The March 4, 2005, electronic edition of The Washington Post carried an item from Associated Press titled "New Gadgets Push the Envelope in Hunting." The gadgets described in the article take some new technologies to places where they have absolutely no business going--into the hunting blind.

By way of full disclosure, I should state that I am not now nor have I ever been a hunter. In fact, for the life of me, or for the life of their quarry for that matter, I don't understand what pleasure hunters get out of their pastime. That might be just because haven't tried it, but the thought of killing Bambi never appealed to me. However, this is not a tirade against hunters or hunting. Being an omnivore, it's hard for me to make a case for animal rights without being, justifiably, denounced as a hypocrite. And I have to admit that I'm a radical human chauvinist. If finding a cure for whatever disease will otherwise lead to my long, lingering, excruciatingly painful, untimely demise means that a few lab mice must die, I say fry the suckers.

No, this is not an anti-hunting or animal rights tirade, but some of the gadgets described in the article seem terribly over the top to me. The article mentions robotic duck and deer decoys, electronic duck and coyote calls, and holographic archery targeting sites. Someone quoted in the article even suggested that people will soon be hunting with lasers. Why? Because laser light remains straight for as far as the eye can see. In essence, if you can light up your target, you are practically guaranteed to make the kill. All of these devices are designed to give hunters a tremendous advantage compared to traditional hunting tools and techniques.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I always thought that the primary enjoyment that most hunters got out of hunting was not a satisfaction of their blood lust, but their mastery of a challenging skill and the opportunity to get out into nature while doing it, even if they do kill some of that nature along the way. Remember, we're not talking about Charles Manson types who just enjoy killing as an end in itself. We're talking about people who enjoy the sport of hunting. Doesn't making it easier to kill your prey take away some of the sport and, therefore, some of the enjoyment?

Let's face it; with the exception of those people who still live primarily off the land, which I dare say is an exceptionally small minority of the readers of this column (probably zero), most hunters are not hunting for economic reasons. I've never priced it, but I'm fairly certain that, when you consider the cost of firearms, ammunition, hunting licenses, hunting vests, gas to get to your hunting grounds, and now the cost of these new gadgets, it would be far cheaper to just buy a steak at a supermarket rather than go out and kill your dinner and butcher it. So, if you are not doing it for economic reasons, why would you want to take away some of the challenge that I assume is part of hunting's allure?

If you want to make hunting more sporting, you should make it more challenging, not less. To my mind, the hunter already has way too much of an advantage over the hunted, without any of these new gadgets. I say, let's tip the scales a little the other way and put the sport back into hunting. Let's give animals guns and train them to shoot accurately. Then it would be a fair fight. We would have to modify the guns to compensate for the fact that most game animals do not have opposable thumbs, or fingers to oppose them for that matter, but considering the sorts of technologies that are being developed for the hunters, those modifications shouldn't be too difficult.

As if giving hunters a ridiculously unfair advantage is not enough, now someone has set up an operation that allows people to aim and shoot guns remotely over the Internet (www.live-shot.com). So far, you can only shoot at paper and silhouette targets, but the plan is to set up the shooting system (that's what they call it, a shooting system) in a blind in a private ranch and allow hunters from anywhere in the world to remotely kill various game, including Aoudad (Barbary Sheep), Blackbuck Antelope, and a variety of species of sheep and wild hogs, without ever getting anywhere near the prey. Don't misunderstand me. We are not talking about a video game here. Remote hunters will be able to pan, tilt, and zoom a real camera and aim and shoot a real firearm at real animals--animals that will bleed real blood if you're successful.

Whatever happened to the pure, unadulterated joy of getting out into the bounteous nature and mercilessly killing innocent wildlife? Isn't that supposed to be part of the pleasure of hunting? If you're going to sit on your living room couch, why not just play a video game instead? What's the difference between the two other than the knowledge that, instead of a no-less-challenging computer-simulated kill of an avatar, you've managed to cause the death of a real, previously living creature?

I'm not an animal rights person, but I do think that if you are going to kill an animal, you should have a reason for doing so. Personally, I don't think that just the sport of it, without intending to eat the meat or use the pelt for clothing, is enough, but that's just me. My views on this matter are not staunch enough for me to want to try to impose them on anyone else. But if you also take away the sport of it by making it too easy, then I don't see the point. What's next? Are people going to start using fully automated robots to do their hunting for them, without any direction from the human "hunters"? The hunters could then sit home and watch Marx Brothers movies while the robots hunt for them. Now that I mention it, watching a Marx Brothers movie sounds like a particularly good idea at this point, so I'll sign off for this week. Happy hunting.

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, and president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based marketing communications firm. Joel has 25 years experience working in IT, first as a programmer/analyst and then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto. Contact Joel at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. As a child, he rooted for Bambi and Bambi's mother over the hunters. He still does.

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, writer, and formerly president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. He has 30 years' experience in various IT capacities and now specializes in writing articles, white papers, and case studies for IT vendors and publications across North America. Joel is also the author of BYTE-ing Satire, a compilation of a year's worth of his columns. He holds a BS in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto.

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