The Benefits and Limits of Artifice

A repost from March 2007

Upon first inspection, the above picture seems absurd: an African Martial Hawk named "Zulu" flying across a field to pounce on a toy bunny which has a slot in its back filled with a morsel of meat.

Is this some kind of weird alternative to true hunting dreamed up by some misguided animal rights lunatic?

Well, actually, no. The eagle is a resident of the Eagle Heights Bird of Prey Centre in Kent England, and my notes say that the bunny is part of the public display that the Centre puts on for visitors. Though the bunny is a bit comical, the string that is tied to its body is used to pull it across the grass at a leisurely pace so that the eagle has to gauge speed and distance properly in order to get a proper "kill and fill" from this plush toy.

Those of us who hunt with hawks and dogs are not above such artifice, especially in the off-season when the goal is to keep our animals fit and sharp.

In the off-season, a greyhound owner may course his dogs to a white plastic bag tied to a string that is zipping around a pulley-course set up in a back pasture.

A terrier owner may run his dogs through a go-to-ground tunnel in the back yard, with a rat or squirrel safely in a cage at the stop end to approximate true quarry.

A falconer may fly a balloon or kite with a pigeon in harness at the end of a string in order to get his or her falcon to fly higher and develop sharper skills.

The tricks we have developed to achieve improved results with our animals are a marvel. That said, I sometime worry about the artifice.

Go-to-ground is not true terrier work -- it is boring and predictable, and there is no element of wood craft, no real physical output for the human, no element of risk for the dog. Above all, it is not hunting.

Coursing plastic bags with greyhounds is more of the same -- a way to keep the dog in shape and perhaps "explode the code within" the dog, but it is not hunting.

I feel a bit differently about training falcons with kites and balloons. Here there is an element of risk -- the risk that the falcon will fly away over the horizon. Though training a falcon with a kite and balloon is not quite hunting, it does have an element of true risk that I can appreciate.

The bottom line is that artifice has its place in training, but never get confused that it is even remotely equivalent to real work.