USA: Recreational Hunters Use Drones for Hunting
More and more recreational hunters in the USA are using drones to track down wildlife. The president of the hunting and fishing association in Nova Scotia considers this to be extremely unethical. More on recreational hunting.
Ian Avery, president of the hunting and fishing association in Nova Scotia, says that far too many recreational hunters are using drones to locate wildlife for killing.
According to Avery, this crosses a line. He considers it highly unethical to use a helicopter, aircraft, or drone for recreational hunting.
Local hunting regulations prohibit recreational hunters from using any type of aircraft for hunting. Avery believes this also applies to drones, even though they are not explicitly mentioned in the law.
No charges filed yet
The association has only asked the government to tighten the laws and specify that no drones may be used during recreational hunting.
According to Avery, no one in his province of Nova Scotia has been charged for this reason so far. Avery believes people should use drones as a leisure activity and not for hunting.
Many aspects of recreational hunting are becoming too high-tech and have nothing to do with the original intent of what hunting is. The existing law does not stop certain people from using remote-controlled aircraft to hunt wildlife Drones can save time when tracking wildlife and can substitute for a lack of know-how.
Wildlife cameras
Not even wildlife cameras are as intrusive as drones. Wildlife cameras are small digital devices activated by a motion sensor. They are often used in terrain where recreational hunters suspect wildlife trails.
Some cameras only take photos, which the recreational hunter must evaluate manually on a computer. The more modern ones send a signal directly to a mobile phone in real time.
Wildlife animals are not the only ones suffering from the drones, cameras, and other devices used by recreational hunters. Many recreational activists also feel pressured and disturbed by these devices.
Furthermore, private individuals walking in the forest could be recorded without their knowledge. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner warned of this as early as 2012. Private individuals are prohibited from setting up cameras in public spaces that can be used to identify persons.
Recreational Hunting and Mobile Phones
Until a few years ago, it was forbidden in Switzerland to use mobile phones while hunting, in order to prevent large-scale driven hunts. Graubünden, for example, recently lifted this ban under pressure from recreational hunters.
For many Graubünden recreational hunters, it had been incomprehensible why mobile phones should not be freely usable in an age of modern technology. Moreover, it had been impossible to enforce the ban. Laws that cannot be enforced are superfluous — so went the recreational hunters' refrain. Actually a pretty clear statement about what ethics, tradition, animal welfare, decency, and so on mean in recreational hunting — namely, absolutely nothing.
A recreational hunter can now commission another recreational hunter to observe wildlife from an opposite slope on their behalf and guide them to the animals. Essentially no different from what drones do.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on the criticism of recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
