State lawmakers seek to ban Internet hunting

BOISE – Ready, aim, click.

It’s called remote-control hunting. A gun is hooked up to a webcam, placed in a field, and with a little fancy mousework, you can hunt deer in Texas from your office in Chicago.

But if some state lawmakers have their way, the Internet hunts will never reach Idaho.

Idaho is the latest state to add a bill to ban the remote-control hunts. Twenty-three states have already banned them, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

“That’s not hunting. What hunting is about is going out, and being out in the mountains and getting calluses on your hands whether you get something or not. That’s just killing, is what it is,” said Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, who is co-sponsoring the bill.

The flurry of laws is in response to a venture set up in 2005 by a Texas entrepreneur who hooked up a gun on his 220-acre ranch to a Web site, where subscribers could pay to click – actually, shoot – antelope, wild pigs and other game. The operator would then send his customers the heads of the animals.

During a demonstration, a friend of the operator used a computer in his home office 45 miles away to shoot a wild hog but only wounded the animal in the neck. The operator, who was on site, had to finish the kill with two more shots. The venture was quickly shut down, but not before 350 people signed up.

The bill would make it illegal in Idaho to hunt using a weapon accessed through the Internet, and would also ban “accessing, regulating access to, or regulating the control of” a remotely accessed weapon. Both would be punishable as misdemeanors.

It’s based on template legislation being passed around by the National Assembly of Sportsmen’s Caucuses. Hunting groups in particular oppose the practice, saying the video-gamelike experience is unethical and gives their sport a bad name.

“I just totally find it strange,” said Idaho hunter Vance Henry. “I’m not sure who’d really go for doing that.”