I shoot box birds occasionally. I cannot afford, nor can I justify, spending as much of my income as would be necessary to do so regularly. Lots of travel in regularly shooting flyers in the South. Some of my friends regularly drive to Texas for shoots, from Georgia.
As to the ethics involved, I cannot agree with Nitro E. He assigns emotions to an animal (terror). This is inconsistent with what I believe an animal to be capable of feeling. Pain, yes, though not the same as humans because there is no emotion, again. Anyway, the alternative to controlling pigeons, where they are trapped, is poison laced grain. Does Nitro think the carcasses of poisoned pigeons are consumed? No difference in a dead pigeon from poison or from a load of 7 1/2s. EXCEPT, the pigeon used in a ring has a darn sight better chance of surviving it than the poison.
SRH
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston - from The Outermost House
