And the guns=penis angle? You bet! About the time girls lost interest in me was when I got all armed up. Yup, you just wait till your load ain’t shootin right. I go huntin just to have the cool mossy realtree camo jacket and a 4wd truck.
Ok it’s also in case things go all code red (or brown-ha!) inside the beltway…then I won’t just be huntin’, I’ll be defendin’.
I see. So you are not talking about hunters. You are talking poachers. Kindly refer to them as such in the future.
Cops hunt bad guys, preachers hunt sinners, teenage boys hunt teenage girls, women hunt husbands…
Teddy Roosevelt hunting for heads to hang on walls? Did the meat go to the natives?
One or three rich guys going after big game in Africa? A guy going out and killing a bear?
Go walk up a Salomon stream during spawn with all the guns you can carry and see how far up the food chain you are. Go hunt a polar bear and miss just once and see who is hunting who.
Go swim off the Great Barrier Reef at night and see who is hunting who. Heck, just walk in the big woods without a weapon. See how long you are the hunter.
What all the others have said.
I know some guys that hunt bison and boar with nothing but spears. Not for the faint of heart. The bison is not over matched. Go out with them once and you might then understand a little more about ‘hunting.’
Then you’re not talking about anybody, unless you can come up with a cite that shows a notable number of people (aside from serial killers) who do kill, just for the hell of it. Every hunter I know eats what they kill.
Actually, as a point of order, poachers kill for monetary gain, not just for the hell of it, not that poachers are anything other than despicable slime.
This is entirely false. Many animals kill for the hell of it. Weasels are famous for it. Why do so many people think that nature is some harmoniously balanced place containing no gratuitous violence or suffering? Nature is brutal and harsh. Many animals die slow, lingering, painful, useless deaths without any help from humans.
I believe the most hunted game animal in North America is the white tailed deer. In most places, deer populations are somewhere between healthy and dangerously high. Deer coexist with agricultural rural North America just fine, but their natural predators do not, and hence natural controls on their population do not exist. Without sport hunting, deer populations would rise to the point where mass starvation would occur during winters. If you were a deer, which would you choose? Death by starvation or possibly by some degenerative disease brought on by malnutrition, or death by .270 Winchester?
To my knowledge, there is no endangered, threatened, or at risk species that, if shot other than in self-defense, will not net you a quick trip to jail or a hefty fine.
You are serious about this? My brother has a bison ranch, and you could not pay me any amount of money to try to take down one of them with anything short of a high powered rifle. 2400lbs of bull coming at you at 35mph is nothing to play around with, especially considering that the front end of a bison doesn’t present many useful targets for a spear.
This takes place on game farms, I imagine? Must sign liability waivers a half inch thick.
Yepper, game farms and really gutsy guys, usually about 3-5 hunting in a pack. LOL They pay well for the chance to let the bison ruin their day. Really back to basics hunting. They have had some really scary encounters and do not always get an animal even though they are on a ‘farm’. Lot of timers the animal wins, sometimes they do not even get a chance to strike. I wish I was younger.
Flynn, you are still arguing that man is somehow apart from nature. That somehow man is above the rest of the animals.
I am trying to tell you that we do these things because of instinct. We are not immune from that. On the contrary, we have created the word “instinct” to differentiate how we act from the way other species act. If you knew even a drop of modern biology you would understand that the word “instinct” is meaningless.
We used our large brains and opposable thumbs to domesticate the auroch (now reffered to, after a few thousand years of directed evolution, as “cattle”). We did that for a food source. Some species of ants have domesticated aphids for the same reason. Those aphids aren’t really “wild type” aphids just as the cow is no longer an auroch.
Bears, cats, dogs, and any other predator or omnivore will kill for recreation. So will we. Hell man, I’ve seen ruminants do it. (cud-chewing herbivores). Was the skunk really threatening the bull? I don’t think so, but it sure didn’t survive the encounter. Hell, it didn’t even have time to spray.
We are animals. We act like it. Our sky scrapers are no different from large termite mounds. Again, that’s what you seem to be forgeting, Flynn. Man is not different from the rest of the animals.
But I think I can read between the line of your posts. This isn’t really about hunting is it? If you wanted to start a thread about whether God would allow one species to kill another, ammend your position, because knocking your points down about hunting is like shooting fish in a bucket.
On preview, I second Gorsnack’s question to GusNSpot. Bison? Spears? What?
But Gus, Spears?!
That’s my reaction too. I’ve heard of taking bison with bows, but spears? That’s freakin suicidal.
Please, Gus, tell us they only try for cows or yearling bulls, and only when they’re seperated from the herd. I’ve seen mature bulls - they’ve been known to give pickups a bad day. I can imagine what they’d do to a few guys with spears. :shudder:
Well, I have seen the pictures. They are all young 20- 35 and seem to really like this. They apparently got 1-3 times a year maybe. They have been doing it for only a few years. I do not know where they got the idea, how they convinced anyone to let them but yes, I think they tried for a mature Bull but I don’t recall is that is what they got. It is really primitive hunting, (that being the idea) and so it is kinda not a real controlled setup. LOL
I will go back to that board and see if I can dig it up and will post a link.
Here is a page about what they do. :eek:
OK, then - give us the score. How many dead animals versus how many dead humans, then we can test your assertion as to who wins and whether the bison is overmatched?
I got interested in hunting after I began eating “paleo-style.” I wanted to get closer to the source of my meat (i.e., I wanted to know what it was like to actually kill something and eat it.)
I didn’t grow up around hunters. I took the hunter safety course and the bowhunting safety course, and found a whole sub-culture of folks that I barely knew existed. Most of these hunters are serious, ethical people. They abide by regulations. They care about the management of the animals. They care about making good shot placement so that the animal dies quickly and without too much suffering. They agonize over just wounding an animal, or over shooting one and not being able to recover the carcass.
They don’t want to let the animal go to waste. If they don’t eat the meat themselves, they donate it to organizations like Hunters Feeding the Hungry. And if they hunt cougar and bear, they eat cougar and bear. (They say cougar meat is delicious.)
I’m a newbie hunter, and I’m still learning where to go and what to look for. I only had one deer in range all season, and I missed her. I’m also a bowhunter only, so I need for an animal to be within 20 yards of me before I’d take a shot. You need to spend a lot of time in the woods getting familiar with animals and habitat before that can happen. You learn a lot and see a lot in the process. And that’s A Good Thing.
My developing hunting philosophy is this: learn your area, and hunt the animals in it. This brings you in closer connection to your land. That said, right now I think I’d have a hard time hunting a fellow predator.
Many people don’t know that sales of hunting licenses and hunting equipment provide funds that go back into supporting natural areas and into managing wildlife.
BTW, those guys hunting bison ought to try using atlatls instead of javelins.
The bison doesn’t have to kill a human to win. It just has to not die.
Well, if you make up your own rules, I guess you can claim anything. So Sonny Liston beat Cassius Clay, Germany and Japan beat the Allies. After all, they lived to fight another day.
The only people I know who have hunted bear ate the bear. Nasty greasy meat. I don’t know anyone who has hunted mountain lions.
Your analogy would be more apt if Cassius Clay were trying to kill and eat Sonny Liston.
Tyson vs Holyfield, maybe…
Thanks for admitting a typo.
Butt-head!! or are you Bevis?
Are you being deliberately obtuse in order to make a point or something?