Hunting Ethics
Most recreational hunters observe legal requirements designed to maintain both ecological balance and stocks of game. They also follow hunting ethics, known as fair chase or walk and stalk designed to even the odds, to give the animal a fair chance. Fair chase requires the hunter to forgo pursuing game in a vehicle or on horseback, shooting over a bait (such as a tethered goat or carcass) or at waterholes, using spotlights to dazzle nocturnal animals, and the like. Only unconfined animals may be hunted; canned hunting, in which the game is confined to an enclosure or small park, is considered unethical by many people. Many hunters believe that telescopic sights and night vision aids are also unethical.
Green hunting involves fair chase but with a non-lethal climax such as a paintball shot or a dart gun that injects a tranquilizer so that the hunter can pose for a photograph with the animal. This is often part of a research program, allowing the animal to be studied, fitted with a microchip, or translocated.
The founder of Orion the Hunter's Institute, Jim Posewitz, wrote: ''Fundamental to ethical hunting is the idea of fair chase. This concept addresses the balance between the hunter and the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken'' (Posewitz 1995, p. 57).
According to the historian John MacKenzie,
In [subsistence] hunting the end is all-important, the death and utilisation of the animal. The subsistence hunter is concerned with the ease with which his purpose can be achieved. The sportsman indulging in the Hunt is concerned with the difficulty. . . . In the Hunt the animal is most to be valued, and by extension the hunter who slays it, according to the fight it puts up. In securing its death he follows strict rules of procedure and endangers himself in the process. (MacKenzie 1988, pp. 10-11)
However, this sharp distinction between subsistence and recreational hunting is questionable. First, the herbivores that are the main target of recreational hunters are not merely edible but regarded as gourmet treats. Many hunters regard it as an obligation to ensure that the animals they kill are utilized, not wasted. Second, often these herbivores must be controlled either because their natural predators have become locally extinct, as in most parts of the United States, or because they were introduced to areas where they never had predators, such as New Zealand. Thus, hunters are often de facto pest controllers. Third, even in traditional societies that depended for subsistence and safety on killing animals, there were often elaborate rules circumscribing hunting, for instance, rules related to religious requirements and rites of passage. Moreover, in those societies hunts often are viewed as fair contests between equals.
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