www.ditl.org

I got nothing on possums though.

Nutso wrote:

We just finished limits in Calculus right now. There are times I was tempted to provide an answer like that.

Those are gold.

Captain Seafort wrote:Yep. The damn things are a menace - and that's coming from a town-dweller who's had his bin knocked over uncountable times by the damn things. As for the method of pest control, getting rid of them = good, getting rid of them, and allowing people to have some fun in the process = better. Not to mention that hunting with dogs is the most humane method of getting rid of foxes available.

Menace or not they do not deserve to be ripped apart by a pack of dogs, you call that humane?

I get your point, Ian, but I believe beagles (and most scent hounds) are trained to bay prey, not to attack it.

If I'm not mistaken though many of these hunts occurred in enclosed areas where the fox could not get away, its not like they attack your chickens so you shoot them...

IanKennedy wrote:Menace or not they do not deserve to be ripped apart by a pack of dogs, you call that humane?

I call it irrelevent - nothing that happens to dead bodies can be considered either humane or inhumane.

Call me crazy, but I think he might be talking about the way those bodies get dead.

Grundig wrote:Call me crazy, but I think he might be talking about the way those bodies get dead.

Couldn't have been - he specifically referred to foxes getting "ripped apart", which has nothing whatever to do with the way they end up dead. Dogs kill their prey by breaking their neck.

I still don't think that the dogs do the actual killing in traditional hunts.

KuvahMagh wrote:If I'm not mistaken though many of these hunts occurred in enclosed areas where the fox could not get away, its not like they attack your chickens so you shoot them...

I may be mistaken, but there are traditional hunt clubs in the southern U.S., and I'm pretty sure they hunt un-trapped quarry in open country.

But that's not pest control, that's sport hunting. Pest Control is going after a specific one because it is a pest to your animals. Farmers are the only people I could defend hunting these as pest control. Even then it should be more of an 'if its on your land and you have a gun shoot it, if not don't bother chasing it with a pack of dogs' type deal.

KuvahMagh wrote:But that's not pest control, that's sport hunting. Pest Control is going after a specific one because it is a pest to your animals. Farmers are the only people I could defend hunting these as pest control. Even then it should be more of an 'if its on your land and you have a gun shoot it, if not don't bother chasing it with a pack of dogs' type deal.

It's not just farmers that have problems with them killing livestock - farming is the backbone of the country economy. Moreover, if their numbers aren't controlled, they come into towns, knocking over bins for scraps, and generally making a nuiscance of themselves. Moreover, hunting with dogs, rather than just shooting them a) provides everyone with a major social event, to the extent that the local hunt is a significant part of the economy in and of itself, and b) is far more humane. Would you rather die from a broken neck, or gangrene caused by non-fatal shotgun injuries?

Hang on...isn't the point of shooting something to be a process sort of like

BANG! | Dead

not

BANG | not dead | Dies in great pain a week later

Reliant121 wrote:Hang on...isn't the point of shooting something to be a process sort of like

BANG! | Dead

not

BANG | not dead | Dies in great pain a week later

That's the point of it. Whether or not everything goes acording to plan in practice is an entirely different matter, especially as shotguns are inherently less accurate and less lethal than sniper rifles. They're certainly effective at hitting a target, but they're a lot less effective at doing serious damage to anything larger than a pheasant at any sort of range.