Belize Govt Shuts Down "cattle" Hunt

[Tim Smith]

Well, Drew, that's quite an effort on your part for a topic that you think doesn't belong on the forum. Well done.

Nope, just someone else claiming there is an infallible almighty being where there is no proof of it. These creatures evolve in a certain place on the planet and man, or nature forces them to adapt to a new area.

Thanks for sorting out the issues about God and evolution. Now that's all cleared now and none of those issues will ever crop up again since everyone has the benefit of your knowledge. Congratulations on a fast start.

Wrong. Stocked trout come from other stocked trout in most hatcheries.

Hmmm. You're slowing down a bit now. Your point is that trout and water buffalo have the same degree of domestication? That's quite an assertive stance but it's a tenuous one at best. Onchorhycus mykiss have only been in hatcheries for 150 years. Salvelineus fontanalis a couple of decades longer than that. Salmo truta are in the same ball park.

Water buffalo, in contrast, have been domesticated for 7000 years. The stock in question came from a ranch raising them for meat (I know this because I did my "research"). Here's the Wikipedia link if you want to use it to begin chasing down the primary literature and do some more... "research".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Buffalo

You might enjoy the pictures on this web page of the water buffalo wearing bridles and yokes and plowing fields, or the jockeys and water buffalo races at the bottom. Maybe we can strap something to a trout they can plow fields of watercress for us or we can jockey them around raceways? Or maybe they need a few thousand more years of domestication before something like that didn't freak them to the point that they rolled over and died.

At one point in time, the brood fish were actually taken from a stream where they were native, crossbred with another species and then put into the Missouri fish system. There is nothing remotely wild about trout in Missouri with the exception of the streams where the fish sustain themselves.

Don't see anyone arguing this point?

Water buffalo were and are a wild animal. Do your research before making such claims. There are Asiatic Buffalo or Wild Water Buffalo, which are wild and native to southeast Asia, and only about 3400 animals exist. Now, at some point in time, some of the wild buffalo were domesticated for livestock use, but some were able to stay wild.

Ouch. Now you're at a screeching halt. The IUCN (the international body who keeps track of these things) does indeed say there are about that many wild water buffalo left. It also says the main threat to them is interbreeding with domestic water buffalo. Wild water buffalo are genetically distinct from domestic water buffalo. Those are two different animals altogether, and the animals that are on these ranches are the domesticated type. Your view that all these buffalo are "wild" directly contradicts the available science on the matter. Here's a link so you can do some..."research".

http://www.iucnredlist.org/apps/redlist/details/3129/0

They're shooting cows and plow oxen. At least they take the bridles off first.

Glad to have you on the thread.

[Tim Smith]

What's next? Guided hunts at the DFW zoo?

...frozen food section at Kroger might be fun.

[Tim Smith]

I'm not saying it's legit, Tim- or even ethical. I'm saying you'll be about as effective persuading a guy who wants to shoot a water buffalo that it isn't "hunting," as you'll be persuading Pam Anderson that shooting a wild deer in Missouri isn't "murder." It's a matter of perspective, personal values, and culture. There are cultural precedents for it- cattle have been domesticated and bred for sport, chickens have been domesticated and bred for sport, and many animals (pheasants, chukar, quail, pigeons, etc), are raised in captivity and released for sport. Some of those things I feel are unethical, some are ambiguous, but I can't go around legislating what is and isn't hunting just based on my own opinion- things rapidly break down.

Here's an example- I have no problem with dove hunting, and shooting 8 or 12 or whatever the limit for mourning doves in Missouri is seems pretty reasonable to me. But going to Argentina and shooting 300 doves a day, to me, constitutes "slaughter"- even though you're not breaking any laws, and both fall under the fair chase principles which I personally use to define "hunting." But I wouldn't consider killing 300 snow geese slaughter, because it's ecologically justified. It's a complex definition, and is often defined more by the individual than by the culture as a whole. It'd be awfully difficult, if not impossible, to create some metric by which everyone agrees on the definition of what is and isn't what we call "hunting."

OB I don't think we disagree at all here. I do think, however, that those feelings come from somewhere and it makes a lot of sense to define why we have the values we have.

You're right that some people won't ever care. But it makes sense to sort out as best we can why we feel the way we feel about what's "legit" and what's not because laws get passed every day based on feelings.

In the case of Belize, it was my impression that most Belizeans who were appalled by this ranch were more worried about encountering feral buffalo in the bush than anything else. I can see their point as it would take a pretty good shot from a deer slug in a 16 gauge shot gun they normally carry to drop a cow that size. The rest who piled on were animal rights types (who bashed all hunting without discriminating between this group and others). Conservationists were barely involved.

[Fly_Guy]

You could just shoot your McDouble with a slingshot. I know it would make my trip to McDonalds feel a little more like a jungle safari...

[Fishinokie1]

You could just shoot your McDouble with a slingshot. I know it would make my trip to McDonalds feel a little more like a jungle safari...

Want fries with that?

[Al Agnew]

Just to maybe put it clearly...

There are two very separate issues here. One is the "sporting" aspect of shooting domesticated, pen raised, confined animals. This is emotional and subjective. Two is the possible dangers to the environment and wild animals (and sometimes people) of this type of "hunting". That can be quantified.

I'd have no real problem with issue number one. I wouldn't want to do it, I don't care to hang around with people who do it, and I believe it's pretty lame. But if somebody wants to do it and somebody wants to make money on it and there is no problem with issue number two, then fine. Although, it certainly gives the anti-hunting crowd a lot of ammo, and that in itself might be a pretty good reason not to allow it.

It's issue number two, as Tim has pretty well covered, that's the big reason it should be strictly limited and strictly policed.