drop step

I'm impressed. again

drop step

I gut shot on a bull elk once...We tracked it for 2 days, about 7 miles and 6000 feet in elevation.

SultanOfSwing

I do love excessive use of the word 'arse', don't you

Bob

If you're desperate...but it's also easy to hunt when you're allowed to use bear traps and if you're really desperate, you'll line hunt animals....but that's after you've raided the local supermarkets of canned food....

meauxna

I know where my Mormon neighbors live. They're well prepared, and nice.

Bob

Bit of both in the modern age isn't it

SultanOfSwing

Kind of like MILF hunting then?

(did I get away with it . . . ?)

Cape Blue

I've eaten elephant - bit gamey for my taste (although the steaks were huge)

another bloody yank

I think I'll need a few minutes to organize my thoughts. In the meantime, if some of you find this subject interesting and have some time to spare, here's a similar thread from a few years ago: http://britishexpats.com/forum/showt...hlight=hunting

Timely thread BTW, I leave next Wednesday for a week of deer hunting back in MO. The season there starts this Saturday, but due to some issues here at work I'll miss the first few days. This will be the first opening weekend I'll have missed in 16 years.

SultanOfSwing

Elephant? Bloody hell!

drop step

I knew there was a reason I liked you...I hunt animals in April and October, the rest of the year i'm hunt'in split tail.

drop step

I'm always on the hunt

fatbrit

They do make good neighbors.

another bloody yank

I guess I'll start with my own experience. I was born and raised by non hunting parents in an urban area. I knew very few people who hunted until I was in my later teens. A couple of my uncles hunted ducks and I knew one kid whose family had moved to the city from a rural area and did quite a bit of hunting with his father. That said, the hunting gene must have been part of my makeup. As far back as I can remember I knew it was something I needed to do. As a kid, my interest in firearms, bows and other tools of the trade was nearly nerdy. For me, there was no why, there just was.

Other kids quoted baseball stats, I knew calibers and ballistics and specifications for numerous firearms. For a 4th grade English assignment I wrote and illustrated a theme paper on the inner workings of the flintlock ignition mechanism. I planned excursions modeled on the Corps of Discovery trip up the Missouri river that eventually led to the Pacific Ocean. When I was about 10 or 11, my parents finally had a chat with me after I handed my Mom a shopping list as she was heading out to the grocery store. On it were things like Flour: 40lbs, Coffee: 20 lbs, dried beans: 30lbs.

Had I grown up in a rural area in a hunting family instead of in a city with parents who not only didn't hunt, but had a distinct dislike of things that went bang, maybe my interest wouldn't have been so intense. I dunno. Although my parents weren't too keen on hunting or firearms we did a lot of camping and fishing which thrilled me.

I went on my first actual hunting trip with an Uncle when I was 15. Every year, he drove down to Alabama to spend a week deer hunting with his wife's relatives. I didn't get a deer, in fact, no one did the week we were there, but the experience was the thrill of my life. Being in the woods before first light, watching the sun slowly make it's way over the horizon and sending it's rays through the thick pine forest, the shadowy shapes that fed my imagination for the previous hour of darkness finally taking shape as the increasing light gradually revealed stumps and rocks and brush. Hearing the rustling and scurrying and chirping as the nocturnal creatures return to their dens and the day shift of squirrels and birds takes over... I've experienced dawn in the woods a hundred more times since then and it has that magical quality every time, but that first morning in Alabama was the catalyst for a reaction that turned the already strong elements of interest within me into a passion.

Why do I and other people have this passion? I've thought about this quite a bit. For my answer, as I do with a lot of things, I looked for an explanation from four legged animals. It's my belief that we as humans have more in common with our four legged friends than we like to think and by remembering this, and looking at an issue from that perspective I have often found an answer that satisfies me as being close to the truth.

Animals, especially non-domesticated animals, don't do anything without reason. They can’t afford to waste energy on trivialities, their every action has a purpose. If you peel back all these actions and purposes and distill them to an ultimate goal, I believe that what you end up with is an innate drive to live long enough to propegate and thereby ensure the survival of the species. Any animals life is governed by this instinct and their every action works towards this goal. It’s their, and our, ultimate life’s purpose.

Even as "evolved" humans it's no accident that the feelings of hunger, fear (survival) and sexual desire are some of the strongest that we experience. We humans have existed on this earth a relatively short time and it's not surprising that these drives that were so necessary for our earliest father's survival are still strong today. Though strong, they have been muted by morality and convienience to the extent that for most people they are dormant, only awakening in the case of extreme necessity.

I believe that suppressing these instincts, while viewed by some as being progressive, isn’t quite healthy and that this process of distancing ourselves from our ancestors is a fools game of denying our humanity and our place in this natural world. I feel it’s not only my duty to remind myself of our place in this ecosystem by hunting, but to teach my children to hunt as well. To teach them that we are human animals and participants in a natural order of things that necessitates the taking of life to sustain our own. I have no issue with people who decline to participate in their carnivorious heritage by becoming vegans, it's a choice that I honor and respect. But if you eat meat or wear fur or leather yet decry hunting as barbarous, you’re just kidding yourself.

One last point for those who state that having a rifle or bow gives unfair advantage to the hunter. Having a rifle might facilitate the actual kill, but in order to kill an animal, you have to see it before it sees, scents, hears or otherwise senses your presence, and that’s where the “hunting” part comes in. If you think being equipped with a weapon makes hunting easy, you’re mistaken. Prey animals are equipped with amazing senses that they utilize with uncanny ability and brilliant effect. Avoiding predators is their business and if they were’nt any good at it they would soon cease to exist ie: the passenger pigeon and nearly, the American Bison.

Ridski

I have nothing against hunting, and I would love to go hunting with someone who knows what they're doing one day.

I just don't understand why it's on my TV. In fact I really don't get why there are whole channels that show nothing but hunting and fishing.

Then again, I feel the same way about golf.