Men have always been good hunters. The problem is that they are too good, witness the loss of every big animal that roamed the earth during the last ice age. And during that time we barely had spears and arrows to hunt them with. That tradition of hunting everything to extinction continues to modern times, such as the disappearance of the passenger pidgeon in the United States, and the increasing difficulty we have in locating what fish are left in the oceans.
Edwardian Punt Gun, picture by Evelyn Simak
From the middle of the Nineteenth Century, so called 'Market Hunters' upped the ante for wildfowl hunting. They used huge shotguns to take large numbers of ducks and geese with one shot. These guns were too big to carry around, so they were mounted to small boats, punts, from which the name 'punt guns' was derived. They could use a pound of pellets, or more, and could collect 50 birds at a shot. The barrels were up to 2 inches in diameter and the guns could easily weigh one hundred pounds.
From Library of Congress, Herbert French collection
Some of these guns are so big, it looks like they were used by some mutant giant race of humans. They were way too successful, and were banned in the US from 1918, and even earlier in some states, but puntgunning still goes on in the UK.
