March 16, 2006--Fanaticism LXXIV: Ready, Aim, Click

For years I’ve wondered why men who hunt are called “sportsmen.” My notion of being involved in sport includes the concept of winning and losing. Thus, stalking the woods with a high powered rifle in search of deer or squirrels, by that definition, doesn’t sound to me like much of a sport. Unless it’s very cold out and the hunter-sportsman is in danger of getting frostbite and losing a few toes.

If even this sounds a little rough for you, then, for the high-end sportsman there is always the hunting ranch. These are places, usually in Texas, where he checks into a fancy lodge; gets someone to serve him an eight-course dinner of grilled game; and, surrounded by his buddies, downs lots of high-octane fluids. Then, the next morning he is driven out to the hunting grounds in a Land Rover, gets comfortably settled in a blind, and then blasts away at the grouse or whatever that the staff release from their nearby cages. Sort of what Dick Cheney did last year when he shot his friend in the face. You know, a fellow sportsman.

Now I like a good steak as much as anyone else and also a nicely roasted piece of grouse, but why various versions of this “manly” behavior are held in such high esteem is totally beyond my comprehension, though I do know there is a hierarchy among hunters that places those who hunt the old-fashioned way with bows and arrows and eat what they kill at the top of the heap.

But since this is the 21st century, for real men who would otherwise be out in the woods if they didn’t have to sit at their computers all day outsourcing the manufacture of porcelain tooth caps to China (I learned about this very thing today from my dentist), there is now a way for even them to get in some hunting—right there at their computer.

For them, a, yes, Texas entrepreneur has set up a Website where they can hunt on line. Not via a computer game, where you "hunt" virtually for humanoids, but literally.

Here’s how it works—

All you need is a high-speed computer connection. Using it, from anywhere in the world, you can “stalk” an antelope or wild pig on his 220-acre spread on your home or office screen. At the Texas end, with your mouse, you control the motion of a video camera that tracks the animals. And then when you are satisfied that you have your prey in your sights, in the crosshairs on the screen, with just the click of the mouse you fire a real gun which is rigged up to the on-site camera. It’s as simple as that.

John Lockwood, who figured all this out, provides two extra services—if you only wound the animal, he is humanely right there to finish it off; and if you’d like, he’ll have the trophy head shipped home to you.

As you might imagine, there is a hue and cry of opposition to this growing phenomenon, not just from the PETA folks but also from the NRA which opposes remote-control “hunting.” To them, in the words of the NY Times which reported about this, it “violates the spirit of fair-chase hunting,” whatever that is. (Article linked below.)

But Lockwood, ever politically correct, asserts that he is helping disabled people to hunt and also enabling men and women serving overseas in the military the chance to bag a buck. Assuming they’re not otherwise getting in enough shooting.