This Mouse Won't Hunt

Lawmakers from Augusta to Sacramento are locking and loading to shoot down a Web site that purports to let people hunt big game online. This topic has been heating up for more than a month after Texas-based Live-Shot.com opened for business, and is finally gaining front-burner status after a prominent Republican congressman introduced a bill to outlaw Internet hunting nationwide.

Explaining his bill, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) said last week that "fair chase is a basic element of hunting. You have to be there, in the field, not sitting behind a computer screen."

Davis's views are shared across the country and across the partisan aisle. California State Sen. Debra Bowen (D) told Reuters that "Pay-per-view hunting doesn't meet any definition of 'sporting' that I've ever heard because there's nothing 'sporting' about sitting at your computer in your pajamas, using your mouse to shoot at hogs or antelope or any other animal that's halfway across the country."

But hold your fire, at least for a moment. People who don't hunt sometimes imagine all hunters as backwoods bubbas or weekend warriors from the city who can't shoot straight. In this situation, however, the poster-boy for the preservation of Live-Shot.com is Dale Hagberg, a 38-year-old quadriplegic who couldn't lift a rifle, let alone engage in "fair chase" in the field.

Hagberg, as the Los Angeles Times noted, worked a computer mouse with his mouth and tongue on Saturday, April 9, to shoot at an antelope on a game reserve near Boeme, Texas, while lying in bed in Ligonier, a town in northeastern Indiana.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Jay Root provided more details of how Live-Shot.com works: "The system is pretty simple. The remote hunter can zoom in and out of the target area by operating remote cameras and has a control panel with four arrows in a circle and a 'fire' button in the middle. With a few mouse clicks, the hunter can swivel and fire a Remington Model 742 .30-'06 mounted on a pan-tilt motor," Root reported. Of course, he noted, "there has to be something to fire at ... For several hours in the morning and evening Saturday, Lockwood scoured a small swath of a ranch near Guadalupe River State Park for any sign of the black buck that Hagberg paid $1,300 for. If [Hagberg] doesn't shoot the animal before the end of August, when his Texas hunting license expires, Lockwood said, he'll refund the money."

Dale plans to try again on Saturday, April 30, Dale's father Robert Hagberg told me in an interview this morning.

If 14 states and a flock of furious animal rights activists have their way, however, Hagberg and other would-be Internet hunters will be banished to video-game territory. Virginia already has banned online hunting, as has Tennessee. Similar efforts are afoot in Maine, California and Texas.

Lawmakers opposed to sites like Live-Shot.com have plenty of allies. UKPets.co.uk reported that Humane Society President Wayne Pacelle is asking Internet service providers to block access to the site, while the Los Angeles Times quotes Texas Wildlife Association Executive Vice President Kirby L. Brown as saying, "It's not hunting... It falls off of the end of the ethical chart."

The L.A. Times presented an interesting point of view from Dale Jamieson, an environmental studies and philosophy professor at New York University. He said that Live-Shot is "an understandable, if disturbing, extension of a computer society that produces games like 'Grand Theft Auto.' Jamieson: "If you look at this as being kind of a continuum or slippery slope ... you have people who enjoy the act of killing and destruction in video games, you have people who enjoy killing animals over the Internet. But of course the next step in this is that people start killing people over the Internet. That's the worry."

That seems a bit far-fetched. Moving from Internet game-hunting to real-life versions of "The Most Dangerous Game" seems like a slope that's more slippery than Rick Santorum's views about where homosexuality will lead our society.

Shooting animals through an Internet connection might seem distasteful to those who oppose hunting on moral grounds to begin with, but using a broadband connection to bag game isn't any better or worse than doing it in person. I can't say whether I think that Dale Hagberg should have a right to hunt despite being paralyzed -- that will be a matter for Rep. Davis and 14 statehouses to deal with.
Just Offshoring

You've probably heard a lot of news reports about "offshoring" and "outsourcing," the practice of transferring jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas. Technology and lots of other companies like it because it saves them money and prevents them from having to procure lots of costly and difficult temporary worker visas for foreign talent to work back here in the states. Lots of unemployed Americans aren't so hot about the practice because they see it as taking jobs out of America. The practical effect, as many of you know, is that your customer support call might get answered in Bangalore rather than Bangor.

Two high-tech executives, however, think they might be able to move outsourced staff a little closer to the United States -- just off the coast of Los Angeles, as a matter of fact. Sourcingmag.com reported that entrepreneurs Roger Green and David Cook plan to position an old cruise ship just off the coast of El Segundo and set up a 24-hour-a-day programming shop, "thereby avoiding H-1B visa hassles while still exploiting offshore labor cost arbitrage and completing development projects in half the time they'd take onshore or offshore."

"The scheme first came to Mr. Cook one day while he was cutting his grass in San Diego. With his unusual background as a super-tanker captain and an IT professional, the idea made a lot of sense to him. He took it to Mr. Green, with whom he'd worked before and who has served as both a buyer and provider of outsourcing services, and they saw the possibility of creating a new form of IT sourcing," the site reported. "A year ago, they formed SeaCode, Inc. with Mr. Cook serving as CEO and Mr. Green as COO. They've signed on a marketing director and CTO and, even more importantly, found an investor. Start-up costs won't be cheap. A broker right now is searching for just the right ship to buy -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million." The advantage? It's a big, big time-saver for harried execs, Green told SourcingMag.

The company plans to use U.S. Internet connections and telecommunications access. On a very practical level, it also plans all sorts of first-class amenities for its residents as well as frequent ship-to-shore service via boat and helicopter: "These workers, they say, will each have private rooms with baths, meal service, laundry service, housekeeping and access to on-board leisure-time activities. Picture the Love Boat with a timecard."

< Aww, you missed the kill-zone, now the deer's a quadrapalegic too.

For the record, we are for animal rights but think the other people who are often go too far. There's a lot of people who deserve to live less than animals, and I don't mean ones who are convicted of something. >