HSUS is pushing to ban a form of dog training known as penning. I don’t honestly know much about this, but dogs, being a certain variation of canis lupus, sort of naturally do this:
Penning involves releasing hunting dogs in enclosed areas to chase foxes and coyotes that have been taken from the wild through trapping. The intent, supporters say, is not to capture or kill the wildlife but merely to train the dogs to hunt.
So if a pack of dogs chases down and kills a fox just generally, that’s just mother nature, but if people do it, it’s wrong? These people have a warped sense of morality. Nature is brutal and cruel. Comparing training a hunting dog to dog fighting is ridiculous. Dog fighting is banned largely because of the crime that tends to go along with it, and also because the only way you can generally train dogs, which are social animals, to maul each other to death, is by severely mistreating them. It takes some training to get a dog to hunt, but chasing animals down is kind of what they do instinctively.
I’m going to guess the purpose of this exercise that HSUS wants to ban is teaching the dogs not to rip the hell out of whatever they manage to capture. That would make me believe that the supporters are correct… that killing the prey is not the goal. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t happen from time to time. Then again, I’m not sure why I should care any more than when a pack of wolves successfully takes down a Bison.
