Chinese Propaganda

Yeah, I saw this.  Before it was reported as sourced from China.  Looked cross-eyed at it then, binned it now.  

"Oh noes!  90% of Michigan deer got the Rona!"

Of course it isn't season yet, so these are NOT tested from any blood samples taken. 

And deer hate nasal swabs. So state workers have to sneak up really quietly and swab the other end with surplus Chinese Anal-Ease swabs. They are Ambassador Strength (TM), so Extra Stout.  

You swab a 2000 random deer, you got enough sample size for the entire Mitten State.  Plus Yoopers are willing to do just about anything for minimum wage plus 20% if there is a 12 pack in it for 'em at the end of work, Friday.   Extrapolate from that 2000, you get a +/- 3% reliability and you get... Whoa 90% positive.  Tsk tsk.  Shoulda masked up, Bambi.  

I guess you damn hillbillies can save ammo money and get your self a dart gun this fall.  Do the Dept of Natural Resources a solid by THHHHHHHHHHHHHHwhpppPPPP! -ing your whitetails with J&J vax.  They'll all be there next season, bigger and healthier, and you help your community AND the Circle of Life.

Plus, free dart gun to put in the gun safe.  Awesome.  If them CHICOM ever invade they'll get the whole 'behind every blade of grass' thing, but first their soldier get softened up by high doses psylocybin and THC from all the dart guns.  Because that would just crack us up. 

Extreme beer funnel pic.twitter.com/7AiM2FPtZV

— 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐩𝐨𝐨𝐥 (@JoshD0110) August 6, 2021

Some days you eat the bar…

I wonder if it will help CCW spreading with all the bear sightings happening in *towns?   

A few pets snatched up in front of the family while walking the dog, or a few close encounter scares, face to face.  Then the subsequent inability for 911 to instantly swoop in and solve the problem because that is impossible, and even upper middle class white ladies that were normally anti-firearms of any kind might see some occasional utility of they, or, better, someone else very nearby, having a gun to hand.  

"Oh, don't hurt Yogi, but do scare him off.  This whole can of anti-grizzly pepper spray barely made him sneeze, but maybe shooting into the air will do?  What?  Well, yes, I will stop voting for people that want to ban guns, just hurry!  I don't think Fluffy my Labradoodle can hold him off much longer."

(*I swear I composed this post before seeing Tam's link to a bar in Indy.  Serendipity, synchronicity, whatever.  Ahem.  Bearthread.)

What a jerk

Banned from hunting errywhere, but Hawaii and Mass.  Has to turn in the guns he used for poaching.

It's not like it is really that hard to adhere to most hunting regulations.  He didn't just poach a lil bit...  he poached it lotta bit.  Like he preferred it out of season.

I imagine he can get another rifle tomorrow.  And he can buy a couple hundred acres.  I assume in that situation he can hunt all year round from his back deck.  Ifn that was what he wanted.  He seems trophy obsessed and not venison obscessed, tho. 

Deer

Throughout my life I've seen plenty of deer.

Probably an equal number alive as dead.  Struck by cars, of course, them dead one.  And most of the live ones I have seen while I was also sitting in a car.  Not all.  Call it 40% road kill, 40% alive but I I spied em through car glass.  The other 20% in parks and hikes and hunting and whatnot.  Out walking around.

That's probably pretty typical.  We moderns cover a lot of ground in our cars.  Hard to spot deer sitting in a cubicle at an office 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

With the hundreds of deer I have seen in my life, I rarely see deer with antlers.  I think older bucks are more wily, except when they are horny.  And of the antlers I have spotted, none are truly spectacular racks.  Either big racks are rare, or deer able to grow em are smart and reticent of roads or a combination of both.  I see a lot more does with yearlings

But yesterday morning was the first time I saw a buck with antlers that had velvet on the antlers.  It was standing on the shoulder of an off ramp and though better of crossing the road so ducked back.  He was maybe a two year old?  Three?  The antlers got a few inches past maximum ear length.

What to take on Safari

What do you take on Safari?

I can tell you what not to take.  Selfies.

That Jimmy Johns guy gets's PETA up his arse for going hunting in Africa.  Thing is, he gave it up 15 years ago.  But every few years PETA posts an old photo of him standing next to dead charismatic mega fauna and now erryone has to donate to kitty murderers at PETA and eat Subway?

And it's always someone new.  Like this lady.

The lesson here, maybe don't take pictures of your hunting trips.  If you do, maybe don't smile.  Or pose with the game you harvested.  Even hunting ethically will get the anti-hunting zealots up your posterior if they see a propaganda value in your images.

Or take all the smiling pictures posing near nude next game you fell, but be careful not to leak them somewhere they can get on social media and come back to you.

I mean, still do it.  The hunt stuff you enjoy, I mean. Still hunt.  And enjoy it.  That's one of the Hater's biggest goals.  To make you miserable enough that it's no fun anymore and you quit.  And take a n00b with you.  Get them to have fun.  Cook up that meat in the smoker after wrapping it in bacon, server that backstrap with taters.  Nom.  Just be mindful about giving ammunition to the enemy

Squirrel Hunting

I've never shot at a squirrel.  But I have looked at squirrels.

Look at this fat bastard here.   That's a resident of Indiana, that squirrel.

I've noticed...  this one in Indy, and also on my visits to Ohio...  The squirrels on THAT side of the Appalachians are bigger.  And redder.  On this side the squirrels are a lot more gray.  And slightly smaller.  And we have some with black fur.  Perhaps even smaller, they.

Truly a noticeable difference.

I seem to recall similar gray style east coast squirrel during my stint in the Florida panhandle, but can't bet my life on it.  Gray, like east coast varieties, in SW Virginia and SE Virginia.  In Pennsylvania too, both east side and nearer Pittsburgh, but I think the I79 corridor they are starting to change...    But man, get to the flat lands past the hills and west and Red and Fat is the squirrel byword.

I wonder, if, with concerted effort, one could import enough of one variety or another to opposite territories and successfully have one variety dominate the other?   Not that'd recommend that sort of unnatural intervention.  But it's not like there is anything preventing it happening naturally.  Yet, it hasn't. 

Vegan sez wha?

Vegans wants me to hunt down animals with my bare hands and eat the meat raw.

Yeah, that was a different kind of Homo.  No, not THAT Homo.  Sheesh.  The other kind.  The Genus kind.  No, not GENIUS kind...

It was like 3 or four species ago when we did that kind of thing.  Now we fashion tools.  And we cook it.   That's what makes us so smart to be able to communicate with Vegans using typed words converted to light and beamed around.  The fat in the easily digestible cooked flesh made the brain so big.

And we cooperate with others like ourselves so maybe we can specialize in our labor.  So I can let someone else hunt down and slaughter and cook my cheeseburger and in exchange write blog posts for money that I then give to the mighty Burger-Jaeger.

Not eat raw exhausted deer like some dumb Australopethicus.

Not going to the range for a month

Puts a crimp on my blog fodder.

More Far Cry 5.

The M-14 and M1A variants in the game, SUCK.  Didn't the developers know that that gun hits like a bolt out of the blue?  Pah!  It feels like a .32 ACP in game.

And it take TWO shots from the bolt action .50 cal to put down a bear.

Lesser calibers you shoot a deer it jumps and runs.  And there are actual blood trails to follow.  Pretty neat.

---

Brilliant plans to win WWII.

I love stuff like that.  Well, loved.  Like, now.


As a kid and budding war historian, I went over and over various mental scenarios like "If the Germans had two dozen more U-Boats in the fall of 1939... they'd have won the war!" or "If Stalin hadn't murdered as many Generals the war wouldn't have seen 1943."  If.  Only if.

No.  The war would have been different maybe.  Maybe.  Anyway, this video series goes over some plans that fell short.  And the folly of the 'what ifs' to reality.  Still interesting to think about, tho.

Masculinity

From an article about a liberal that wants to learn how to hunt. And good for him.

"These are not the best of times to declare one’s pursuit of manly ideals. Masculinity, or at least the toxic manifestations of it, has much to answer for."

Why not?  I don't see a problem with it.  Nor do my work and friends and family.  And plenty of them are liberal.  Maybe you need to stop hanging around folks that think like that, buddy.  There is something wrong with keeping your head in that place.  Some loss of faith in the very civilization from which you spring.  Hell confidence in your very humanity.

Also, he mentions the liberal gun club.  Frustrated lefty gun enthusiasts that don't want to restrict magazines, ban AR's, or be associated in ANY WAY with the NRA.  But the only difference with their postions and the NRA is that they really don't have a problem with a nationwide gun registry.  I guess they haven't come around to grokking "Registration = Confiscation" just yet.  Oh, and they'd NEVER vote for a political conservative, obviously.  So, they'd reject Reagan and Scalia and Thomas and Kavenaugh.  They think the NRA and GOP are the same thing, and the NRA is captured by the Greed Gun Industry.  Naw.  I'm the NRA.  It's not that the NRA is in lock step with the GOP.  It's that the Democrats never put forward a truly progun candidate anymore that reliably votes that way.  If they ever do one the Liberal Gun Club be surprised when the hated NRA supports that Dem.

You know, the LBC even support national CCW reciprocity?  They want a qualifications floor, so a Pennsylvania CCW won't be valid nationwide, but a Utah one might.  Good for them. 

A lever gun

Not a tacticool bolt action sniper rifle, in case the tree of Liberty needs watering, or the zombies finally rise, or you get to go to Africa and stalk a Cape Bussaflo?

Yeah, when I started this blog that was a possibility. Fighting with a rifle.  I was younger, I remembered my 30s, and injuries had yet to really catch up to me.  It wasn't doable, in reality, really, but it was feasible.

As for traipsing about Africa in short khaki pants, knees are scratched, and making a ton and a quarter of wild mean cattle angry with me armed with only a .308?  Madness.

Anyway, what was feasible once is much less feasible now.  I don't like lying on the ground because it entails sometime in the relatively near future I will have to get back up again.  If forced to throw a punch my punching arm is as week as an asthmatic 12 year old boy now.  Thanks neuropathy.   And I am way too fat.  I was too fat 10 years ago.  I was too fat training to be a Naval Aviator 25+ years ago.

At my peak of ability I could do 7 pullups.  That was age 27.

AR15s are much more attractive to me now.  They are lighter.  But I am not going on a patrol with one with this body.  Not and be much more than a burden to the people I am with.  I stopped smoking not because I wanted to, but because I was done with it dragging me down and had to.

And thank goodness someone invented the pistol.  I can LOOK as formidable (well almost) as I did when I was 27, but with a pistol I am much more dangerous as I was back then, full of beans and vinegar.

So, in the decision between tactical neato sniper rifle and lever action hunting rifle... I might as well go hunting rifle.

Left handed hunting rifle

They make few bolt action lefty rifles.  And no one like Remington anymore, and because of that new Savages are under pressure...

What about a NEW lever gun?  I took a chance on a used one and got burned.  But Browning has the BLR.  If there is something up with that it's under 'warranty'.

Anyone ever use one?  Thoughts?

Oooo, the takedown version is setup with Scout scopes in mind.

"The barrel on BLR Takedown models is factory drilled and tapped for an optional Browning forward-mounted scout-style scope base to provide a rock-solid optics mounting platform, allowing you to remove the barrel for transportation and storage without losing your scope’s zero."

OH NOES!

Heard this in NPR Saturday,

Essentially it went "First day of guy season Wisconsin, but now there IS NO AGE LIMIT on who can go afield!  Panic!  Armed children!"  It used to be 12, last year, or summat. 

Tacked onto the end they said "34 other states already have no age limit on who can hunt"

Wait, so 2/3rds of the country has no issue with it, and you never hear about packs of orange clad kindergartners going on a Remington bolt action rampage in those 34 states, so, maybe this isn't worth the hysterics?  You don't say.  Not even thousands of accidental shootings with the 3rd graders?  Huh.  Maybe your worry is overblown and parents are doing something consistently right? 

Who Pooped?

Hey what kind of scat is this?

It's less than 24 hours old, but it did get rained on over night.

The thing is, there same sort of scat was there in the exact spot a week or so ago.  Serial driveway pooper!

I'm thinking... Possum?  Doesn't look like the raccoon poop I've had to deal with.  It did have an aroma...  And it was done at night. 

That's not humane!

The usual suspect on my own personal social media are sharing a story about Texas and feral hogs and poisoning same with the anticoagulant Warfarin. 

"Oh the poor things!  How is this sporting?  Inhumane!"

For those that don't know, Warfarin is prescribe to people to keep blood clots from forming in your capillaries, thus helping to head off a heart attack or stroke.  If you get cut on Warfarin it may take some time to get the bleeding controlled.  If you overdose, you get what happens to rats or feral hogs that eat baited Warfarin.  You internal organ bleed.

I include rats and hogs together because they are the same thing.  Pests to be eradicated.  This isn't hunting.  No need or call to be sporting.  That's not Wilbur from Charlotte's Web.  Rats only edge Pigs in destructiveness because Rats helped spread Plague. 

I did not know that

I knew that deer population took a huge hit, but I didn't know the estimate was down to half a million animals.

I also didn't know it was all the way up past 30 million now.  And this AFTER the invention and production of a bajillion cars.

That's mind boggling.

Why?  Well, yes, the excise tax on guns and ammo and the efforts of outdoorsmen to pay for, preserve, and manage large areas for deer.  The retirement of sub-nominal farmland far enough from urban areas to not be suburbified.  Plus restrictions on market hunting.  You want to make a species extinct?  Give a population a disease they have no immunity to and make the animals not belong to anyone but still have a monetary value when harvested.  Around Maryland we did what we could to kill off many species of waterfowl, for example.  Out west, buffalo.  Pennsylvania and upstate New York did its part for whitetail.  And you know about the horn poachers of Africa, today.  

Ecological Disaster

Feral cats are an ecological disaster and all cats should be locked up indoors?

Or... maybe... cats fill an important role since we eliminated normal, wild, predators from civilization centuries ago.  If only housecats could take down whitetail deer, too, but without preying on any smaller humans.

I think worrying about it one way or another is standard buttinsky control-everything-impulse, histrionics.   Lighten up, Francis.

"Kill all stray cats and keep the rest indoors" 

Maybe we should kill all stray busybodies and keep the rest indoors?

Hunting

People get up in arms because you run with a GUN with a SCOPE on it.  You are big and brave with a firearm, you oughta hunt with the odd more even!

Then some guy hunts a bear with a spear and the anti's lose their damn minds.



They just don't want you to hunt.  Or own firearms. And now I need another source of longjohns. Stupid Maryland companies

Nuthin

Saw a smaller doe.  Didn't take the shot.  Wanted it a little bit closer.  Woulda been perfect otherwise.

Gone Huntin'

With luck, I went hunting for deer yesterday and/or today and if I got sumthin I'll let you know.

Hmmm, this is posting at 7AM.  Suns should be bright enough now.   Maybe I just shot a yearling buck.  Only took MBtGE 10 minutes.

Oh Deer

And here is the deer I poached with my new rifle on my front lawn area.

No.  I don't even have the rifle home yet.  Left it at MBtGE as his house is by the range for further testing this weekend and I need to bring a case out to pack it home in.

No, according to my broken spanish this guy busted into a neighbors house though the french doors and walloped about.  The constabulary was summoned.  The deer then vacated the premises.  Apparently then managing to get hit by a car outside my domicile later in that same morning.

According to the english speaking neighbor, the cops shot it in my backyard and dragged it around front.  It's leg was broken and it was suffering.  Multiple people have contacted the local gummint to come collect the carcass.

You can see the broken leg, injured jaw, and where the cop capped it behind the ear if you embiggenate this.