The “hunter” sits in his office high above the city streets, glancing occasionally at his computer monitor from time to time as he works. The screen displays a wooded clearing on a ranch, 50 miles away, a television image in real time. A muted bell demands attention. The office worker/hunter puts down the report he was reading to study the monitor intently, his hand moving to the mouse. The dark form of a wild pig has entered the clearing. The bell advises him of that, as part of the arrangement.

The mouse moves the image of a small circle with a crosshairs in it across the screen. The “hunter” carefully sets the crosshairs on the shoulder of the pig. A rifle, hidden in the stand beside the television camera, responds to the motion of the mouse, zeroing in on the pig’s kitchen. The “hunter” discharges the rifle with a click of the mouse button. Dead pig. A real dead pig. This is not a video game.

The rancher/guide who has arranged this so-called hunt butchers the animal and sends the meat as directed, carefully wrapped and ready for the freezer. All part of the deal for the price that the hunter has agreed to pay, arranged over the Internet.

This is neither fantasy nor the product of an overwrought imagination. Check out Live-Shot.com , described in the article “Virtual Adrenalin” in the March 5-ll, 2005 issue of The Economist. The story is real enough. It illustrates where we are headed unless we call a halt. It represents precisely the type of development foretold by the advent of electronic, battery powered spinning wing waterfowl decoys (SWDs), activated by remote control devices.

If one can set up a rifle to point by remote control, using a computer mouse to move a sight on a televised image, why not a shotgun? And while we are at it, why not provide precisely the type of speed, directional and other information that would improve the “hunter’s” accuracy, right on the screen – in a manner similar to that of interactive video games? The sensing devices certainly exist to collect and provide that information, in digital or pictorial form, as the birds fly into the decoys (presumably supplemented by batteries of SWDs). Indeed, a skilled programmer could figure out how to project the precise kill point on the screen. As in a game of Pong, the “waterfowler” would need only to adjust the mouse or joystick so that the cursor on the screen moved to that point, timing the click to fire the shot at the exact instant the images converged.

Controlling hardware (a shotgun) from a remote computer terminal would be far simpler than some of the robot control practices routinely used in modern manufacturing. With this type of setup, the truly modern waterfowler could take his limit without ever pulling on a pair of boots, without ever leaving his home or office. He would have to pay for the privilege, of course. But think of the money he would save on mileage, raingear, waders, meals away from home, the jewelry purchased to discharge obligations of spousal contrition, etc. With no need to leave the office, he would not eat into his vacation time or lose productive hours.

Isn’t this the perfect solution to the problem posed by busy and demanding modern lives, difficulty in finding good places to hunt, the hardship of sitting out in the cold, the rain, the wind? And if the whole idea makes you sick, you have your choice of at least a dozen over-the-counter nausea control medicines – another advance of modern science.

Or, of course, you could rise up from your lazy-boy lounge chair and join your similarly disgusted fellows in demanding that our regulators call a halt to this nonsense.

* * * * *

The Division of Migratory Bird Management of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently issued a report entitled “Review Of Electronic, Motorized Decoys For Taking Migratory Game Birds,” February 10, 2005 (the “SWD Report”). The SWD Report was prepared at the request of the Service Regulations Committee, apparently for the purpose of considering possible prohibition of SWD use.

The SWD Report painstakingly summarizes the studies that have been done and describes the history of SWD usage since their advent during the 1998-99 season in California. The Report suggests that at least fifty percent of waterfowlers nationwide now use SWDs when they hunt – and take far greater numbers of birds than they would without them. When comparing SWD usage periods with non-SWD time segments during the same hunt, the SWD Report concludes that seventy percent of the birds were killed during the SWD assisted time segments. The math supports the conclusion that SWD use contributed to a much higher kill for the users, perhaps as much as a forty percent overall increase. Given the results of some of the field surveys identified in the SWD Report, that disclosed a six to one or even higher kill ratio during SWD assisted time segments, one could characterize “forty percent” as beyond conservative.

The SWD Report does not recommend a ban, however. It muses over the possibility that SWD use merely “redistributes” the total kill from non-users to users, with no increase in overall take.1 It makes no mention of the correlation between the advent and growth of SWD use and the decline in our waterfowl populations that has occurred with each successive year of SWD usage – populations declining as SWD use expands. Apparently that’s purely a coincidence. Indeed, the SWD Report purports to see no correlation (and no cause and effect relationship) between growing SWD use and the anguished reports from the field that have punctuated each season since 2000 in a growing crescendo of alarm.

When the Service decided to ban the use of lead shot, it did so on the basis of studies suggesting that lead poisoning might be killing as many as two million migratory waterfowl each year. It undertook no subsequent studies to determine if the shift to non-toxics actually coincided with a population increase2. The presumed lethality of lead justified the regulation – even though lead shot had been the tool of hunters since the invention of firearms and an integral component of the traditions of waterfowling, a constant as populations rose and fell through the cycles of the years. Unlike SWDs, lead shot did not represent a new development. Just the opposite.

Well, times change. We now think of lead as “toxic,” despite its long usage and place in our traditions. Modern medicine gave us new information and the Service acted on that information, despite the fact that it lacked the very scientific support it now claims it must have before it can take action based on another advancement in human technology, an advancement that has created a direct kill enhancer.

The Service’s response to the advent of electronic calling devices provides an even more striking analogy. When sound reproduction and projection devices became good enough, small enough and durable enough to take into the field – and when anecdotal evidence from the field testified to the dramatic increase in kill that hunters achieved with the equipment, the Service imposed a ban, despite the fact that it lacked the very scientific support it now claims it must have before it can take action based on another advancement in human technology.

Raise that issue and you will presumably be told, as I have been from levels of high authority, that the Service may have acted too hastily – it should have consulted public opinion and waited for proof of adverse impact on populations, etc. If so, why has the Service not lifted the ban and conducted those studies? After all, we are not dealing with a constitutional amendment. The ban could be lifted provisionally by regulation, if “scientific” proof of effect on populations must support all of our restrictions. These, by the way, are the same people who have decided that we need to kill a lot of snow geese to reduce their populations – and the way we do that is allow spring hunts assisted with electronic calling devices because that’s the way to bring the populations down into balance with the capacity of the nesting grounds! In short, the ban might have been premature for lack of proof that electronic calling devices would adversely affect populations – but we are willing to make the assumption of population impact when it suits us.

The SWD Report may be valuable for its collection of information and its official recognition of the problem; but it is otherwise an effort of which the Service should be genuinely ashamed, demonstrating a lack of leadership that borders on gutlessness, completely inconsistent with the patterns of the past. Since when do we decide fundamental issues of stewardship based on “public opinion”? What process has the Service established for determining that opinion – and deciding when the opinion has coalesced sufficiently to guide its actions? By what process do we determine that leadership demands action regardless of public opinion – if it ever does under the current regime? When in the past have we waited for clear proof of impact on populations before acting on the best empirical data available?

To ask those questions is to answer them.

* * * * *

Mark Twain wrote: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of truth.” He must have had a crystal ball, with waterfowl biology in mind – except that he judged perhaps too harshly. For “conjecture” read “common sense deduction coupled with the courage to act” and you have a fair summary of the Service’s reaction to the advent of electronic calling devices.

Somewhere along the line, conjecture became anathema. Empirical proof must support any new restriction or the practice, however obscene or untraditional, will not be proscribed. Out with common sense. A complete scientific foundation must support any action that might deprive hunters of new killing leverage on the birds, as though preservation and enhancement of hunter opportunity – defined by killing – constituted the Service’s sole reason to exist. If Twain’s crystal ball foretold that transformation, he also saw “conjecture” as a political term (in the small “p” sense of that word), serving the bureaucratic penchant for sacrifice of the mission statement on the alter of flak aversion.

One wonders how many more years of dismal results we must endure before some vestige of leadership again bestirs itself among our regulators. Far better to take a risk on the side of caution, as in the case of electronic calling devices, than to stand frozen like a hare in the headlights awaiting a true and immutable answer, in the fashion of a medieval philosopher seeking a heavenly form of abstract goodness or agonizing over an attempt to construct a logical proof of the existence of God. Sorry, but waterfowl biology simply does not admit of such certainty.

But as the demand for such unattainable certainty excuses inaction – and inaction awaiting further study is the national anthem of bureaucracy, I personally don’t expect change, now that the habit of inaction has taken hold.

Perhaps the Service will prove me wrong. The proposed adjustments in AHM exhibit at least a tentative step on the road to risk. Time will tell if that is a sea change or a mere puff of vagrant breeze, quickly dissipated.

But of this I am confident. The 2005-06 season will be as dismal as the last two, probably more so. The next round of technological “advance” in killing devices will surely occur and just as surely accelerate the downward spiral of our populations. Those supposedly in charge will stand there and watch it happen, agonizing over irrelevancies. And those of us who hope to see bountiful skies again before descending to the wrong side of the grass will explore new dimensions in our personal concepts of frustration.

1 I, of course, do not use SWDs and most of those with whom I hunt don’t use them either. Our take has not declined beyond what one would expect as a product of declining populations. The very notion of redistribution presupposes that non-users would persist in non-use, even if their take dramatically declined, a fanciful concept in the case of most hunters. Indeed, large numbers of SWD users profess to use them only because their neighbors do and they have to use to compete. In short, the notion of “redistribution” is pure propaganda offered in support of inaction.

2 If one assumes that 50 percent of hunter days are SWD assisted, SWD’s are probably responsible for the kill of 2,700,000 waterfowl, more or less, during the average year. See Back Of The Envelope , March 15, 2005.