Animal welfare types (including NR alum Matthew Scully) love to criticize “canned hunts” — hunts that occur within enclosed areas. The image is always of a big animal, trapped in a tiny enclosure with no where to run. As it happens, most so-called “canned hunts” are nothing of the sort. While fishing in New Mexico, I visited a private game park that offers elk hunting. The park spans 3,000 acres of wooded and hilly terrian and is home to an estimated 1,000-plus elk. Because the park is surrounded by an 8-foot fence, hunts there would qualify as “canned” as defined by anti-hunting types. Yet one can drive through the park and scarcely see an animal. To be sure, one attraction of such parks is that the typical hunter will get ample opportunity to shoot an elk over the course of the standard five-day hunt, but the idea that such an experience is “canned” is absurd.