Obama: Gun-control advocates have to listen more

[primavera]

105. Exclusive use

Well, I suppose I have a choice in that I can choose to adhere to rules for hunters or I can choose to get shot. I suppose that's a choice of sorts. So, if I tell you to give me all of your money or I'll shoot you, you're making a free choice to give me your money, right? No responsibility attaches to me, does it? Besides, it was your choice to wander into my neighborhood in the first place, which I was happy to share with you, provided that you don't mind either giving me all of your money or letting me shoot you, of course.

Unfortunately, orange vests are nearly as effective at scaring away birds as air sirens are. Birds are visually oriented animals; visual stimuli are the first things they react to. So wearing an orange vest makes it kind of hard to get close enough to identify and/or photograph them.

Nevertheless, although I still think there's something skewed in unilaterally requiring other wildlife appreciators to change their behavior to accommodate your behavior when they make no such demands upon you, Crepuscular's post was very helpful and informative. I always thought that hunting seasons existed for one type of wildlife or another for much of the year: as soon as the season for one animal ended, the season for another started up, and then another, and so on. But, inspired by Crepuscular's post, I went and did a little digging online and learned that, at least in the state where I live, hunting seasons overlap with all occurring at pretty much the same time and they don't last very long. So it sounds like the inconvenience to others is less than I thought - I at least don't have to avoid forests for fear of noisy, disruptive, dangerous gun slingers for any significant period of time. And it sounds like hunting produces some benefits with respect to keeping lands free from commercial development and the habitat disruption that accompanies it, so there that adds more tick marks in the "benefit" column.

In sum, I'm persuaded that there are benefits to hunting and limitations on the costs to hunting that make it less onerous than I had initially thought.