This Mouse Won't Hunt

Byline: Robert MacMillan

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."

Hillary Clinton, Italian-Style

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) successfully reclaimed the Internet address HillaryClinton.com after an international arbitration panel ruled that Michele Dinoia of Pineto, Italy, who registered the domain in 2001, was using it in bad faith. USA Today columnist Eric Sinrod , an attorney with the Duane Morris law firm, reported that Dinoia "used the domain name to direct Internet users to a Web site that displayed a generic search engine, links to commercial Web sites, and exposed users to pop-up ads and pay-per-click search results. Also, the domain name bookmarked itself as a visitor's homepage each time his or her Internet browser was opened." Based on what I wrote about papal domains in yesterday's column , the next logical question is whether Dinoia's next battle will involve the Vatican.

From the Mailbag...

Speaking of the Vatican, reader Sarah Nichols in Kansas City, Mo., came up with this tongue-in-cheek suggestion for how the Holy See could get more cozy with the Internet: "Can't get to confession? Don't have time to swing by and see your priest to tell him of the evil thoughts you had about your boss on the drive home? No need to worry. Simply go home, and confess online. Rosary in hand, you'll get instructions for the 10 Hail Marys you must say right from the comfort of your computer chair, or couch if you're wireless. Better yet, confess at work, and save even more time. That's certainly a justifiable use of company resources, don't you think? Plus, how convenient would it be if you could also go to Mass, take communion and then socialize with your fellow churchgoers afterwards, all online? Wouldn't more people go to church? Now ... if only they could equip computers with automatic incense and communion dispensers."

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