legality and ethics do not go hand in hand. there is a lot of overlap in some areas but also a lot of divergence.
for example(keep it hunting related), I know I can make just as clean of a kill on a turkey with a 223, as I can with a shotgun, and in that instance it's either a hit/kill or a complete miss, rather than the turkey catching a few pellets and surviving in pain despite it, yet the state I live in says I am only allowed to use a shotgun. similarly, I am allowed to hunt grouse with a 22lr, yet a pheasant which is the exact same size and is way more skiddish and harder to get within effective shotgun range, is shotgun only... lots of double standards and pointless arbitrary limitations.
with that said, I hate to see animals suffering and I have made illegal finishing shots, to end the suffering of wounded animals. it's rough, but letting the animal suffer while the county spends 30 minutes dispatching a cop to do the same thing is far less ethical in my opinion.
now although I agree with a lot of the quoted post above, I would like to address a few key portions.
While a car hit deer can be different, do we really want any Joe Blow with a CWC license trying to put down a injured and moving deer with his occasionally shot CWC gun with other folks standing around?
on the flip side of that, do we want some police officer who fires his gun once a year to show he knows where to point the gun doing the exact same thing? not this is just arguing semantics and citing euphamisns, and anecdotes, but it seems like where I'm from, most cops really are not gun guys, and shoot only when the dept makes them to prove competence. is joe blow with a CWC any less practiced? I've taken a few CWL classes and they were absolute travesties to the art of firearms instruction, but anyone I know who has also taken them has also recognized this and continued to practice on their own time to improve, even if the class did not give any firearms instruction. I would take any of their skills to put down a wounded animal over officer blow anyday.
I have arrowed a coupla bucks that I thought were dead deer walking after seeing the hit and following the blood trail. I never recovered those animals and thought for sure they were coyote bait. Both of them were seen later in the season and acting as if nothing had ever happened to them. Even tho at some point, odds are they were sick enough to be unable to get up and run very far.
this is a good point. my younger brother has shot elk with completely atrophied legs that were shot the year prior, as well as deer with large puss sacks inside the ribcage where poorly placed shots went through without hitting any vitals and got infected. I've shot deer that had both legs on one side taken out with a single poorly placed shot. some animals can handle a lot of punishment. I've also killed animals that had no discernable wound track at all, no blood, no bruising, no broken bones, just a shot followed by a dead animal. the amount of suffering is really at the discretion of the beholder. personally I would like to put down half of the poor animals that are constantly being dragged to the vet with injuries and health conditions that obviously cause the animal to suffer, but the owners refuse to let their pets go, and instead make them suffer on.
now here is where I get preachy.
actually they are not. I've been forced to take so many ethics courses I can just about quote every possible definition of ethics that exists. Ethics are not personal. Morals are personal. your morals are your personally held beliefs which guide your behavior and cause you to make decisions based on what you think is right. Ethics are an agreed upon set of morally acceptable behaviors among a group of people based on the most prolifically held sets of morals. as an example, in large cities like NY, it is very common to basically use interns as slave labor, no pay, no benefits, and having 10 people competing for one open position. just about everywhere else in the country, interns are very well paid, almost on par with the people who hold permanent positions and there are rarely more than 2 people competing for one open position. although me might find it morally reprehensible to have someone work for 12 weeks for a company completely without pay only to get the boot, this is ethically acceptable in the cities where this is common practice.
given this definition of ethics, I think there is a common set of hunting ethics that everyone agrees to, even though our personal morals might differ greatly.
