what. the. fuck? that is so weird and wrong that I don't know where to begin...and doesn't it seem to raise the rather obvious business strategy of just kiling one deer, once, and then splicing various camera angles and so forth into a video-game environment and tricking people into thinking they were shooting animals?
At least it's just targets, for now. The thought of actually shooting deer over the net physically sickens me. That kind of callousness to life is unpardonable.
I'm not so bothered by the actual killing. I eat meat, it gets killed. What I can't understand is the thought, "That's really pretty, now all we need to do is shoot it."
What makes me uncomfortable is the approach to killing. Yeah, I know the approach we use for culling our food isn't much better, and I don't like that either, but to me there's a difference between descentizing the animal, objectifying it into simply food-stuff, and therefore ignoring the act of killing, and on the other hand directly desensitizing the act of killing. The first one might almost seem worse in that it completely takes the life of the animal for granted, but I think that by ignoring the killing it doesn't actually desensitize it, which is why most of us are still squeamish at the actual thought of an animal being butchered. The shooting over the internet seems to me a complete lack of appreciation of life (appreciation in the sense of recognition), treating a living thing as no more than an image. And certainly one can't make the argument which makes hunting acceptable, namely that the hunter eats what he kills.