Deer Me!
Not stolen from anybody else’s blog this time. Ok, my mom sent me an email about it. You think bloggers have all day to look stuff up?
"Animal rights activists call the culling barbaric, and say officials should explore other methods such as contraception to control the animals’ numbers.”
Sounds good. Let’s get the animal rights activists to give live demonstrations on how to put a condom on a rutting 8 point buck while we’re at it.
And then film it and submit it to “Amrica’s Funniest Home Videos”. This could be worth some cash.
Now Drew, we’re all friends here, you don’t need to hold back your feelings.....
This whole thing is a great example of basic ignorance, learned fear, and total failure to recognize reality.
OK #1 Everybody is scared that a group of professional hunters (aka Snipers) with scoped rifles are going to mistake 2 legged people for 4 legged deer. The average hunter doesn’t make that mistake, let alone a pro. They are frightened of the very thought of hearing a gunshot. Am I the only one thinking that you could probably go for a nice walk in those woods and unless you hid underneath a deer, you’d be perfectly safe? Who taught these people to be afraid? What kind of BS will they pass on (like to kids in the 2nd grade), even if the whole thing comes off entirely without incident? Fear is a great way of suppressing dissent and stifling debate. Never let facts get in the way of reality. It’s the feelings that count.
Now the animal rights activists are a fun bunch. I remember that they wanted some kind of hormonal birth control distributed in the wilderness to suppress the deer’s birthrate. Well and good, but what about the effect of the hormones on the environment? Some odd fish with both male and female sex organs have already started to turn up in some places and it’s being blamed on the use of birth control pills - at least by the enviroweenies. So, let’s go dumping tons of hormones in the wilderness. That should trigger a great war between the animal rights activists and the tree huggers. Bring a comfy chair and some pop corn, it ought to be good.
Oh yeah - the folks getting the venison - has anyone checked the amount of lead in the meat? I mean, after all, don’t bullets have lead in them? Isn’t lead a terrible poison that will keep on killing for generations?
All in all, I think we could get at least 6 or 8 frivolous lawsuits costing the taxpayers millions of dollars out of this.
Now here’s the basic reality. Without predators, animal populations grow beyond what the local ecosystem can support. There are few or no predators in a suburban environment. Therefore, it will be periodically necessary to cull the herd by the most efficient means available. Now, you take a good hunter, put him in a tree stand so he’s basically got the whole planet for a backstop and I’d say the danger to humans and is about zero. Any lead deposited in the venison would probably be in the parts per billion range, well below the level of concern for any one not frightened of the bogeyman and old wives’s tales.
We had a similar problem in California about 10 years ago. The choices even wound up as ballot initiatives. One said issue lots of tags to guys who wanted to hunt cougers and thin the population out by the end of hunting season. Of course, the state would make a tidy sum per tag - who wouldn’t want a nice couger skin trophy? The other initiative said pay professional hunters to do the job (of course costing the state money instead of making money). Well the animal rights activists went ballistic at the idea of letting hunters loose on the couger population, so they ran a lot of ads against the tag initiative. After the election, they woke up and realized that the cougers were still going to be killed, but now the state was going to have to hire people to do it. Oh yeah, they also tried to stop the culling entirely. After the cougers had munched a few more family pets and came close to munching a few kids, they backed off. We still don’t have a couger hunting season though.
Yes, please explain to me the thought processes of these idiots. Oh, wait, I remember now. They think man is the foulest creature on the planet, man should be culled to around 5% of the current worldwide population. Then all the little aminals could wiv in peeeaaaccee. The unicorn would return, and the lion and the lamb would frolic in happiness.
Reading through this I was thinking why not reintroduce wolves? I’m sure they wouldn’t bother tree huggers all that patchouli oil would keep them at bay ! Dr. Jeff has the right idea, introduce tags. How hard is this to understand? Something else I find very odd in America you can get a centre fire rifle pretty easily but (correct me if I’m wrong) getting hold of a moderator (I won’t call them a silencer as they can’t silence supersonic bullets) you need a license from BATF or some such. In Britain the shooting lobby forced the government to allow the use of moderators using Health and Safety law. I have a moderator fitted to a .223 and it sounds about the same as a .22 rimfire shooting supersonic bullets. Now my .22 firing subsonic rounds really is near silent. I can fart louder than that bugger. It strikes me that the anti shooting lobby have somehow put into the mind of the government in the US that sound suppressors or “silencers” are the work of the devil, whereas in reality they are a superb idea. It would cut down on complaints if hunters were shooting deer close to urban areas as the average Joe in the street would not hear the big boom of a .308” etc. all they would hear would be a sharp crack followed by a loud thwump when the bullet hit the deer. Just my 2cents!
BTW! Out here in Eastern New Mexico, the feral hog problem has gotten so bad they’ve been declared pests/vermin. No season, no limit. And they do cook up well indeed. Wild pork without all the steroids and hormones and miscellaneous crap they pump into farm animals.
Maybe the Doe-huggers can teach the deer to put condoms on. If only these deer had thumbs instead of those damn hooves. Or, we could do absolutely nothing and when we have too many starving baby bambi’s we could put them all on some kind of welfare and provide subsidized housing all paid for by the taxpayer. It’s expensive, but don’t it feel so good inside? I’m sure the welfare deer recipients will be so appreciative that they will limit their multiplying even though they would get extra deer food for every offspring produced. With the proper re-education, these deer could later rejoin the deer workforce and contribute back to society by trimming the locals lawns and properly pruning trees. This plan has worked in the past successfully so many times...let’s do it again.
I don’t have the specifics on the kind of guns these shooters are using. The deer are being baited though; they put up feeders just upwind of the tree stands. My guess is that the shots are from about 50 feet away. At that range you could use a .22 rimfire and get the job done, especially since they are probably taking head shots. From above. Heck, that’s what I’d do. And with at least 150 yards of forest to absorb the noise, the locals might not hear a thing. Even without suppressors.
Having just taken a looooooooong drive through the worst America has to offer (from 29 Palms CA to OH) - there were vast areas in CA, AZ, NM, TX and OK - without people and without a huge mass of ‘wild’ animals - so if those animals were driven from the ‘populated’ areas to the non-populated areas - how come I didn’t see a one, not even a smear of road kill?!?
And oh, btw in this city of 300,000+ - we have deer behind our home and deer that graze outside my son’s dr’s office.
Go figure.
Just another lie fed to us by the tree hugging enviro wackos.
Not word for word, but pretty close:
Political Activist: Someone who can’t do basic arithmetic.
- Robert A. HeinleinThe regulation of sound suppressors or silencers dates back to the 1930’s. Because some government functionary decided they were most useful to gangsters, the got regulated, much the same way full auto weapons did. It was all done through the tax code. No, It doesn’t really make much sense, but there you have it.
btw - Nice to know that at least the people of New Mexico haven’t gone completely wonky. There’s one last thought to be considered. Any population is going to expand until some limiting factor culls it back. It doesn’t matter if the factor is starvation, war or disease, the population will be limited. No one has yet disproved the theories of Malthus. With the proper care, we can get support a lot of people from a given amount of resources, but that number will always be finite. The real questions are not how much of nature we will preserve, but how we will shepard our resources for the greatest good of men and women and how we will find a way to limit the human population before starvation, war or disease does it for us.
my sister lives up there, they call them rats. Bring back market hunting. allow those who hunt to donate the meat to the needy and up the number of deer a hunter can take. and change the damn rules. Why hunt bucks? If you kill every buck but one in a county the one left will still get every doe pregnant. The stupid hunting regs no longer reflect the reality of the situation. i was raised in upstate NY and rarely saw a deer in the 60’s and 70’s. spent the last three years up there and saw some nearly every day on my 30 mile commute.
Posted by DixieKraut
01/30/2008 at 11:07 PM
Antlered Rats. I coined that name twenty years ago. The damn deer destroy feed needed for cattle. I’ve seen them ruin many an orchard as well. Driven out by urban sprawl? ROFLMAO at that one! Deer thrive in urban sprawl. I see more deer in the housing development I pass going into town then I do in my own pasture. Last night there were fifteen deer down there. Ten more and they’d have out numbered the residents standing out there going gaga at them. They do keep speeds down on the road though so its safer for kids. No one wants a hood ornament on their Prius, and I sure don’t want one on my GMC.
Nobody in New Jersey wants any venison, they can ship a few pounds my way. Hell, ground bison goes for $4.99 a pound out here, you can bet deer goes for a tad more.
Wait until white tail start invading the tony neighborhoods where the ecodweebs dwell. You’re going to see a run on hunting rifles like you’ve never seen before.
re: NM. At the moment, larger game, deer, antelope, elk, and so on are on a lottery. But supposedly that’s about to go back to just the Big Game license, period. But at least the feral hog problem allows you to fill your freezer with GOOD pig meat. Gotta love it!
01/30/2008 at 09:34 AM
