Hunting Made Easy

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Even preserves with no baited killings and lots of room to roam may be less of a square deal than they seem. "If a ranch advertises itself as having 3,500 acres, you need to know if that space is open or broken down into pens and whether there's protective cover or the ground is clear," says Richard Farinato, director of the Humane Society's captive-wildlife protection program.

Concerns such as these are prompting governments to act. More states are being pressed to ban or restrict hunting in enclosures. The House bill, which parallels one introduced in the Senate by Delaware's Joseph Biden, would not drop the hammer on the hunts but would give Washington a way to control the animal traffic.

But the new laws could come at a price. In Texas alone, the hunt industry brings in $1 billion a year; a crackdown could hurt both good ranches and bad. "Cattle prices have stayed the same for 40 years," says Gardner. "To hold on to acreage, you've got to have other sources of income." Safari Club International is worried that since hunting areas are so different, it may be impossible to pass a law that covers them all. "There's no standard to say what is and what isn't fair," says club spokesman Jim Brown. "You know it when you see it."

But there may be a deeper standard than that. If the hunting impulse is as old as humanity, so is the sense of what it truly means to chase and bag an animal. Nature may have intended humans to hunt, but whether it meant to toss ranches, pens and feeding stations into the mix is a question hunters must ask themselves.