Hunting

Since no one has yet answered, I'll start it off. In a recent "The Week" magazine, there was a piece called "The Thrill of the Kill" from a Washington Post writer Fredrick Kunkle. in the piece, he tries to explain to his colleagues, friends, and daughter what drives him to hunt. I still don't understand.
I am not a hunter, and I don't think I ever could be one. It's not for me, but if one hunts and eats their kill, I don't have a problem with that - it's just not for me. To kill for sport, however, is unconscionable.
We are all more than the sum total of our past parts - some people can hunt and kill and others can't. My totality of being can not understand how someone can so easily end a life - intentionally go out to kill something. I have accidentally killed, and I still don't feel okay about it.
In the natural world, there is no good or bad - it just is. Animals kill for food out of necessity - survival. There are the hunters and the hunted (I would probably be one of the hunted). Nature keeps itself balanced in the big picture through a supply and demand arrangement. Man does not (usually) need to hunt - it may be the thrill of the kill; I don't know.
I do want to see what turns up here - I usually learn something.

p.s. Yes, to complicate things, I do eat meat, and yes, I do own guns. Go figure.

I do quite a bit of hunting myself - of all sorts, as well fishing - and this time of year the part of the country in which I live is awash with blaze orange, swarming with deer-carcass-laden pickup trucks, and overrun with tall stories. I'm pretty much part of that all the way around, every year. I do eat whatever I bring down, and I look for good meat animals; I have no interest in the Trophy Buck - can't cook an antler.

I disagree w/the observation that nature balances itself; in this area, deer are an agricultural pest, a road hazard, and left to their own devices easily and rapidly would be of a population surpassing the capacity of the environment to support.

I agree entirely. If humans don't kill deer what will? In my area there isn't enough of any kind of predator to do such a thing.

Nature is.

In the larger picture, if there are too many deer, the food supply will soon diminish and deer will die off. As deer die off, their food supply will eventually return achieving a balance. Or, if deer are plentiful, predators will increase until their food supply dwindles, in which case the predator population will dwindle, etc. In the world of pure nature, that is what I meant.

Man helps keep the balance as well.

I have hunted, and I may go again this year. May or may not actually kill anything. I enjoy being out there tracking and sitting in wait.
I will only hunt with those I respect and those who have similiar values to myself. I also fish. We only shoot for food. It is winter meat.
I do not like trophy hunting. Not at all.

Man is part of nature. The way I look at it is this: Be respectful and take only what you need, and things will be okay. That is all I can do anyhow. I am not responsible for the cycles of nature; just my part in it.

I used to hunt for deer. Discovered I dont like deer meat. I have started going out for geese this last year and have bagged some very tasty christmas geese. (Ya need about 3 for a family-and everyone likes the wild gamey goose taste)

Ive nothing against hunting for the food. Im sorry we dont have pheasant antmore but, hey, they were an imported artificially stocked bird. We raised guinea hens and they are just as tasty (Dont raise em any more because they are embarrasingly stupid birds)

AS far as hunting deer. We had better find some way to keep the herd down or we will have a pandemic of CWD (besides all the dead cars and deers)
CWD is like the "Mad cow disease" of the wild "split hooved "ungulates. If its allowed to go unchecked, this disease will evolve into one that will take out sheep, pigs, and probably cows. Its in the same family as BSE and may be a serious problem waiting to start.
1 or 2 deer in W Va have been found with CWD and its worrying the game managers about the herds of deer and elk in all the Appalachians. Its already seen in Wyoming and (timber will correct me if Im wrong , also in Wisconsin and Minnesota)

I use deer antler to do pressure flaking for flint knapping. But I usually can find a rack each year and I dont go through antlers that quickly that Ive gotta kill a deer.
Trophy hunting is just nuts. Its a weirdness that is kept alive by the taxidermy industry. If ya want a deer, carve one. that takes some talent.

I cant understand shooting bear, they are so cool alive and Ill bet they are mostly inedible. Ditto dahl sheep and mountain goat, ditto musk ox.

Moose I can eat and I got a batch of moose jerky sent me by some friends up in Maine. I think I could go and shoot a moose cause they are really tasty, sos an antelope, Its meat is not as mealy as a whitetail

Compare hunting to fishing. Im not a big "catch and release fan" , unless its a swordfish or mola mola. Anything else, including small sharks, gets in the boat and cleaned for the kitxhen.

Thats my story and Im stickin to it.

Dontcha get a lot of cuts on that pressure knapping?

Yeah, CWD is found in certain areas of Wi and Mn - some roadkill is tested for it, and further survey is accomplished via tests conducted on random samples selected from the harvest during hunting season. CWD is scary - sure as hell don't wanna let it get out into the general ungulate population.

Roger, flint knapping is a thing that I got started doing after I met a guy named Gary Fogelman at a"rendesvous" once. HE makes the most beautiful atlatls and makes flint and quartz heads (he is also very knowledgeable on ancient "arrow" point typology)
Rule one is wear some cotton gloves for the flaking (thats where you use a rock to chip the general shape of the point) then for the knapping (pressure flaking) use leather gloves and wrap your point blank in a leather wrap and use the deer antler to make the whole thing a finished piece. You can cut yourself really bad if you work with stuff like obsidian. That **** is like a pane of window glass.

Since this is rutting season , we have a lot of the "ruburb SUV drivers" who drive to Lancaster or Philly to work. These people leave at 0-dark hundred and go speeding along the country lanes trying to find a hiway thatll get em in the right direction. SInce the beginning of November , weve had 5 really bad accidents within a mile of us as deer, who follow the same swales and ridges that their parents did, cross the roads and are wiped out by guy going 70 on a road that is marked 35. Weve had one guy have to get jawed out of his car and get choppered out. He is still in a coma after 3 weeks. These people own 25 or 30 acre little horsie farms and wont let the bow hunters cross their land cause they >" like the deer on their pastures" . Anti-hunting folks in the country are big pains in the ass. They dont "get" how , if you keep nursing your pastures into grand alfalfa buffets for your horsies, your also providing really great food for deer and perhaps the population of deer around you will explode into a huge subspecies .

I forgot rabbit, I love rabbit hunting. Among the tastiest of wild game, the rabbit. AND, if you skin em right, and design it correctly, they make a neat hat.

Rabbit meat IS amazing. If you like wild rabbit you should try domestic. There isn't a whole lot better than a freshly cooked rabbit right outta my barn. MMMMMMMMMMMM.....

Raised rabbits briefly. Kids wouldnt eat em, and I could understand . It was like eating a pet. This whole thing lasted less than 2 years and we were awash in rabbits. So we sold them tom the Amish. Theyll eat anything.

I have to take exception there Farmerman. You're stereotyping an entire community. The Amish are very fussy about what they eat. In fact....

Oh, never mind.


Cash: Hunt, eat, live!

AMEN!!!haha

I saw an xray of an innuit womans appendix. It was loaded with lead shot from a lifetime of her eating game foods. Apparently did her no harm (course she was only 30 and looked like she was 90)

http://www.wrif.com/media/2005_06nugent.asx

my speakers are non functioning and Im too damn lazy to have our contractor come in and take care of it for just one computer. What did the clip have to do with?

My brother kilt a coon . . .

It was just Ted blathering on about all things Ted.

I don't care if you have heard this before, don't try to stop me . . .

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I once worked at an environmental center in Little Egypt (far southern Illinois), and among the programs there was a youth diversion program. This meant adjudicated youth (usually teen-aged gang members) would be sent to this program rather than the House of Detention. If they successfully completed the program, no detention. They were taken out into the woods and taught "woodcraft" and camping skills--starting a fire which will cook your dinner but not injury anyone or burn down the woods, packing a backpack so that you can stand to carry it for the next ten hours, what kinds of food and how to pack it in, how to set up a tent . . . in the dark . . . preferrably, in the wind and rain . . . it was always interesting to watch the city boys and girls learning to cope (the groups were segregated by gender, for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with teenagers).

The program was run by the Division of Youth and Community Services, with offices in Chicago (which made sense, as that was the center of most gang activity in the state). The head of DYCS was well-liked throughout the state, Curt, and was a completely clueless city-boy, known with genuine affection as Nerdy Curt. He was coming for a visit one time, and decided to drive there, as it was less trouble than flying to St. Louis of Memphis, and driving in anyway. It would take less time to walk from our facility to the Ohio to look at Kentucky, or the Mississippi to look at Missouri or Arkansas than it would to drive to Chicago--the distance was nearly 500 miles. We expected him before nightfall, though, and i went out with one of the Program Directors to greet him when he arrived. Our facility was 3500 acres of nearly wilderness woodland on the shores of one of the lakes in the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge; to get there, you left the Interstate and drove about 15 miles to the blacktop road, and then drove south another ten miles or so, and hoped you didn't miss the entrance--we thought we'd look out for him so that he wouldn't miss it. Remember now, this is a city boy, born and bred, who thought of O'Hare airport when you mentioned the country.

He was really late, and just after dark, we saw headlights on the blacktop (sufficiently rare there to make us wonder if it were him each time we saw headlights), and then we recognized a state-owned sedan, and were about to flag him down, when one of them huge, hulking does leaps out of the underbrush, and as they don't know which way they're going to jump themselves, are impossible to avoid. Curt hit her head on at about 50 mph, but was lucky to strike a glancing, though mortal, blow, which did not send her through the windshield to join him.

He pulled over, we ran up and found him sitting in the front seat, shaking uncontrollably. We had quite a time to get him calmed down, assure him that it had been unavoidable, that she had felt no pain, and that he was not a bad man. We got him out and walked him around for a while, and he was finally coming back to his usual, cheerful self, when a pick-em-up truck screeched to halt in the road. The passenge side window comes down, and the following conversation ensued:

That yer deer?

Yeah, i suppose.

You gonna keep 'er?

I don't think so, i ain't interested in guttin' and cleanin' her . . .

Kin ah have 'er?

Sure, help yerself . . .

These two boys jump out, grab the doe and drag her to the back of the truck, pull down the tail gate, and on three, heave her up and then manhandle her into the bed. They're laughin' and jokin' and commenting favorably on the fresh blood, which means it's a fresh kill. Then they squealed out and disappeared down the road. Curt went to pieces--he was sure he had landed in the middle of Deliverance, and would never live to see Chicago again. He didn't really calm down until the following afternoon, and he looked as though he hadn't slept much . . .