Jon and Dylan are standing at a bus stop on a corner on Queen Anne Avenue, their attention focused across the street on the parking lot of Dick's restaurant. The lot is full of mid-sized sedans and family station wagons, but Jon and Dylan take little notice. They're hunting larger game. A Chevy Suburban barrels up to the stop sign beside them. It's a breathtaking beast: 20 feet long and weighing in at more than 5,000 pounds. Jon tenses and starts to inch toward the behemoth, but the businessman behind the wheel spots him and speeds away.

They decide to walk north on Queen Anne Avenue. A block up they discover a Ford Excursion parked in a pay lot. Jon closes in, pulling a sticker from under his shirt and peeling off the backing. He quickly kneels and smooths the sticker onto the bumper in one swift motion.

"I'M CHANGING THE CLIMATE!" the sticker announces. "ASK ME HOW!"

Jon and Dylan are practitioners of a new urban sport: Big Game SUV Hunting. SUVs, of course, are "Sports Utility Vehicles," though very few of them actually do much sporting. There are about 767,000 SUVs in Washington state, and despite advertisements that typically show them charging up mountains, most SUVs never leave pavement.

Jon and Dylan have stalked and stickered hundreds of SUVs in the Seattle area. They do most of their hunting on the Eastside, taking the bus to shopping centers where the acres of asphalt teem with huge SUVs. "That's where the big game is," jokes Jon.

After hitting the Excursion on Queen Anne Avenue, Jon and Dylan linger outside the parking garage at Larry's Market. A wary attendant studies them from his booth. Suddenly a woman in a pristine GMC Yukon rolls out, giggling into her phone. Dylan's weapon is already peeled. He crouches down low, creeps around the Yukon's flank, one eye on the bumper and the other on the Yukon's rearview mirrors. But the driver senses danger and escapes in a cloud of blue exhaust.

Big Game SUV Hunting was created by Robert Lind and Charles Dines, two San Francisco residents who decided one day that bitching about SUVs wasn't enough. There are pictures of Lind and Dines on their website, www.changingtheclimate.com, and in their pictures Lind and Dines look like a couple of geeky middle-class guys coasting into their 40s. Their mission statement, however, drips with testosterone.

"Feel the adrenaline rush of stalking the really big game--like the Denali™, Yukon™, or Tahoe™," the site reads. "In the old days society had a pillory to shame people out of anti-social behavior. Today we have the mighty Bumper Sticker."

The goal of Big Game SUV Hunting is simple: embarrass the hell out of people who drive these gas-guzzlers. The rules of the sport are simple as well:

1. Don't tag commercial vehicles or pickup trucks.

2. Only tag big, late-model SUVs, the grotesque and bloated gas-guzzling members of the SUV species.

3. Don't knowingly re-tag an SUV that's already been hit.

Lind and Dines do not promote the intentional damaging of SUVs. Their bumper sticker includes their website's address, and there are instructions on the site about how to remove the stickers. Lind and Dines also urge taggers to avoid rural areas, where a driver may have a legitimate need for an SUV. The target, they declare, is the single commuter, the suburban driver on an errand to the local shopping center, or a parent taking a kid to softball practice.

The facts about SUVs make it hard to argue with Lind and Dines. Because SUVs are classified as light trucks, they escape most of the federal fuel and pollution standards that apply to passenger vehicles. But few drivers actually use SUVs as trucks, and the most popular models feature leather interiors and plush carpeting, which aren't conducive to most "truck work." With 21 million of them on our roads, the U.S. is experiencing the lowest average automobile fuel economy since 1980. "Switching from driving an average car to a 13-miles-per-gallon SUV for one year would waste more energy than if you left your bathroom light burning for 30 years," says the Sierra Club.

As a proposed energy bill was debated in the Senate recently, ads by automakers warned that raising national fuel standards would force trucks and SUVs into extinction. The bill, which sought to increase the standard fuel efficiency of cars and trucks to 36 mpg by the year 2013, was defeated. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), one of the senators who helped kill the bill, defended so-called "Soccer Moms" by declaring, "Women love their SUVs and minivans... because of their safety." Ron McCallie, a salesman at Millennium Ford in Burien, couldn't agree more. "SUVs are safer than cars," McCallie said. "They're bigger vehicles, so if they get hit they have bigger cab room, which gives more protection." But according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, McCallie's sales pitch doesn't add up. In crash tests, SUV occupants did fare better in certain types of collisions, but because SUVs are heavier and ride higher than cars, they're more prone to rollovers, making them about as safe as cars overall. And while SUVs don't make their passengers any safer, they do endanger other automobiles. Crashes between an SUV and any other vehicle now account for the majority of fatalities in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. What's worse, the socially and environmentally incorrect status of the SUV is now being used as a selling point. On Aurora Avenue a recent billboard for the GMC Denali proclaimed the SUV to be "a big, fat, juicy cheeseburger in a land of tofu."

Urban and suburban SUV drivers, according to Lind, "suffer from the serious modern-day disease of the soul often called 'The Tyranny of Comfort.' In mistaking goodness with their ability to buy anything, they avoid the question of their overconsumption." Carl Calvert, the editor of Today's SUV magazine, sees things a little differently. "The indiscriminate tagging of large SUVs is a definite violation of people's rights," he says. "I believe Lind and Dines should be penalized."

Is sticking a bumper sticker on someone else's car illegal? Dwayne Fish of the Seattle police's media relations department says that it might be, but it's hard to make a case against it. He explained that vandalism is usually cited when damage occurs. Unless a sticker harms a vehicle during removal, it's difficult for a police officer to do much. On the books it amounts to a vandalism misdemeanor. "We don't issue tickets for misdemeanors in Washington," says Fish.

For now, Jon and Dylan are content with their hunting partnership, but they have considered plans to start a tagging club in Seattle. "It'd be great to get organized," says Dylan. As for the future of Big Game SUV Hunting, "It's out of our hands," says Lind. "People are starting their own tagging groups locally and spreading the word. We want to get people thinking about the effects of one's actions and are always open to suggestions on how to best do that."