Dog fighting and cock fighting are banned in the US, but in 19 states, pen hunting is not. Wildlife advocates call it a "heinous, barbaric blood 'sport'" and want it banned in North Carolina.
In these "controlled hunting preserves," it's a pack of dogs against one fox or coyote, often one that's already suffering from being trapped by steel jaw leg-holds, then starved for days before being released into the pens to be hunted and torn apart.
Hunting dog groups say hunt pens are necessary to train their dogs, and Keith Loudermilt of NC Sporting Dogs Assoc. accuses animal activists of exaggerating the situation. But wildlife photographer Bill Lea, a supportor of ethical hunting, says Loudermilt uses "inflammatory rhetoric, untruths and fear to lobby support for the blood “sport” of hunt pens."
Support efforts to ban this heinous torture of innocent foxes and coyotes, and tell NC lawmakers to outlaw these horrible hunt pens.
We, the undersigned, support efforts to put an end to hunt pens in North Carolina.
As Bill Lea explains in his RiseNC rebuttal of Keith Loudermilt's statements, this is not about outsiders or anti-hunting groups with a "hidden agenda" objecting to ethical hunting practices. It's about, he says, "North Carolinians who care and want to see the pursuit and torture of innocent fox and coyotes stopped." He adds that the hunt pens are giving ethical hunters a bad name.
Lea says that Loudermilt's claim that “'Fox enclosures range from several hundred acres to thousands of acres,'" is false according to statistics from the NC Wildlife Resources Commission. "Of the 108 licensed hunt pens in North Carolina," Lea says, "one hunt pen exceeds 1000 acres, but twenty five hunt pens have enclosures of 25 acres or less, with the smallest being a mere but legal 6 acres."
Mitch Weiss's AP report (published by Pilot Online) says that Lea and others met with Wildlife Resources Commission director Gordon Myers recently to discuss banning the practice, but found Myers unwilling to take a stand, saying this was an issue for the state legislature. But Edwards and other activists tried in 2009 to get the legislature to ban it and failed.
It's time for one or both of you to take a stand and end this cruel and unethical practice in NC.
Thanks for your serious and timely attention to this important issue.
