Animal Rights Group Drone Shot Down

A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday near Ehrhardt, S.C.

Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.

“It didn’t work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal,” Hindi said in a news release. “Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave.”

He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.

“Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out,” Hindi said in the release. “As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter.”

He claimed the shooters were “in tree cover” and “fled the scene on small motorized vehicles.”

The Times and Democrat

As I was reading this my first thought was “what uncanny timing for this to happen.”  In the wake of the federal government overwhelmingly passing legislation that will allow them to launch drones into the sky to spy on us, is this reaction by the citizen shooters a foreshadowing of things to come?  Personally, I’m perfectly supportive of shooting the government drones if you can, although I think it’s going to be rather difficult.  My understanding is that they are going to be several thousand feet into the air so unless you have a long range bazooka in your gun cabinet it’s probably out of the question.

This incident with SHARK also raises a heavily debated question.  What are the physical boundaries of our right to privacy?  The most common argument I hear is that when you’re in public you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, but in this case the folks at Broxton Bridge Plantation were on their own private land.  In the same respect, however, SHARK’s drone was not on the plantation grounds.  They were flying in the sky out of the way, but still with a clear view of the pigeon shoot.

Who is right here?  Would my next door neighbor legally be able to place a camera say 100 feet into the air over their property and video tape me in my back yard?  I’ll tell you what, I would not want to be the judge who would have to make a decision in a case like this because as a libertarian I have respect for the property rights of both parties.  This is not a black and white issue.  Is it inevitable that the progress of technology will ultimately render the idea of privacy obsolete?

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