I came home from the shop last night around 4:30, while there was still some light; passing the turn-off into the neighbor’s corn field (they grow corn to attract the deer so they can shoot them while they eat) I saw a silver pickup truck parked back in the corner, which is the end closest to my property. Here we go, again.
The 4×4 in my Tahoe engages spottily and sometimes stays resolutely in neutral, but this time it locked quickly and I turned up the muddy incline into the upper field, not slowing down and keeping momentum until I was on the grass where I had better traction. From there, I noodled at walking speed around the edge of the field and toward the ridge-line separating it from the back field. As soon as I came over the ridge, I saw two blobs of safety orange: hunters. Here we go, again.
I kept my speed up but didn’t aim straight toward the one sitting against the tree by the strippings. After all, I know they’re going to be armed. Rolled the window down and yelled, “HEY! You’re trespassing on my property and you’re armed! Don’t you know Pennsylvania is a ‘stand your ground’ state? Are you crazy?” Turned out I was yelling at a 15 or 16 year-old girl, who now looked like she was about to cry. She pointed her free hand (nice of her not to wave the rifle around) toward the other orange blob and said “I’m just here with my dad.” Uh huh. Here we go, again.
Freshly out of fucks I decided to risk burying the Tahoe and just went straight through a few bushes and rolled like a tank toward the second hunter. It was some old coot, who was levering himself to his feet as I bore down on him. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want to be between a tree and my Tahoe, either. I cut the wheel when I got close (hoping I’d be able to get rolling again when it was time to leave) and I was staring at a guy about 70, again with a deer rifle. He must be a rotten hunter because he had a scope on the thing, and usually you can walk right up to a deer out here – in fact, the problem is getting the deer to run away most of the time.
“Hey, you’re trespassing with a weapon, on my property! What do you think you’re doing?!” That’s my standard opening, as you can see.
Hunters are such pathetic, stupid, assholes – barely smarter than the deer they like to blast with massively overpowered gear. He said, “I didn’t know this was private property.”
“Oh, come ON you’re insulting my intelligence. You know a) this isn’t state game lands and b) you don’t own it. If you don’t own it, that means you’re on someone else’s land. I’m Mister Someone and I know for a fact that you never called me for permission to hunt here because I always say ‘no’ on the rare occasions someone does ask.”
“I usually hunt with ${neighbor} I thought it’d be OK.”
“I don’t allow ${neighbor} to hunt here and they don’t have any right to give someone else permission over my land. You know that. So now you’re an armed trespasser who’s lying to my face. I saw your truck parked back off the road – you know exactly where my property line is because you drove right up to it, parked, and walked right past my NO TRESPASSING sign. If you get the fuck off of my land quickly and quietly I won’t ask to see your hunting license so I can take a picture of it and file a complaint with the game warden, take your license away so you don’t hunt again in this county. And keep that muzzle pointed over there, please.” He was holding the rifle by the middle of the stock, so it was kind of waving in general directions, but I’m sure he thought he was being non-threatening holding it that way. What a pathetic old asshole. He had even brought a nice comfy chair with a hot pad so as to make his trespassing session as relaxing as possible.
I had kept the Tahoe in ‘Drive’ the whole time, in case I needed to flatten the guy, so I just eased off on the brake, turned the wheel a bit to point downhill, and rolled away. This old coot wasn’t going to bluster or threaten, and I suspected he’ll never be back, but I wasn’t worried about having a bullet rip through the back window or anything like that. Just another evening in Pennsylvania. Here we go, again.
Let me say a few things that are my opinion about hunters.
First off, deer meat tastes like shit and by the time you’ve added up the cost of the license, the guns and gear, and the risk of getting flattened by an angry landowner in a Tahoe, that weedy little jackass could have bought some nice grass-fed filet mignon at the grocery store. And by “some” I mean: a lot. The US has destroyed lots of environment and bypassed common sense to produce a food system where you can buy terrific cuts of steak for next to nothing (compared to Europe) and hunters that squawk about how they’re feeding themselves are basically hobbyists. Why don’t they grow their own potatoes and churn their own butter, while they’re at it? Going out into some field, wearing battery-warmed hunting clothes and carrying a scope-sighted rifle is like the jackasses who fish for tuna off the back of a $2mn yacht and call it “sport fishing.” So, I utterly reject arguments that hunters are doing it for the meat, or to get in touch with the land, or their ancestry, or any shit like that: this guy’s ancestry was probably European, like mine, whose ancestors left because European politicians are/were way too fond of having big religious wars, or caused famines with their rentier-supporting behavior. Weedy little jackass probably thinks of himself as some kind of independent frontiersman, but didn’t notice that he’s not independent enough to hunt in the state game lands, 4 miles up the road, which are more closely regulated and he wouldn’t be infringing on my property rights.
Secondly, hunters are basically always dishonest about their hunting. They convince themselves it’s hard. It’s not. They convince themselves they are following a tradition. They are not. It’s not traditional to use a ‘scoped bolt action rifle that was machined to a ridiculous tolerance, or a high-tech composite bow that is rifle accurate and rifle deadly. If I ever did see a hunter on my land wearing buckskins and carrying a hand-bored flintlock, I’d be impressed. But no, they’re out there lying to themselves about the fact that they’re just trespassers who aren’t doing a single, fucking, thing for their toxic manhood sitting there on their heated chair after driving their 4×4 to my property line then sneakily walking over it.
But the dishonesty of hunting is more than just the sheer toxic-manliness of the whole thing. The entire hunting system in this stupid country/state is dishonest. It’s complicated, but here’s the framework: the hunters say they need to keep the deer population in check, because (admittedly) they are like giant ugly stupid rats that carry all kinds of diseases and parasites and love to jump into traffic. But the hunting season is specifically set up to encourage hunters to shoot male deer. In other words, that “keep the population in check” is bullshit, it’s to manage the population so that hunters will always have lots of deer to shoot. Except for in the off-season when the deer wander about eating people’s crops and jumping into traffic. The whole hunting system is based on this kind of dishonesty. A bunch of years ago, some sneaky hunters went out west and snuck back some live elk, then released them. Why did they do that? Simple: they knew that eventually there would be huge elk wandering into traffic and the hunters would be able to step forward, helpfully, to “keep the population in check.” That bullshit only fools someone who is as stupid as a hunter, i.e.: the Pennsylvania legislature and the rest of Pennsylvania. A few years ago the hunters made a big deal out of the fact that there was a veritable explosion in the bear population and, guess what? Yup, they needed an open day to kill some bears. I’ve never eaten bear meat but my grandfather served bear during the depression and apparently it’s greasy, nasty, tough stuff. But, after the big build up to the auto da fe of the bears, someone apparently told the bears, who hid, because there were remarkably few bears taken that day. I think it was about 2, state-wide. But even then, what you need to know is that those honest, manly hunters, feed the bears so they know exactly where and when a bear is going to come so they can blast the thing when it drops by for the snack it’s been enjoying for months.
The proud Pennsylvanian hunter was on full display out here in my neighborhood a few years ago, when a guy shot a deer that another hunter had been raising. The deal was that this was going to be a prize-winning buck because it had huge antlers and it had been living its whole life in a penned-off area, eating corn and drinking chablis and hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite. It was in for a shock, someday, but the guy who shot it shot it from a distance because he saw those huge antlers. Then, there was (I kid you not!) a lawsuit because the guy who was raising the deer claimed it was worth $250,000 as a trophy, and the guy who shot it claimed “fuck you” and I don’t know the resolution of that important court case because, did you hear that two of the guys who spent most of their lives in prison for allegedly killing Malcolm X were exonerated? It turns out that the NYPD and FBI knew all along they were innocent and there’s some hinkiness going on, like that the real shooter was an FBI informant. Deer? What fucking deer? Oh, yeah, anyhow, it was a very important deer and an important incident in the history of bloodsport.
Meanwhile – and this is a shocker, the house passed a new $768 billion (AKA: $7.6 trillion over 10 years) bill without a squeak from any of the budget hawks in Washington. I’ll note that it didn’t raise a squeak from congress’ pretend-progressives, either. It’s interesting that Joe Manchin can single-walletedly bring legislation to a halt but progressives can’t. Actually, it just means that the bill has (as always) overwhelming bipartisan support. [nyt]
Lawmakers tossed out some bipartisan provisions as they rushed to advance the bill, which would increase the Pentagon’s budget by more than what President Biden had requested.
…
The House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a $768 billion defense policy bill after lawmakers abruptly dropped proposals that would have required women to register for the draft, repealed the 2002 authorization of the Iraq war and imposed sanctions for a Russian gas pipeline, in a late-year drive to salvage a bipartisan priority.
I love how the NYT frames that – “the repeal of the 2002 authorization of the Iraq war” is also known as the “go ahead and use military force to do whatever you want, mister president” authorization, which has been used by every president since to bomb, assassinate, and invade. But, hey, as soon as it looked like that might be a hold-up, the Washington elite couldn’t even posture and pose as realistically as Joe Manchin, basically, “whatever.” That way they can say “I sponsored legislation to do good things…” and not voice the part where “… as it if matters.” There is so much there to be furious about, for example: why is the US sanctioning the Russians over gas pipelines while it’s flattening protesters who are trying to stop the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline?
I never got a christmas present worth $1000+. I guess it’s good to be congresswoman’s kids.
From the “you can’t make this shit up” department, fascism Barbie Lauren Boebert apparently bought her kids AR-15s, in order to help perpetuate the stereotype that American men all carry AR-15s and like to shoot civilians and commit war crimes. Look at the adorable way they have magazines in the magazine wells of those things, and the bolts are all forward and locked. Good thing they have their fingers off the triggers, especially since the barrel of little boy blue in the center’s rifle is aimed toward his brother’s shin or foot. I’m not going to say that I hope one of those kids accidentally shoots her, but at this point, I would laugh. This woman is one of the ones who supported characterizing muslim Somali refugee Ilhan Omar as a bomb-carrying muslim, without the slightest consideration that she’s just characterized her own kids as gun-toting chucklefucks. These are exactly the kind of people that I chase off my property every year, trespassing armed on my land, then lying about how they didn’t know they were trespassing.
There is a story about Sulla, walking into an enemy camp alone, and telling the leader to go home. Just a lone Roman in a white toga, but he spoke with the weight of Rome – and they went. Because Rome had a way of sending armies to crush you, crucify or strangle your leaders in a big show, and generally stomp you flat. Then, there was the British empire, which had a way of sending armies of redcoats that could do massed fire and mow less technological civilizations flat (basically, they were Pennsylvania deer hunters). Everyone feared those empires but I don’t think that the scariest empires in history (probably the Akkadians?) are as scary as the Americans. Look at those people in the picture above. The proud mother. What a harpy.
Re-reading this, I realized that there’s a whole #include <rant/europe-hunters.h> that I should have mentioned. I don’t know about all of Europe, of course, but the forests I crept around in in France in the 1970s, had been thoroughly hunted out, to the point where nobody even bothered anymore. There would be a few folks wandering around looking for wild mushrooms (by god, let’s hunt those out, too!) (and the French absolutely would, if they could) and snails, but the reason the US has its hunter population that needs to be managed is because it’s still massively big over here and there are lots of forests with wildlife. There are huge state game lands, but they’re regulated – you can’t just walk into them with a rifle and start shooting things like those assholes thought they could do in my back yard. So, a European-descended American hunter, who is trying to hunt to get in touch with their ancestry is doubly a fool: hunting in most of Europe was the exclusive right of the rich and the noble. Unless that guy’s name was De LaTour or Bourbon, or Windsor, he was probably not in touch with his ancestry, at all. Even that’s a ridiculous argument – I’m not leaning on my imagined Scandinavian ancestry to justify sacking monasteries, am I? C’mon, Pennsylvanians, this is simple.
Sometimes someone crops up to defend the edibility of deer. Nevermind the massive parasite-load they often carry, I’ve had people tell me you can make great deer meat chili if you … wait. Stop. If you put enough chili spices on a Jeep you could eat the seats. Or frying it in bacon. It’s bacon! I would eat Jeep lugnuts wrapped in bacon. I don’t care what kind of remedial cooking you throw at it, deer meat isn’t as good as a properly aged steak or some smoked salmon or something good from the grocery store. I’m not going to listen to some idiot carrying a $500 rifle wearing $200 worth of gear and driving a pickup truck tell me that hunting was an economic necessity. I don’t know what the shit they put in McDonalds burgers is but it’s cheaper and better than deer meat.
I don’t know about your deer, but I absolutely love Scottish red deer venision – I’ve got some haunch medallions in the freezer that will be pan-fried medium rare and served with a nice red wine and blackcurrant jus, and a loin fillet that will get roasted for Christmas dinner. On the other hand, I think smoked salmon is rank, barely fit for cat food. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that… (We used to have a law back around the 14th C that you weren’t allowed to feed your apprentices salmon more than 4 times a week.)
One of the reasons Europe cleared their game lands is that the common folk ignored the laws and hunted anyplace they could find game when food was scarce. So hunters ignoring the law and hunting on other peoples land is sorta getting in touch with their heritage.
That said there are hunters that are not trespassing or doing other stupid stuff in PA. You just don’t see them in the news because they go to hunting camps that are well away from everything else. The ones that make the news are the guys that have a beer or two and then go hunting with buddies in the closest land they think they can get away with.
JM@#2:
That said there are hunters that are not trespassing or doing other stupid stuff in PA. You just don’t see them in the news because they go to hunting camps that are well away from everything else.
Yup. There are many many miles of state game lands that are ruled by hunters in the fall. In theory you could go for a walk but you’d be risking your life, if you did. But at least those hunters aren’t reaching out and making everyone’s woods unsafe. To be fair, each year a hunter or two gets killed by another hunter, but it’s usually a hunter from out of state, so everyone can just shrug.
Dunc@#1:
I don’t know about your deer, but I absolutely love Scottish red deer venision
Tangential thought: why don’t most mammals taste pretty much the same? They’re all made out of more or less the same stuff. I suppose there are going to be metabolic differences between predators and prey animals, but I do think there’s a clear difference between pork, deer (I have tasted deer, including reindeer) and cows.
I’m sure you can make great chili with a red deer, too.
From my understanding, it depends on what the animal (not just mammals) itself ate. That’s why beef producers change their feed before then sent the cows to market.
Silly side note: did you know that many box turtles are poisonous to eat? It turns out that they are able to eat a whole variety of poisonous mushrooms, and then store the toxins in there flesh. (I’d only ever heard of various toads.)
If you also want to connect with your ancestry, you could start planting blackthorn (sloe) along with the other thorny thing you were trying to plant for a fence line. It’s pretty darn hardy, and was the ancestors’ version of barbed wire. And you can make sloe gin, or even better, sloe jelly, with the berries to boot (and give the birds something to eat in winter), and I think Oregon is the only place that lists it as unwanted invasive, rather than naturalized.
And hunting in a lot of places in Europe has turned into a responsibility, now that all the apex (4 legged) predators are gone (or shot, when they run into the wrong person after crossing a border). Deer and swine become quite the nuisance, and in some places to get a hunting license you have to join a hunting club, and then the clubs have areas of responsibility where they are required to thin out the deer and wild swine. Unfortunately, while the wild swine sausages and the like are popular, it’s expensive to dress and sell, because each carcass needs a vet. exam before the meat can be sold (and a radiologic test in some places, although it’s not totally clear if the current standards are overly cautious).
While it’s not my favorite, I rather like venison. I assume the steaks I’ve bought were probably from farmed deer, which might be quite different from wild deer. As a kid, I had a neighbor that hunted and would give us a bunch of sausage and jerky. The sausage was really good, but the jerky was like gnawing on an old shoe.
Rude hunters suck though. Where my parents live, it’s the duck hunters. They start shooting before dawn, but my parents are very old, so at least it’s not too much before they’d normally get up. The real problem is the trash. They think the bay is just one big trash can, and of course it all washes up on shore eventually. The neighbors hate the hunters so much that they bring out their dogs and start running the leaf blower to scare away all the ducks.
ahcuah @ 5
I’m not a biologist, but let me guess:
It could be the food the animals eat. Though, sheep and cow may both eat grass, but mutton and beef taste quite different. AFAIK, especially beef fat and mutton fat are very different tasting. This may be due to the different fatty acids produced by the metabolism of the animals and the rumen microbial flora. For horses or rabbits/hare, the intestine/colon microbial flora may have the same effect (I’ve never tasted horsemeat that hasn’t been smoked, so I don’t know about that, but hare tastes a bit like liver).
One thing is that game meat tends to be more lean than farmed meat. Also beef can contain more fat “marbled” inside the muscle tissue than pork or game. Maybe both the fatty acid composition of the fat as well as the amount and location of the adipose tissue influences the taste. The amino acids in the proteins of the meat may depend on genes of the animal, but the composition of the fat could be dependent on many factors.
Also meat hanging/aging also affects the taste. Pork isn’t aged because it’s tender even when it’s fresh, but beef and game are aged.
I’ve had venison which was tasty, and venison which was not.
From what the hunters tell me, it’s the same reason that cows are killed as quickly as possible. It’s not to save on animal suffering, but to prevent the release of adrenaline into the bloodstream and into the meat.
Deer which are killed cleanly, dead before they can react, result in wonderful, lean, tender, slightly sweet, meat. Deer which are allowed to run for a mile before collapsing produce sour, tough, rancid, meat. The adrenaline spoils the meat, and you can use it in stews or spice the hell out of it, but it’s really lousy.
The diet of the animal does make a difference. When we raised cows they were almost exclusively fed on grass, and the meat was leaner and sweeter than the usual grain-fed beef. But the difference in diet is minor compared to the difference between meat which is filled with adrenaline and meat which isn’t. Aging also has an affect, as Ice Swimmer @7 wrote.
I just had a thought…. I can’t imagine human meat reacting any differently, so the movies which show cannibalism should really show the villain taking their prey completely by surprise. Frightening the victim, or chasing them with a cleaver, would probably make the meat taste pretty bad. I suppose most movie cannibals are not too concerned with flavor. But it would be a funny scene where the villain misses the nubile sophomore and then rejects clear opportunities to kill the victim because the meat would be sour. Maybe it’s been done, I don’t usually watch those types of movies.
I’ve contacted the government and asked them to arrest you for joking about murdering trump supporters scumbag!
Philip Jones
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2020/09/08/let-the-hatred-flow/?fbclid=IwAR1w8LmHE4f-cPYysSNVvs_GqNsrBgt7kDfQxe4wSdKQjeT8QnwaUdOVEXc
Marcus Ranum
8 September 2020 at 9:47 pm
What if I told you I’ve already killed 3 Trump supporters
I grew up in a rural PA town, and holy fuck, the hunters and the hunting-centric societal norms are fucking assholes. Sure, there are some that are responsible and okay, but they are a quiet minority.
I remember back in highschool, we had the first day of (deer) hunting season off. And almost nobody showed up that entire first week, including quite a few of the teachers. You could take off a week to go to the “farm show”, but you only got two days to go visit colleges. Go figure…
And every year, someone got shot, and it was always blamed on the person who got shot, because everyone should know you shouldn’t go out of your house wearing green/brown/black/red/white/blue, or have any item in your possession bearing any of those colors, because that means you are either too difficult to see, too easily mistaken for a deer, or too easily mistaken for a turkey. Can’t have the person with the lethal fucking firearm to double-check what they thought they saw before pulling the trigger, they might miss that deer/turkey/whatever, and we can’t have that…
lochaber: That’s one aspect of US hunting culture that seems really bizarre from a UK perspective (and I suspect that of most other countries, but I can’t speak to anywhere else specifically). Over here everybody who shoots goes out in earth tones, and yet nobody gets shot*, because it’s drilled into you that it is your absolute responsibility to know not only what you’ve shooting at, but what’s behind what you’re shooting at, and that you don’t even load unless you’re sure of both of those things.
Now, certainly, the Highland shooting estates advise that people shouldn’t go traipsing around the areas where they might be stalking without checking first (and there are well-established mechanisms for this), and that you should avoid areas where they are actively stalking on that day, but (AFAIK) there’s no suggestion that failure to do so would relieve a negligent shooter of their responsibilities or legal liabilities.
* I’ve certainly never heard of it happening, nor can I find any reports via a casual search – all the reports of hunting accidents I can find relate to people falling from horses.
To this UKnian, “hunters” conjures images of toffs in their Hunting Pink chasing foxes; what Wilde called “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible”.
To give you an idea of the feeling of ordinary Brits towards our kind of huntsman, the common insult “berk” is a shortened version of “Berkeley Hunt”, itself rhyming slang for… well, you can imagine.
Stag meat is expensive, or as I like to say, venison’s dear. The joke doesn’t really work in print though – say it out loud. It’s expensive (in the UK) because there’s not much of it and if it’s to your taste, it’s lovely. I do wonder how much of that is to do with scarcity, though – I understand caviar used to be peasant food, and I’ve never cared for it.
Sous vide a god venison fillet for four hours at 53C, flash fry it to seal and brown and there’s not much beef that can match it. Echoing the bit above about the importance of a swift kill, though, which is why I would forgive someone hunting with a scoped bolt action rifle – the entire point is to kill instantly, with a single shot, and game wardens in the highlands do it that way. Require hunters to use more difficult weapons and all you’ll do is increase suffering of animals and spoil the meat.
I’ve shot a compound bow. I’ll agree with “deadly”, for a short range (<50m), but "accurate"? Maybe if you're an Olympic-standard archer and prepared to spend a LOT of time on the range. By contrast, with relatively little practice, I could hit a running-speed moving target at 100m in a 30mph sidewind and driving rain 38 times out of 40 with a scoped rifle – a fact I attribute almost entirely to the rifle and scope, as I am at best an average shot. With a bow I wouldn't bet I could hit your Tahoe at 50m if it was parked. I might be able to hit your garage. This may be just me and only having seen bad bows, but still.
It's an interesting thing to compare hunting cultures across the US and Europe. Hunting proper in the UK is very much the preserve of the rich and their hangers on. It's not the kind of blue-collar knockabout the US allows at all.
We just finished the last of the bear meat my son sent down from the interior where a bear, all fat and sassy for hibernation, made the mistake of tearing the roof off his chicken coop. It was delicious. Especially the fat, which just melted in my mouth. Admittedly it was too tough unless cooked to death in the pressure cooker, but still, great meat to eat.
The last venison I ate, years ago now, tasted like lamb. Heavenly, with a bit of mint sauce. You can’t compare that meat to feed lot beef or fast food burgers that taste like cardboard. Also, it’s the most ethical meat you can eat. That young buck didn’t spend its life ankle deep in manure in some feed lot being fed grain or corn instead of grass. It lived free and ate healthy.
I won’t bother trying to defend asshole hunters. But if you get your meat wrapped in plastic at the supermarket, you are a long way from the high moral ground. There is still a place for hunting and hunters in some parts of the world, like the pacific North West where I live. I absolutely detest trophy hunters, and don’t get me started on catch and release fishing. When it comes to deer, just don’t kill more than you can eat.
sonofrojblake: There’s loads of venison on the hoof in Scotland. The excess deer population is a major ecological issue, as their grazing prevents the regeneration of woodland. It’s expensive because of the practicalities of hunting wild animals across some fairly inhospitable mountain country versus shipping domesticated animals to a slaughterhouse.
Cop Caught Illegally Hunting From His Cruiser With A Felon
Here in CZ, we do not have hunters per see. We have gamekeepers. I do not know the details because I am not one, but there are quotas and sometimes even prescriptions of what they can hunt and where. If there is too much deer, they can get a prescribed quota of deer to hunt, including the sex of said animals, so they cannot only shoot trophy-worthy, antler-bearing males and some years they might not be allowed to hunt what they want at all but must hunt what is needed.
Also, membership requires not only fees to be paid, but also accompanied duties to fulfill – like providing animals with feed in rough winter/water in dry summer, with salt where needed, clearing the forest of trash, helping to manage the trees, inoculating animals against rabies, monitoring pig plague spread etc.etc. One article that I quickly found on google summed it up as “a duty to care, an entitlement to hunt”.
The “No Trespassing” sign is also rare in CZ, since forests and meadows must be accessible to the public under the law, with provisions of doing no harm etc. So even privately owned forest cannot be fenced off and the owner cannot bar people from for example 1) passing through 2) collecting berries and/or mushrooms 3)having a picnic there (provided they clean up and do not start fires). I think I have commented this in the past.
If you also want to connect with your ancestry, you could start planting blackthorn (sloe) along with the other thorny thing you were trying to plant for a fence line. It’s pretty darn hardy, and was the ancestors’ version of barbed wire. And you can make sloe gin, or even better, sloe jelly, with the berries to boot (and give the birds something to eat in winter), and I think Oregon is the only place that lists it as unwanted invasive, rather than naturalized.
And hunting in a lot of places in Europe has turned into a responsibility, now that all the apex (4 legged) predators are gone (or shot, when they run into the wrong person after crossing a border). Deer and swine become quite the nuisance, and in some places to get a hunting license you have to join a hunting club, and then the clubs have areas of responsibility where they are required to thin out the deer and wild swine. Unfortunately, while the wild swine sausages and the like are popular, it’s expensive to dress and sell, because each carcass needs a vet. exam before the meat can be sold (and a radiologic test in some places, although it’s not totally clear if the current standards are overly cautious).
Charly@#18:
The “No Trespassing” sign is also rare in CZ, since forests and meadows must be accessible to the public under the law, with provisions of doing no harm etc. So even privately owned forest cannot be fenced off and the owner cannot bar people from for example 1) passing through 2) collecting berries and/or mushrooms 3)having a picnic there (provided they clean up and do not start fires). I think I have commented this in the past.
Of course, you don’t have idiots with weapons wandering around on your property, or tearing through on ATVs, scaring your livestock and destroying your hay fields. When Americans trespass it’s a whole different vibe. I’m familiar with hiking in Europe – you don’t leave the livestock gates open, or pick someone’s crops. If it was different, I suspect that trespassing would be a lot less tolerated.
Out here in Pennsylvania, of course, the worst of the trespassers (the ones on ATVs) will tell you they’d shoot you if you came and did a few laps around their house in your 4×4. I’ve asked.
zaledalen@#15:
But if you get your meat wrapped in plastic at the supermarket, you are a long way from the high moral ground.
You’ll note that I was careful not to make claims of moral superiority; only cost and (in my opinion) quality. In fact I clearly stated that the latter was my opinion. If you think I was reaching for moral high ground, then it seems to me that you’re mistaken.
sonofrojblake@#14:
I’ve shot a compound bow. I’ll agree with “deadly”, for a short range (<50m), but "accurate"? Maybe if you're an Olympic-standard archer and prepared to spend a LOT of time on the range. By contrast, with relatively little practice, I could hit a running-speed moving target at 100m in a 30mph sidewind and driving rain 38 times out of 40 with a scoped rifle
I think my expectations with respect to bows are probably skewed. A guy who used to work for me was mid-atlantic regional champion with a compound bow and I went to a few of his shoots. After watching someone effortlessly fire arrow after arrow into a quarter-sized target at 100yd, I maybe over-estimated the accuracy and deadliness of a bow.
But your point about how much superior a rifle is (which, I agree!) sort of makes my point about the ridiculousness of claiming that hunting is a “sport”. There have been mornings I’ve woken up here with so many deer in my yard that I could “hunt” one by dropping a cinderblock on it from my bedroom window. That’s an exaggeration but only a slight one.
Dunc@#16:
The excess deer population is a major ecological issue, as their grazing prevents the regeneration of woodland.
Do they hunt the does, or mostly just the bucks?
In the US, the hunters claim they are reducing the herd, then shoot the bucks – which does damn little to reduce the herd but allows them a nice supply of ecological problems to solve the next year. I don’t know if European game managers/sport hunters are as dishonest about what they are doing as their American counterparts, but here everyone just plays along with the “gosh, the deer population just is so darned big” bullshit. I mean, it’s big alright – because they want it to be big. And it’s a problem alright. I hit a doe at 70 in my former Toyota Tundra and it was a seriously dangerous situation. It was hunting season and during hunting season the deer run all over the place trying to get away from the hunters, which results in motorist fatalities.
Male and female red deer are stags and hinds, and yes, they hunt both. The hind season runs from October to February, but some years, particularly if it’s been a hard winter, the hind cull can be extended out-of-season.
The main distinction is between “sport” hunters, who pay for the privilege and generally go for stags (both for trophies and because the stag season is July to October, which is an easier and more pleasant time to be out on the hills), and professional hunters and game managers, who go for hinds because that’s how you actually manage the population.
But yes, there is a lot of conflict between the desire for good ecological management, and the desire to have a larger population for stags for those paying “sportsmen” to shoot at. The other big issue is the “management” of grouse estates, again for the benefit of fee-paying customers. This all interacts with the semi-feudal pattern of land ownership, which is arguably the real root of the problem. Much of Scotland is basically run as a glorified theme park for toffs. We’re working on it, but a thousand years of ingrained privilege is not easy to uproot.
There’s actually a quota for the hind cull, which is set by a government body called Scottish Natural Heritage, and if the estates don’t make their numbers, SNH will step in, do the job for them, and send them the bill.
I’m pretty sure the ARs in the Boebert pic are 22s. If you zoom in on a high res version, the magazines are a give away, and the bolts aren’t standard AR 556.
keith nielsen @ 26
So what? A semi-auto .22 LR firearm is sufficient for killing, even massacring people. Two mass shootings (7 and 10 victims, all adults or teens, as well as the shooters dead in each case) here have been carried out with .22 semiauto pistols. The asshole who tried to massacre people with a sword (he wasn’t able to get a firearm) only managed to kill one person (out of the 20 he was proven to try to kill).