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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (89410)	11/23/2004 1:00:59 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

You make an interesting point, but you are still wrong. I'm not preventing people from protecting animals. They can give to the Humane Society, adopt homeless dogs, etc. Fine with me. I do the same. People can believe anything they want, but their rights stop where mine begin. I have the right to hunt. You have the right to NOT hunt. That's as far as your rights go. You MAY NOT interfere in the rights of others. If you attempt to change the definition of those rights, as you are wont to do, there will be war. Unless you overstep your bounds, that war will be fought in the polling booth. By the way I DO NOT want to kill dogs. I killed one of my own by accident many years ago and I've never quite gotten over it. All my dogs since then have died of old age, with my hands and tears on them. But if your point is, "Do Vietnamese people have the right to kill dogs for the pot?" My answer to that is "In Vietnam, yes. In America? If it's legal (is it?). But stay away from MY dog, or there will be trouble." This is America, and people would do well to respect our heritage and our history. That way everybody is happy.

To: epicure who wrote (89410)	11/23/2004 1:35:15 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Historically, in this country and in most of the world, I believe, wildlife has been considered part of the land just as other resources. The right to decide what to do with that wildlife - whether to protect it, harvest it, or eradicate it - therefore goes with the property rights of the land. These rights have, of course, been limited by acts of society, through government, where there is a widely agreed societal interest in doing so. For example, rights to use of the resource water flowing over private land are limited by environmental laws and by limitations on withdrawals that unreasonably reduce amounts of the resource available downstream. Similarly, mineral rights are limited in that extraction methods should not harm the property rights of others by damaging adjacent property or the environment in general. You appear to be arguing that one's decision to harvest deer on private property somehow infringes on the property rights of others, justifying restrictions or prohibitions. To make that case, you'd have to either show that such harvesting causes actual damages to the property of others individually or else take the position that wildlife is never a private good - that it is somehow collectively owned and, therefore, subject to collective decision-making as to its use, even to the extent of infringing other rights to protect it. If the former, then let's hear it - how are the rights of others to their OWN property infringed by a hunter's decision regarding his own? If the latter, then I can only say that your philosophy flies in the face of American (if not Western) thought regarding individual rights. In order to be consistent with American/Western notions of property rights, if society decides it has a real interest in protection of wildlife in general (or specific species as in endangered species laws), even on private land, then it is imperative that society find some way of fairly compensating those whose rights are being infringed. Unless their exercise of their rights somehow infringes on the legitimate rights of others (as in the case of pollution noted above, for example), prohibitions on hunting of wildlife on private land would, IMO, constitute a "taking", which requires compensation. Likewise, if protections imposed by society result in damage to private property (garden shrubs, farm crops, livestock, timber seedlings, etc.) or persons due to overpopulation of certain wildlife (whether deer, wolves, bear or anything else), then this would also require compensation. This is clearly a complex issue. Weighing individual rights against the desires of a majority (if you could get a majority on the anti-hunting side) is always a touchy and potentially (morally) hazardous endeavor. IMO, erring on the side of protecting individual rights, including property rights, is the less hazardous course. A taking, if in the genuine public interest (as opposed to private, as is being done in some jurisdictions these days), is not inherently wrong. But it raises a real moral hazard for society, especially if done without fair compensation. Sometimes the slope really is slippery.