmental violations via drones after farms and factories spent so much time making sure the local police and regulators don't come looking, so there have been pushes to make such things illegal. Activists are a lot harder to pay off or threaten then local officials, so making it illegal for activists to aid in enforcing the law is a high priority for some.
Re: Land of the Free! (Score:4, Insightful)
if this thing flies onto my property and interferes with a cull, then PETA has not only trespassed, but it is harming the very animals that it is trying to protect. Unless PETA expects vets to go into the woods and start neutering every woodchuck and deer in a thousand square miles, culls are the most effective way to deal with population explosions.
Re: Land of the Free! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good. Peta are hypocritical arseholes. Anything that is bad for them, I'm in favour of.
I actually happen to think that a large asteroid colliding with Earth doesn't sound like a good idea.
Re: Land of the Free! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hunters have hunted for longer than this country has been around and now, all of a sudden, we need an adversarial group like PETA "monitoring" for compliance? Give me a break.
If PETA were a bit more rational (not counting on it), they might be welcomed to the table for constructive solutions to the problems they see.
As long as I can... (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as I can still use a drone to monitor activity on my own property during hunting season. It would make it safer to look for trespassers and call the sheriff by eliminating the possibility of being "mistaken" for a deer and shot.
Not against hunting, just against hunters shooting on my property.
Re:clearly... (Score:4, Insightful)
What hyperbole? I'm not sure you actually know what the word means.
My experience with animal rights activists has been pretty similar. People with too much privilege to have personal experience with human problems and an utter lack of strategy in pursuing their agenda that results in a bunch of actions that only sound clever to people inside the group, that alienate everyone outside of it, and that more often than not hurt the cause of animal rights by being the worst living strawmen against it.
My law school had an animal rights program that overlapped a lot with the environmental program I was in, and most of the animal rights people were pretty flaky -- harmless and not nearly as self-sabotaging as PETA activists, but prone to stupid things like running around "casing" Asian food markets for sharks fin while all being a bunch of suspicious-acting white people who didn't speak a bit of Chinese and not really realizing the cost of shark's fin vs. the income bracket the stores they went to serviced.
Re: Land of the Free! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they do, an issued permit means they have a legal right to kill animals within the confines of said permit.
PETA, on the other hand, does not have a legal right to harass people, especially on private land. If they want to change things, a sound arguement and political campaign is a better idea than publicity stunts and rhetoric. If states are actually legalizing weed, who knowns maybe hunting can be outlawed.
Something PETA completely fails to understand though, we have kind of killed off most of the natural predators. It is funny because I have heard PETA complain about this but never realize the implications. If the predators are gone, the prey doesn't stop breeding. Hunting permits are carefully issued to maintain wild population stocks. We already did the damage to the predators and now have to clean up our mess. If the wild predator populations climb back up to a level that can keep the prey levels in check, I would be happy reassess my positions. I don't actually like hunters, but my personal distaste with them and what they do doesn't mean they don't have a role to play.
Re:clearly... (Score:2, Insightful)
What hyperbole? I'm not sure you actually know what the word means.
Well, thanks for giving us two more paragraphs of examples of hyperbole in action.
Why is it that nobody who dislikes PETA is able to talk about them without obvious exaggeration? "Utter lack of strategy," "worst living strawmen," But on re-read it turns out you aren't even talking about PETA members.