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A Brief Summary of Hunting Law
8 years ago
Hunting hours is mentioned in several of my stories so I decided to create a brief explanation of how it works. The actual laws are more complex and written in garbled legalese but this explains some of the basics. This will probably get updated quite frequently as I think of more things that need explaining.
The starting concept is hunting hours. Hunting hours is a set time during which it is predation is legal in public spaces. Hunting hours usually lasts from 10 pm to 4 am, although a few places have slightly different times for this.
During hunting hours it is legal to claim people as prey as long as they are in a public place (including the streets, parks, and government buildings, although some exceptions apply to hospitals) and you can subdue them. It is definitely not legal to break into a private property to do this. Even if the prey invites a predator into their home, they are still protected.
Inversely, it is always legal for a predator to eat, or imprison to be eaten or sold later, anyone who enters their home. Basically, in public predation is allowed anywhere between 10 pm and 4 am while in a private building the owner has the final say over who can eat who. Certain legal contracts can override this allowing, for instance, a rabbit to work as an electrician and safely enter a predator’s house in order to do their job.
Likewise the legality of eating someone while in a shop is determined by the owner of the shop. Most businesses will ban their customers from eating each other, but not all. Some may choose to allow predation during hunting hours while others (that don’t care if prey species never come in) may permit it at any time but this is pretty rare.
There are some slightly more complex laws regarding prey renting a house from a predator, or a predator renting from prey. Without getting into the full details both the owner of the house and the tenant would be safe from being eaten by the other.
Once someone has been claimed as prey they are usually eaten straight away to remove the risk of them escaping but they can also be kept prisoner, either to be sold at a later point or simply until their captor feels hungry.
As a prisoner, prey have very few rights but that is not the same as none at all. They are permitted to try to escape from their captors and, should they succeed, any harm to the predator or damage to his/her property will be considered to have been inflicted in self-defense.
They also cannot be held to any contract or agreement. It is illegal for predators to attempt to extract payment of any kind from their prey, or even accept payment if it is offered. This rule isn't exactly very popular with prey who have been caught, as it prevents them from being able to bribe their captor but its introduction did lead to a massive decrease corruption.
Predators can accept payment from a third party in exchange for their prey and there are several restaurants that specialize in buying caught prey to serve to their customers. They can, of course, also accept payment from a friend of their captive in exchange from releasing them, although any agreement that the prey may have to pay their friend back for the rescue would not be legally enforceable.
Interfering with someone else's catch is a bit of a gray area. Taking someone's prey with intent to eat or sell them would be considered stealing, but helping a friend to escape is allowed.
The starting concept is hunting hours. Hunting hours is a set time during which it is predation is legal in public spaces. Hunting hours usually lasts from 10 pm to 4 am, although a few places have slightly different times for this.
During hunting hours it is legal to claim people as prey as long as they are in a public place (including the streets, parks, and government buildings, although some exceptions apply to hospitals) and you can subdue them. It is definitely not legal to break into a private property to do this. Even if the prey invites a predator into their home, they are still protected.
Inversely, it is always legal for a predator to eat, or imprison to be eaten or sold later, anyone who enters their home. Basically, in public predation is allowed anywhere between 10 pm and 4 am while in a private building the owner has the final say over who can eat who. Certain legal contracts can override this allowing, for instance, a rabbit to work as an electrician and safely enter a predator’s house in order to do their job.
Likewise the legality of eating someone while in a shop is determined by the owner of the shop. Most businesses will ban their customers from eating each other, but not all. Some may choose to allow predation during hunting hours while others (that don’t care if prey species never come in) may permit it at any time but this is pretty rare.
There are some slightly more complex laws regarding prey renting a house from a predator, or a predator renting from prey. Without getting into the full details both the owner of the house and the tenant would be safe from being eaten by the other.
Once someone has been claimed as prey they are usually eaten straight away to remove the risk of them escaping but they can also be kept prisoner, either to be sold at a later point or simply until their captor feels hungry.
As a prisoner, prey have very few rights but that is not the same as none at all. They are permitted to try to escape from their captors and, should they succeed, any harm to the predator or damage to his/her property will be considered to have been inflicted in self-defense.
They also cannot be held to any contract or agreement. It is illegal for predators to attempt to extract payment of any kind from their prey, or even accept payment if it is offered. This rule isn't exactly very popular with prey who have been caught, as it prevents them from being able to bribe their captor but its introduction did lead to a massive decrease corruption.
Predators can accept payment from a third party in exchange for their prey and there are several restaurants that specialize in buying caught prey to serve to their customers. They can, of course, also accept payment from a friend of their captive in exchange from releasing them, although any agreement that the prey may have to pay their friend back for the rescue would not be legally enforceable.
Interfering with someone else's catch is a bit of a gray area. Taking someone's prey with intent to eat or sell them would be considered stealing, but helping a friend to escape is allowed.
I have some "garbled legalese" of my own anthro/vore world and it's interesting seeing your approach; making time the limiting factor with "hunting hours" is something I never considered, I've always stuck to defined territorial boundaries where predation is legal etc. Just knowing that there is a pre-determined time that you absolutely have to be indoors for (if you're prey) adds a nice dystopian intimidation factor.
I think a part of me also is of the idea of "fair hunting", where in the act of predation, neither side may use manufactured weapons without legal consequences. If the pred does, that's assault to murder as normal (and things like tranquilizers are out as well), while prey are also committing a crime for using a weapon against a predator partaking in legal hunting. If a prey target physically beats off their predator, that is still considered self defense, and the predator can't press charges, but the pred can press charges if the prey pulls a knife, gun, or other weapon on them.
I think in my system, however, there's a smaller window in which a predator can eat their meals. After a while, it's less a matter of hunting and more kidnapping/abduction.
Use of weapons is also a complex issue and one that I still haven't got a satisfactory answer to. For the most part I tend to overlook them in my stories. Either guns are implied to be unavailable, illegal, or so tightly regulated that the predators can safely assume their intended meal will not have one. Knives and other weapons such as nets are allowed, both for the predators and the prey, but most predator prefer to hunt without them and most prey accept that running gives them a better chance of escaping than to stay and fight. It helps that the difference in size and strength between predators and prey in my settings is usually large enough that a knife isn't likely to change things much. Out of interest, if the prey in your world did pull out a knife or something would they simply be charged with assault (because that seems like a fairly minor price to pay in exchange for escaping from someone who wants to eat you) or would their punishment be more on the lines of getting handed over to the person who was hunting them? You broke the rules so you forfeit your right to a fair chase, kind of thing.
And finally, yes, the time a predator can hold their prey captive is deliberately left unlimited. People get caught and held for days, or sold to a restaurant, and all sorts due to this. If they get grabbed during hunting hours, then they are legally just food unless and until they can escape. Of course, the longer the predator leaves them alive, the more chance there is that they will see an opportunity and take it, so most preds eat their meals quite quickly. Still there is no actual time limit enforced and live prey are quite valuable.
Self defense via the martial arts is likely also very popular among prey species willing to maintain the physical levels to practice it.
As for self defense, most prey in my world consider running to be their best option. There is simply too much difference in the physical abilities between predators and prey for fighting back to be a good choice, particularly given that most predators will have dealt with multiple prey in the past and know what to expect while most prey species find that their first encounter with a predator they can't outrun is also their last.
Public transport and mainly pedestrian areas of inner city make for good vore stories, but I can't resist the morbid fascination imagining what commuter belt suburbs must be like after dark.
Anyway, that's the best I've managed to work out for cars in my setting so far. What about in yours? Is it similar or are there different rules for this sort of thing?
The most significant difference between your hunting hours world and my variant is the species sizes. I like to imagine anthros being about the same size as their feral equivalents, so tiny critters like mice have a decent chance of being able to hide, or of just being ignored as too small by many predators. If a fox tries to hunt a horse, they get their head kicked in, so some large herbivore species can go out at night in relative safety.
The sizes thing is fun. In most of my stories mice are portrayed as being only a little smaller than rabbits but I have done a few where they are closer in size to their real counterparts. It certainly allows for some interesting plotlines that wouldn't work with larger creatures.