It seems a simple enough concept — as a hunter, you should give your quarry a fair chance to escape being taken. In other words, no excessive measures should be used to entrap or otherwise reduce a game animal's chance of detecting and escaping you. Talk to a room full of hunters and chances are they will all agree with such a general statement. After all, "fair chase" is touted as an important element of hunting ethics and a key to continued public acceptance of hunting. Yet, talk to that same room of hunters about how fair chase is applied to specific types of hunting, and chances are you'll get considerable disagreement.

While writing last month's column on wounding and loss, I found myself taking off on a tangent to discuss personal ethics, or how we make the moral decisions we do in the field.