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I don't find it particularly cruel, however

I don't either, in general, except that some (perhaps most) of these people are horrible shots, and end up mangling the animal before it finally dies. When it takes you 3 or 4 shots at 10 feet to kill a pheasant on a short leash, that's pretty lame.

I love hunting, but if you're going to do something like that, why not just beat it to death with a baseball bat?

I don't either, in general, except that some (perhaps most) of these people are horrible shots, and end up mangling the animal before it finally dies.

But again, if this bothers you, don't eat ANY meat, since there are undoubtedly hundreds of less-than-clean kills daily amongst the many thousands in slaughterhouses around the country.

Again, if this bothers you (the abstract 'you', not the personal 'you'), don't support ANY hunting, because these same people aren't going to do any better when they go "real" hunting - in THAT case, the wounded animal might successfully drag itself out of range to suffer an even MORE prolonged agony.

All this to say that I think "canned" hunting is pretty sissified, but I don't support banning it.

Yeah, just because they can buy the gun doesn't mean they can shoot it. I regularly shoot pigs around here with a .308, sometimes across fields, and 150 grain Barnes X bullets work fine. Up close, I use an old .375 that I am fond of, but I have not lost a pig yet at 150-250 yards. I use high quality bullets and I shoot carefully. I regularly see people with huge magnums with scopes on them that you could use to examine the surface of Mars dump 20+ rounds in the general direction of a pig and hit nothing. Two years ago I knew (socially) several great white hunters who took a bunch of magnums out to hunt "trophy pigs". One of them got nibbled on a bit after running out of ammunition and being to fat to climb a tree. He had taken out 60 rounds of .338 Win Mag. Damn. The landowner found the pig by hearing the shreiking (he though that it was his ten year old daughter, not a 6'2" grown man) and driving across fields to get to the woods in a pickup truck, nearly killing himself in the process. He dispatched the pig with a .30-30. The pig had a few flesh wounds. Now I am not a huge fan of the .338 Win Mag (I hate the sudden recoil), but I have never had one suggest that at <20 yards it will not put down game. The chewed-up fat guy was in the hospital for a few days and his legs still look kind of weird. He has since lost a lot of weight and now hunts with me. After this he learned how to shoot. He does admit that it would have been a good idea to learn before he went out after a 450 pound boar.