‘Tis the Season: The Jinx is Gone!
The Colorado high mountain air was cold and thin. Our legs, tired from marching through 20 inches of snow all day, get relief as we travel along a south-facing, therefore, snow-free ridge. Below us, double thick aspen groves reveal very little. But friend and hunting partner, Cliff, whispers my name. His eagle-eyes, assisted with bino’s, pierce the dark aspen jungle. I quickly raise my own binoculars, matching his direction. And there she is — a cow elk.
Hey, I heard you chuckle. Yeah, you. “A cow elk. Like shooting fish in a barrel.” Ok, I didn’t hear you say the second part, but I know you’re thinking it. Sure, a cow. Not some big, cagey, trophy bull with years of experience dodging hunters and crafty hunting guides. Just a little old cow with cute deer eyes, never hurt a soul, cropping grass and nursing her young offspring. Innocence on four hooves. Right?
The gals are good. Very good. Female elk are smart, tough, and live a lot longer than their male counterparts. Their biggest advantage: They run in a harem. With multiple sets of eyes, acute smellers, radar hearing, and spider-senses tingling like Antifa crashing a Taser manufacturers convention, you may have a better chance seeing Bigfoot dancing an Irish jig.
Working Like Elmer Fudd
The other night my beloved called me upstairs to the main floor of our house to show me something outside. I looked out the window to see a five-point buck deer, not ten feet away, staring back at us with curiosity. I said to my wife “If only I had a rifle, the creature would have nothing to fear from me.” I couldn’t hit a bullet with the broadside of a barn.
Not that I haven’t tried. After all, if you live in Montana hunting is practically mandatory, especially for men and boys. Hunters generally think of non-hunters as less masculine than they ought to be, and nobody wants to be labeled a sissy. So, I started hunting when I was fourteen, seeing it as more of a duty than a profitable form of recreation.
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Conservation Is Conservatism. Animal Rights Radicalism Is Not.
Michael Scully has apparently decided to take leave of his senses and join PETA.
Then, to take a final illustration, we have the 5 or 6 percent of our population who still think it is normal, and indeed praiseworthy, to stalk, sneak up on, and dispatch animals for no better reason than the malicious thrill of it, memorializing these moments with their “trophies.” It’s a passion captured by an American bow hunter who wrote of deer, “I have so loved them that I longed to kill them,” and these days it extends well beyond deer to “game” of every kind. The creepiest of the lot is a type whose low character can escape no outsider to the trophy-hunting mania: thousands of people who compete throughout the world to kill the most and biggest animals. Members of outfits such as America’s own Safari Club International, these hunters are mostly men of means who still assume it is their prerogative to kill even elephants, rhinos, lions, grizzlies, and every other kind of creature in every place on earth.
The Issues That Matter to Gun Owners, Part Two
Part one of this series, if you haven’t read it already, is over here. Picking up from there, here are four more issues that matter to American gun owners.
Liability Laws: This is the pet issue for one of the currently unindicted Democratic candidates for President. She is pushing the idea that gun companies are somehow completely free from the product liability laws which cover improperly made or dangerous products, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Gun companies can be sued for guns that are dangerous or are poorly built, which is right in line with every other manufacturer in America. What the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act covers is frivolous, inane lawsuits against firearms companies which are designed to put them out of business because of the fact they are gun companies. A prime example of this was the nuisance lawsuit brought by the parents of one of the victims of the Aurora theater shooting against the online ammo retailer Lucky Gunner, because they sold the ammunition used in that horrific event (Disclaimer: I know the people at Lucky Gunner pretty well, and consider them to be terrific people). The suit was thrown out of court and the family was ordered to pay the court costs of Lucky Gunner because it was patently obvious that Lucky Gunner had no idea that the products they sold would be used in such a manner.
Six Points in Defense of Hunting
My fourteen-year-old daughter got her buck last week, and a friend shot hers this evening. My husband posts photos on Facebook, and I admit I worry about backlash, since the practice of hunting is getting unpopular with the public. However, hunting is the culture where we live, and there’s even an official certificate for the first deer taken. Once I saw that there’s a group for sharing such photos, I felt better.
Although I’m no hunter myself, I’ve thought it through and do not believe hunting deserves moral outrage. I’m talking specifically about hunting deer and other animals for food, as well as killing pests. (Although the latest stir was over exotic animal hunting, some animal lovers hate all forms of it.) Here are six points in defense of hunting:
1.) Hunting is do-it-yourself meat. If you eat meat, you cannot be opposed to fair chase, quick-kill hunting. You may dislike the idea that the hunter perceives the challenge as a sport, but that doesn’t make the resulting meat less moral than packaged meat from farms. This is fresh, local, minimally processed food. Now, if you don’t eat meat, your position is consistent — I recognize that — but I disagree with the premise that eating meat is wrong.
The Common Roots of America’s Gun Culture
I grew up in Calgary and spent many a day on my uncle’s farms scattered all over southern Alberta. Some of them were hunters, and some, like my Dad, were not. One thing all my farming relatives had in common, though, was a well-stocked larder. When you live on farm that’s miles away from the nearest town, you can’t just pop down to the local IGA (Walmart hadn’t been invented yet) and get what you’re missing: If you don’t have it in the house, you went without it until the next trip into town.
This sense of self-reliance and preparedness is what drove gun culture in America for hundreds of years. There is an element of sport to hunting, and trophy hunting will always offer the allure of competing against nature to bring home their prizes. But, by and large, people who hunted for food was what the public thought of when they thought of the typical American gun owner.
This is changing as America moves off the farm and into the city, but the same sense of self-reliance remains, and guns are a part of it. Writer and television host Michael Bane was one of the first to use the phrase “Gun Culture 2.0,” and it’s an apt description of what is driving today’s gun owners. If Gun Culture 1.0 was about hunting and traditional target sports like bullseye, trap shooting and Camp Perry, Gun Culture 2.0 is about concealed carry, practical pistol, and 3 Gun. The same self-reliant, independent streak, however, runs through both cultures, and it’s why today’s gun owners are buying guns in record numbers.
Robert Mugabe Eats A Zoo
No, that is not hyperbole, but from an actual headline at The Independent (UK) dated March 1, 2015. From the article:
Robert Mugabe isn’t known for his subdued taste, and his million-dollar birthday was just as extravagant as people have come to expect.
The Social-Media Mob Bags Another Trophy
I don’t hunt and — at the risk of losing my conservative bona fides — I also don’t own a firearm and have never pulled the trigger on anything more powerful than a pellet gun. Furthermore, I agree that a distinction can be drawn between hunting animal populations that pose a threat when their numbers get too great and hunting rare or exotic animals purely for sport.
But even with no vested interest in the topic, I found myself rushing to the defense of Cecil the Lion’s “murderer,” Dr. Walter Palmer, a Minnesota dentist. Not because I agree with what he did, but because I disagree with what happened to him as a result of the story going viral.
For those of you who missed it, the short version is that Palmer enjoys big-game trophy hunting and paid more than $50,000 for what he believed to be a legal and properly-permitted expedition in Africa. As it turned out, there is significant doubt about whether Palmer and his guides acted legally, having allegedly lured Cecil off of a protected preserve in order to hunt him.
Man vs. Bear — The Debate.
Here in Oregon, a rancher recently shot and killed a black bear that was hunting his cattle. The bear made the news, as it hit a record-breaking (for this area) size of 490 pounds. That is a lot of black bear, which is the smallest and most widespread of the species in North America. Of course, the real fun of this article is the comments section. As could be expected, the arguments boil down to city environmentalists versus country conservationists.
For us city folk, the arguments come down to three points:
