A historic Pennsylvanian gun club that has hosted Ernest Hemingway and Annie Oakley has surreptitiously restarted a century-old tradition of holding live pigeon shoots, reigniting the ire of animal rights groups and putting the state's porous animal cruelty legislation in the crosshairs.
The Philadelphia Gun Club has been fined $160 following a recent incident in which a member was spotted firing his rifle at birds that had been released from spring-loaded traps along the banks of the Delaware River, about 32 kilometers north of Philadelphia.
"Live pigeon shoots are a practice similar to cockfighting or dog fighting, where it is largely an underground circuit of the same people who follow it around," said Heidi Prescott of The Humane Society of the United States. "The Philadelphia Gun Club had shut them down, but apparently started them up quietly again, and we don't know when."
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