Last-minute win for NRA; No vote on pigeon shoots

Posted 8/21/12

HARRISBURG, PA — The National Rifle Association (NRA) won a victory at the end of the legislative session, when the Pennsylvania House avoided a scheduled vote on a bill that would have banned …

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Last-minute win for NRA; No vote on pigeon shoots

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HARRISBURG, PA — The National Rifle Association (NRA) won a victory at the end of the legislative session, when the Pennsylvania House avoided a scheduled vote on a bill that would have banned pigeon shoots in the state.

The Senate voted on the measure early in October and the support was very high. After that vote, the NRA Institute for Legislative Acation (NSA-ILA) sent this message to supporters: “Unfortunately this week, the Pennsylvania Senate caved to the radical anti-hunting Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and passed House Bill 1750, by a 36 to 12 vote. If HB 1750 becomes law, it would ban organized bird shoots and tower shoots in the Commonwealth. These types of activities have been held in the Keystone State for more than a century, and participants are law-abiding, ethical shooting enthusiasts, hunters and sportsmen.”

But the vote in the house, which was scheduled for October 20, never occurred. John Goodwin, director of animal cruelty policy at the HSUS, said his organization assumes that it was pressure from the NRA that prevented the vote from happening.

In 1900, the International Olympic Committee determined that pigeon shoots are not sporting events and from then on banned them from the Olympics.

Goodwin said he attended a pigeon shoot near Reading a couple of months ago, and this is what he saw.

He said, “At the shoot they had a lot of pigeons, well over a thousand. They’d be put in little boxes and there were five boxes lined up together about 30 yards from the shooter. Someone would yell ‘pull’ and one of the boxes would be opened, and the pigeon would be propelled out of the box because the bird had been standing on a spring loaded plate, and the bird would be shot at.

“If the bird were lucky, he would completely escape or be killed outright; a lot of them just kind of flopped around injured and in pain, until these teenagers that they hired ran out onto the field and broke the bird’s necks, by hand.

“The worst-case scenario was if one of the birds fell outside of the shooting area; if that happened they’d just leave them there to suffer, because the bird wasn’t in the way of the competition.”

Goodwin said every other state has either banned pigeon shoots outright, or the shoots are prohibited because of a state’s animal cruelty laws. He said Pennsylvania is the only state where pigeon shoots are regularly and openly conducted.

He said if any of the shoots were taken to court, he thinks “there’s a good chance they would be shut down, but local district attorneys aren’t taking the cases.”

The pigeon-shoot-ban language was attached to House Bill 1750, which would have also banned the slaughter of dogs and cats for meat for human consumption.

HSUS is expected to have the legislation introduced again next year.

After the bill died, a message on the NRA website said, “We are pleased to report that after much hard work, House Bill 1750, misguided legislation being pushed by the Humane Society of the United States, died in the House Rules Committee and is no longer a threat this year to the age-old tradition of organized bird shoots.”

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