Animal activists annoy hunters with a flying drone. Guess what happened next.

Yesterday when I was reading the story about the 30000 year old seed that grew, I also saw this fun story. And since I hate pigeons, I’ll post it.

After Animal Activists Track Pigeon Hunt With Drone, Pigeon Hunters Shoot Down Drone

An animal rights group stopped a planned pigeon shoot over the weekend, leaving the would-be marksmen to shoot down another target: The animal group’s aerial drone.

A group called SHARK, SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness, went to Broxton Bridge Plantation near Ehrhardt, S.C., on Sunday to video a live pigeon shoot, according to the Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, S.C. The group lofted a small Mikrokopter drone and planned to tape the shoot. Law enforcement officers and an attorney tried to stop the drone from flying, according to the T&D. The group persisted, and apparently the shooters got back in their cars to leave, said Steve Hindi, president of SHARK.

The drone took off anyway, and then several shots rang out. One eventually struck the drone and it spiraled to the ground, to the dismay of the SHARK representatives who were filming it from the ground. The T&D has video of it here.

[…]

What did these annoying activists think was going to happen to their annoying drone when they annoyed a bunch of men hunting with guns?

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26 Comments

  1. milhon1 says:

    Those guys must have been crack shots.

  2. digdigby says:

    Cowgirl’s Country Life (Father has her on his side panel) has got a good recipe for dove sausage I’d love to send to SHARK.
    She can cook anything in her smoker – maybe even bacon wrapped drone. AVOID HER MEATY SITE DURING LENT. I would hate to commit a sin of…whatever its called when I tempt you to do something you wouldn’t do if I hadn’t tempted you…

  3. irishgirl says:

    Good for the hunters. Bad for the drone and the animal activists.
    Guess who I’m rooting for….yep, the hunters!

  4. catholicmidwest says:

    What did they think would happen? Duh-uh.

  5. wmeyer says:

    LOL! And I’m sure the drone folks were shocked, dismayed, even irate! They got exactly the result the should have expected. ;)

  6. Supertradmum says:

    Duh, what did they think would happen? Target practice provided…

  7. EXCHIEF says:

    one of the trap shooters in the group probably yelled “Pull”…..moral of story, don’t mess with anyone with a shotgun

  8. disco says:

    I was sort of hoping for an explosion in the video. I couldn’t even see any damage. Oh well sanctimonious liberal garbage. You can choose to murder an innocent child in utero but don’t you dare choose to go bird hunting.

  9. irishgirl says:

    @ disco: you got that right! Especially your last line, ‘You can choose to murder an innocent child in utero but don’t you dare choose to go bird hunting’.
    Darn tootin’….!

  10. pseudomodo says:

    I am a member or PETA,

    People
    Eating
    Tasty
    Animals

  11. xsosdid says:

    These activists may have inadvertently found a way to end pigeon hunting: shooting that drone HAD to have been at least as satisfying as shooting a pigeon. I bet that felt gooooood! Now, if they were just good eating….maybe a tofu drone…no what am I thinking

  12. AnAmericanMother says:

    LOL!
    Don’t mess with South Carolinians and their bird hunts!
    Looks like a pretty cool place, with something for everyone, including a Civil War reenactment and an endurance ride: Broxton Bridge Plantation
    Just two weekends ago we were handling dogs at a tower shoot. If anybody had flown a drone over that field it would have been riddled with holes . . . and my little black Lab f/k/a Psycho Ruby would have retrieved the remains! (there was a Norman Thelwell cartoon along those lines – with a bird hunter and a spaniel staring at a downed and smoking satellite).
    “There’s a place for all God’s creatures – right next to the mashed potatoes!”

  13. Sword40 says:

    Buy them “good ol’ boys” a cigar.

  14. I’m fairly sure that the RC helicopter was trespassing, since I seriously doubt it got high enough to be in the commons of commercial airspace.

    So… yeah… if the ball falls in the wrong yard, you’re not going to get the ball back. And if the ball got in the yard by trying to annoy the people who live there… well, you’re not going to get much sympathy for the fate of your RC helicopter.

    Although it would be great if the hunters were to fix their new helicopter and use it for knocking the next RC “drone” out of the sky.

  15. JMody says:

    @ digdigby:
    when you tempt me to eat meat on a day of abstinence, that’s called “Scandinavalizing”. It’s somewhat similar to what happens when Scandinavians find you’ve been sleeping around on them and all that’s readily at hand is a pitching wedge …

  16. jflare says:

    I gather these activists forgot to inform the gun-totin’ folks that when someone says, “Shoot!”, you’re supposed to say, “Click”! Ooops! They decided to pull the trigger instead.

    It’d be interesting to see how a judge would decide this one if the activists attempted a civil case related to destruction of property. They might find themselves answering how they justified effective spying without a warrant.

  17. jflare says:

    Suburbanbanshee,
    I’m not so sure the law would see the activist’s efforts as trespassing. I don’t know if “trespassing” laws have ever precisely dealt with concerns of objects being flown at 200 feet off the ground. By aviation rules, you’re in Class G airspace up to 400 feet AGL; so long as you aren’t interfering with someone else or taking unreasonable risks, you might be allowed to quite legally fly this drone at 200 feet or so. Depending on precisely what they might do with the craft, they may not TECHnically be doing anything for which they could be cited.
    Trespassing may not apply per se, though I would expect that respect for someone’s privacy would.

    Oh, and just for the record, I suspect that if the hunters attempted using their own drone to begin “air to air combat” of drone v drone, they might find themselves liable for some infraction. Even if most civil law wouldn’t precisely address it, the FAA does not typically look kindly upon two aircraft interfering with each other.

    I think it’d be better if people would cease using these ultra-light craft in this fashion. I don’t think people realize the can of worms they’re opening.

  18. albizzi says:

    Before to shoot down a drone, be careful there is no pilot inside.
    When the hunters find no game to shoot, what do they do? They shoot their caps.
    A drone being a better game than a cap, here is how the story ended. Sad for the drone.

  19. Elizabeth D says:

    “It is contrary to human dignity to cause unnecessary suffering or death to animals.” (CCC)

    I think it is certainly sad when people engage in hunting primarily as a form of recreation or fun, or when the suffering or death of animals is made light of. This has often been acknowledged by Christians, including various Saints. In the UK, anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce was also an initiator of the movement against animal cruelty. Do you really think that taking a break from meat on Fridays has nothing to do with taking a break from shedding blood? There are obviously other ways to give up luxuries, but giving up meat in reverence toward Christ the Divine Lamb is significant for that particular reason. This is a part of our Christian culture.

    Why should we not be known as humane, is this not an aspect of the right ordering of our relationship to Creation, and an aspect of our dignity? Is the image of man in a benevolent relationship in regards to animals, the image of the Good Shepherd for instance, not an image of God and His Mercy? I think it is actually harmful to abandon the field of concern for animals to those with such seriously warped philosophies (Peter Singer!!!) as PETA and the like.

  20. AnAmericanMother says:

    ElizabethD,
    Don’t fret. Living in the wild and then a quick clean death from a bullet or birdshot is probably preferable to being eaten alive by a coyote or dying slowly in the wild, or even living a short lifespan in a tiny cage and then being killed on an assembly line. Hunters do personally acknowledge and take responsibility for what most people think comes in plastic wrap and foam trays in the supermarket.
    One of the primary tenets of the hunter is to kill as quickly and painlessly as possible. That’s why bird hunters go to the skeet and trap range (that’s why those sports were invented), and why deer and bear hunters sight in their rifles at the start of the season, and why different types of shot and bullets are carefully employed. It’s not clear if this was a tower shoot, planted birds, or an actual dove hunt (I really don’t expect either the activists or the news media to know the difference.)
    Tower shoots and planted birds are by and large more sophisticated practice for hunting, with varying levels of skill you do occasionally get a wounded bird, but that’s why we use retrievers. My girls use their speed, keen eyesight and sharp noses to find any wounded bird and bring it quickly to me so that I can put it out of its pain. They also retrieve dead birds from heavy cover so that none go to waste. That’s why we say “a well trained retriever is the best conservation tool.”
    If these ‘pigeons’ were wild doves, they are game birds, and they will be cooked and eaten. Pheasants or quail, ditto (although I must admit I have kept whole pheasants and mallard ducks wrapped in newspaper in the freezer for training the dogs. If you don’t train on birds the dogs won’t pick them up when you hunt).
    If these were actual city pigeons, a/k/a rock doves or Columba livia, they are vermin and not fit to eat, but their numbers need to be kept down just like coyotes and rats.
    Bishop Wilberforce was concerned with dog- and cock-fighting, bull baiting, and the horrendous abuse of carriage and dray horses who were worked to death a la Black Beauty. He never took on hunting, not even the fox variety that has raised so much ire in Britain. He did criticize field sports in one relatively early work, but not on the issue of cruelty — only as one example of idle amusements of fallen-away “Christians in name only”:

    Yet thus life rolls away with too many of us, in a course of ‘shapeless idleness.’ Its recreations constitute its chief business. Watering-places, the sports of the field, cards! never-failing cards! the assembly, the theatre, all contribute their aid; amusements are multiplied, and combined, and varied, “to fill up the void of a listless and languid life;” and by the regulated use of these different resources, there is often a kind of sober settled plan of domestic dissipation, in which, with all imaginable decency, year after year wears away in unprofitable vacancy.

    A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes Contrasted with Real Christianity, (1797) p. 130.

  21. smmclaug says:

    Elizabeth, that statement would be extremely moving if it had anything to do say to the people in this particular combox. I’ve squinted pretty hard to find someone advocating cruelty and sadism toward animals and…nope, can’t find it. Also, do you really men to suggest that whatever is proscribed on Fridays during Lent must be evil? Like, you know, eating three times a day?

    But in answer to your question, no. I don’t think the point of meatless Fridays is to tell us that pigeon hunting is wicked. I also don’t see anybody making light of the suffering of animals here. I do see them making light of the suffering of silly, self-righteous animal rights activists, though. The point, which you seem to have missed entirely, is that these people failed to think even two steps ahead when deciding to harass the guys with the guns. It’s comical, no matter where you stand on hunting (for the record, I do not hunt and will not hunt).

    Finally, describing someone as an “anti-slavery crusader” doesn’t imbue his every thought and deed with profound spiritual significance, still less does it make his opinion on every subject morally binding on Christians.

  22. digdigby says:

    Elizabeth D-

    When the prodigal son comes home (if you study the original Greek) there is nothing about a ‘fatted calf’ – he was actually feted with a vegan pizza and salad of organic baby greens and quinoa roast.

  23. Elizabeth D says:

    AnAmericanMother, I am not sure how my post could have moved you to post that. One of the more precious gifts of God in my life, has been my friend of half my lifetime, Earl Grey, an African Grey parrot, about the size of a rock dove (which is also a wonderful and surprisingly intelligent creature). I had to kill a bird one time, I would rather not anymore. But that is the way in this sad world, I do not accuse the hunters and have not tried to argue against meat eating (I do abstain perpetually, with a monastic type fasting regimen also), for the sensitive among us (myself, and if that attracts derision and contempt, well I deserve that for my sins anyway) maybe this all adds to the joy that in the end death itself will be destroyed, and indeed is already conquered, and in regards to this as well as the incomparably greater joy of the eternal life of our human loved ones, there is consolation.

  24. digdigby says:

    Elizabeth D-
    I’d love to meet your parrot and teach it some sailor words.

  25. AnAmericanMother says:

    Elizabeth,
    Not sure how your post moved me to post that?
    “I think it is certainly sad when people engage in hunting primarily as a form of recreation or fun, or when the suffering or death of animals is made light of.”
    I took it upon myself to reassure you that we hunters are not evil monsters who inflict suffering for kicks, and to explain how we hunt ethically. I didn’t blow up at your rather uninformed statements, many hunters are quite suspicious of the anti-hunter agenda and would have responded harshly. But you can’t expect to issue general condemnations like that and not draw some sort of response.
    Btw, my daughter has a charming and intelligent parakeet named Ozymandias, and a good friend has a green, a gray, two cockatiels and a cage full of parakeets, as well as a goose, Rhode Island Reds and a flock of guineas. The dogs don’t bother them – they know that game birds aren’t domesticated pets, any more than a coyote is a house dog.
    And, of course, the statement about Bishop Wilberforce was either inaccurate or irrelevant, take your choice. Most hunters would take offense at being classed with dog fighters, bullbaiters, and slaveholders, though. Just sayin’.

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