Craig,
I am very familiar with the Sundance Festival and hope one day to enter a short-subject film on marsh hunting for waterfowl and shorebirds (not ducks and geese. A good friend of mine was filmed by Outdoors Maryland, our local PBS channel years ago, and made a great 22-minute film on the intracacies of hunting ducks in a shortgrass marsh using watercraft as blinds. The film was nominated and sent to Sundance but was not selected, which was a shame, since it is yet the best piece on this type of hunting yet.
My younger brother wrote screenplays and script for the "Wings" channel on WW II aircraft for several years and convinced me that in films, as many other things in life, good things can come in quite small packages. The amazing original VHS conversion of the TV-broadcast format tape showing punt gunning in Great Britain (still legal) is less than a half-hour long, and is still one of the most incredible real-time films on waterfowl hunting ever made.
Coincidentally enough, I did in fact see the 60 minutes segment on exotic African animal hunting in Texas. My wife and daughter were watching the SAG awards so I taped it and split-screened it as it was taping when a commercial came on the SAG channel. After a few 'jumps", they both wanted to hear Lara Logan, one our our alltime favorites, so we watched the complete cut where Logan interviewed the FOA spokesperson. You're right; I'd be worried about my PR image if I was an FOA type!
The simple fact is that a number of the species they showed are not only surviving but in fact thriving in the very similar Texas climate and environment to that of Africa. I would LOVE to see a way that these dedicated people could import African elephant in small numbers and experiment on similar survival quotients (not for hunting but for breeding stock) but I don't know how they would ever contain them. Commerial American bison breeders go through containment and restraining designs for fences and enclosures constantly, with limited success. It would be great to see a 150-pound tusker while out wild quail hunting in the panhandle!!
(PS - Almost forgot - loved the comment from her dad about the pearls on the A-5 girl!)
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