So these two brothers, Good Ol’ Boys, are creeping along in their pickup, headlights off, down a rural back road outside Owen Sound, Ont. just after sundown.

They’re driving slow, peering intently into woodlots and brush piles on both sides of the road. 

Finally the driver sees what they’re looking for. He cuts the ignition, coasts to a stop, nods wordlessly towards a thicket of scrub willow.

White-tail buck. Three-pointer. Silhouetted against the horizon. 

The brother in the passenger seat rolls down his window, hauls out a high-powered hunting rifle from behind the seat and draws a bead. No need to hurry. The deer just stands there like a statue.

BLAM! BLAM! The deer is still standing there like a statue. BLAM!

That’s because it is a statue. A decoy. Two conservation officers materialize by the pickup and the brothers are busted for poaching.

Hunting from a car: redneck couch potato heaven.  Almost as much fun as fishing with dynamite. 

I’d like to tell you the judge threw the book at them, but the brothers found themselves a slithery lawyer who argued that using a decoy deer to tantalize his clients amounted to entrapment.   

The case has dragged on through two appeals and three years of litigation and shows no sign of resolution anytime soon. 

If there’s a glint of gold in this judicial mare’s nest, perhaps it’s the fact that animals – even ersatz ones – are finally getting their day in court. 

But change has been coming for some time. 

Don’t forget just a few generations ago, English bluebloods thought it great sport to put a bear in a pit and unleash a pack of hunting dogs to worry it to death.

Jim West might have a tough time believing that. He’s a recreational hunter who lives up near 70 Mile House. 

West was out with his dogs scouting for moose one day when a hunter’s worst nightmare came thundering down on him. He got himself between a bear cub and a very angry Momma Grizzly.

She swatted him sprawling, not once but twice. West grabbed a tree limb and swatted back. He managed to stun the bear and then kill it with the tree limb. 

West stumbled back to his vehicle and drove himself to a hospital. The cuts in his scalp, arms and face took 60 stitches to close. He was lucky to be alive. 

Then his real troubles started.

Word of his encounter hit the media – along with the news that conservation officers had tracked down and destroyed two bear cubs the mother bear had been protecting. Animal rights crusaders ignited a fire storm of protest. West’s phone began to ring around the clock. A blizzard of e-mails hit media outlets across the province. 

One zealot went so far as to impersonate Jim West, sending out a fake e-mail in West’s name claiming that actually, his dogs had started the whole thing by chasing the bears up a tree.

One woman accosted West and asked him why he hadn’t “just run away” when he saw the bear. I doubt that West would have got very far. I’ve been told that in a 100-yard dash, a grizzly can outrun a horse. Jim West agrees.  “You can’t outrun a mother bear,” he says.

A lot of folks get a tad dotty when it comes to our relations with animals – few more so than Jennifer Thornburg, of North Carolina.

Excuse me – that should be Cut-out Dissection.com of North Carolina.  Ms. err…Cut-out Dissection…had her name legally changed to publicize the plight of animals which wind up as specimens in high school biology classes. 

She acknowledges that her new moniker can be a bit of a pain. “I normally do have to repeat my name several times when I am introducing myself,” she says.  But it’s a price she’s willing to pay on behalf of the suffering animals.

Yeah, well …

Looney Tunes like Ms. Cut-out Dissection.com aside, perhaps we actually have hauled ourselves a rung or so higher on the evolutionary ladder.  

Maybe we’ve outgrown the notion that we can treat the rest of the natural world as our personal amusement park-cum-petting/shooting zoo. 

If so, Lady Margo Asquith was ’way ahead of her time.  The British socialite and wife of an Earl lived when bear-baiting was still legal and “riding to the hounds” was all the rage. 

At a ball, she overheard someone extolling the remarkable jumping prowess of various fox-harrying horsemen. “Jump?” sniffed Lady Asquith. “Anyone can jump. Look at fleas.”

Arthur Black is a syndicated humour columnist.