Category Archive 'Hunting'
16 Apr 2015

British Celeb Tweets Attack on Utah Huntress, Death Threats Follow

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British celebrity (I’d never heard of him) Ricky Gervais recently unleashed an international avalanche of personal abuse and even death threats at Utah huntress Rebecca Francis by a post on Twitter attacking her for taking a photograph of herself lying next to a trophy giraffe.

Hunting Life alerted Ms. Francis, who explained:

When I was in Africa five years ago I was of the mindset that I would never shoot a giraffe. I was approached toward the end of my hunt with a unique circumstance. They showed me this beautiful old bull giraffe that was wandering all alone. He had been kicked out of the herd by a younger and stronger bull. He was past his breeding years and very close to death. They asked me if I would preserve this giraffe by providing all the locals with food and other means of survival. He was inevitably going to die soon and he could either be wasted or utilized by the local people. I chose to honor his life by providing others with his uses and I do not regret it for one second. Once he was down there were people waiting to take his meat. They also took his tail to make jewelry, his bones to make other things, and did not waste a single part of him.”

In our contemporary world, any hunting trophy photograph, particularly a photo featuring a female hunter, can be relied upon to provoke passionate outrage on the part of the herd of urban douches who’ve been conditioned by entertainment industry Nature pimps to wallow in emotional self-indulgence over wild animals and who have grown to believe that meat is normally grown hydroponically on supermarket shelves.

NY Daily News story

01 Feb 2015

Engagement Photo

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EngagementPhoto
photo: Josh Rainey

Josh Rainey:

A couple of weeks ago I had the incredible opportunity to photograph Stevie and Brady’s engagement photos on a family property along the Siletz River. They had a great idea for a photo so we set it up and got the shot we were all thinking. Long story short, the image was shared on the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation page and gained a ton of exposure! 100,000 likes and 9,000 shares in the first 24 hours!

28 Jan 2015

Shaggy Buffalo Story

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buffalow

From Gerard van der Leun:

He’d hunted big game for years all over the United States. Hunting was a way of life to him. But, in all those years, he’d never shot a buffalo. He’d put his name in for the lottery that gave out yearly licenses to shoot buffalo, but year after year the winning number had eluded him. As he failed, again and again, his need to add a buffalo, an American bison, to his life bag grew to obsessive proportions. Finally, he could stand it no longer. He determined that he would buy a couple of young buffalo, raise them, and then shoot them. It seemed like a plan.

When the buffalo purchase was completed the question arose about where these buffalo were to be raised. He wasn’t a rich man and the cost to two baby buffalo maxed out his credit cards. The only viable option was to raise them on his front lawn in Moab, Utah. Accordingly, the buffalo were delivered and put out to pasture, or “out to lawn” as the case may be.

Besides grass the lawn also contained, courtesy of his kids, a couple of soccer balls. Shortly after the buffalo became his lawn ornaments, he was out walking among them when one of them discovered a soccer ball and butted it over to him with its nose. Without thinking he kicked it back towards the other buffalo, who passed it to the first buffalo who butted it back to him. An hour or so of passing and kicking the soccer ball between man and buffalo ensued.

When he went out on his lawn the next morning, they were waiting for him. One seemed to be playing midlawn while the other hung back by the water trough which had become some sort of goal. The forward buffalo butted the ball towards him. Without thinking he returned the kick over the head of the forward. No good. With a speed belying its bulk, the defensive buffalo moved quickly and butted it through his legs to the porch. When it bounced off the barbecue, they seemed to do a brief victory prance. The game was afoot.

Read the whole thing.

13 Dec 2014

Don’t Mess With Texas

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AlyssaCaldwellMoutainLion
12-Year-Old Alyssa Caldwell and the lion

Mississippi Rebel reports that a New Mexico mountain lion tried stalking a young girl from Odessa, Texas. Unfortunately for the lion, the little girl was deer hunting and carrying a .30-06.

A twelve-year-old girl killed a mountain lion that was threatening to attack her on a hunting trip in New Mexico.

Alyssa Caldwell was hunting elk with her father in October when he left her alone to gather some gear. Almost immediately, she noticed that something was wrong.

“I already had a feeling that something was watching me or something, but I didn’t see the cat until it was close,” she said.

Just feet away, a mountain lion crouched ready to attack. Although she had never shot anything bigger than a white tailed deer, Caldwell knew exactly what to do. She raised her brand new .30-06 and fired, killing the animal instantly.

“I just raised up my gun and shot it point blank long ways through the body because it was facing me when I shot,” she told CBS News. “The cat instantly flopped over right there, of course I kept my gun on it just in case it got up or something like that.”

Her father came running back, thinking she had downed an elk. When he realized what had happened, he fell to his knees and “got emotional,” Alyssa says.

“I definitely could have died,” she added. “It was probably like seconds away from pouncing on me.”

11 Oct 2014

Bruegel’s Hunting Dogs

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BruegelDoggies
Deatai from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Karen forwarded this, commenting: “Notice all the curly tails. But are the ears greyhound-like or pendant, like tazis?”

Her reference to curly tails, pertains to the policy of organized hunting packs to cull hounds with curly tails because, when they are bred from, the curvature of the tail tends to migrate forward, producing spinal problems in their offspring.

Tazis are the more northerly form of the Persian, or Oriental, Greyhound, known elsewhere as the saluki.

Bruegel’s hunters’ dogs, I think, consist of three types: I see three long-bodied, short-haired sighthounds (visible on the upper right): greyhounds. The only one whose head is visible has short, pointed ears. The upper left dog, with coarse coat, is a lurcher type (a cross between a sighthound and another kind of breed, either a pastoral guard dog or a terrier). So, too, might be the taller, heavier-built dark brown dog whose loins are concealed behind a tree. The shorter, flop-eared dogs would be scent hounds.

I like the way Image Diver produced this detail image.

15 Jun 2014

Tall Tale Vintage Postcard

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JetmoreKansas
The original date seems to be 1909. Naturally, it appeared labelled attributing the scene to lots of different locations.

27 May 2014

Dinner Time for the Vautrait de Bannasat Hounds

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René Kleboth, Master of the Vautrait de Banassat, maintains the largest pack of foxhounds (over 400 hounds) in France at his kennels at Chirat-l’Eglise in Allier. But these Poitevin foxhounds hunt wild boar in the forest of Tronçais, not foxes.

21 May 2014

Three Jolly Hunters

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DuckHunting

These three waggish hunters are posing with three enormous punt guns, the sort of arm that was used to hunt waterfowl en masse during the reign of Queen Victoria, in front of a duck-billed dinosaur.

From Steve Bodio via Karen L. Myers.

20 Apr 2014

Sighthound Nailed Easter Bunny

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SforzaHoursBunny

Sforza Hours’, Milan 1490.

BL, Add 34294, fol. 45r

Via Ratak Monodosico.

29 Dec 2013

Hunting Red Deer in Normandy

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French photographer Eric Dubos recently went out with L’équipage Kermaingant et le Pays de Normandie* hunting in the Forêt d Ecouves and got some great pictures.

*French hunts are all called either “Rallyes” or “Équipages.” They wear more old-fashioned and elaborate uniforms than British or American hunts. Ladies sometimes wear tricorn hats, and may be seen flaunting dashing Inverness-style coats. In most cases, a lot of the hunters will carry and play round hunting horns. Where British and American hunts use only a very limited repertoire of horn calls and signals, each French hunt has its own elaborate polyphonic fanfare, and in addition to many complex musical tunes for all sorts of occasions, there are even entire masses composed for French hunting horn. French hunts, instead of the fox or the hare, often pursue much larger quarry, like the red deer (the European equivalent of our elk) or the wild boar.

All this certainly looks like great fun.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

06 Aug 2013

Quotation of the Day

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Thathanka Iyotake, “Sitting Bull” (1831-1890)

I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie mice.

— Sitting Bull to James M. Walsh, inspector in the Northwest Territory of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at a conference on March 23, 1879.

08 Jan 2013

Hunting Lessons From Obsidian Wings

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William G. Zincavage (my father) fulfilling his top-of-the-food-chain responsibilities in 1947.

Last month, NYM linked an article on Slate reporting that hunting was catching on among left-wing, bicycle-riding hipsters as a sort of an extension of back-to-the-land locavore fashion. The hippie berry-pickers and mushroom-gatherers have been slowly evolving into hunters.

Today, we find, on the eminently leftist blog Obsidian Wings, an article by an anti-gun suburbanista from New Jersey styling herself “Doctor Science,” who has suddenly discovered that hunters have an important role to play in wildlife population management.

The way I see it, humans are the top predator around here[6], and we have an ecological obligation to act like it. Which means killing deer[7], especially the young ones and the does. In other words, for food. The reason the venison we had last week was so exceptionally scrumptious was because it came from a 2-year-old antlerless animal, just the kind you’d select if they were farm-raised.

What I’m seeing in NJ is that hunters and birders (and other conservationists) are working together more than used to be the case. …

I don’t know if there will be a shift in hunting culture, if hunters in places like NJ come to see themselves as ecological agents who don’t just “harvest” or exploit wild animals, they use their skills to perform crucial tasks of population control and management.

“Doctor Science” (I keep struggling to suppress a derisive snort every time I read her self-application of that undoubtedly grossly exaggerated appelative) attributes her enlightenment on the unfashionable subject of hunting to her being a bird watcher.

We spend time outside, cultivating patience, observational skills, and learning to keep our feet warm. Birding definitely taps into part of the ancient hunting impulse, to chase things down and find them out. I can definitely understand hunting on a gut level and see the appeal, even though I’d be a pretty terrible hunter.

I think she’s probably right about the last, since she is obviously pretty lousy at finding things out.

If she was much of a hunter of information, about birding, for instance, she’d know that wildlife in North America generally was saved from extinction, parks and gamelands created, habitat preserved, commercial hunting suppressed, and bird and animal species successfully managed (and sometimes dramatically restored) by hunters.

She would know that John James Audubon invariably reduced to possession with a gun the Birds of America he recorded in his paintings.

She would know that the Conservation Movement of the late 19th century that preserved from extinction, and brought back only too successfully, those white-tailed deer she finds delicious was created entirely by prominent sportsmen, by men like Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Charles Sheldon, William T. Hornaday, John C. Phillips, Aldo Leopold, and others. All of those gentlemen wrote books which the lady could hunt up and read. There is also a general survey of the history of the conservation movement in this country, published in 1975, and titled An American Crusade for Wildlife.

“Doctor Science” is sufficiently self-enamored to suggest that hunters ought to become more like left-wing suburban bird watchers, give up their NRA memberships, quit liking and collecting guns, and use firearms guiltily, reluctantly, and only when thinking of them as food harvesting implements. Aesthetic, historical, technological, and associative sentimental appreciation of firearms would be wrong. Just as hunting for sport, for the personal pleasure of participatory experience of the active role in the natural contest of predator and prey, for the aesthetic awareness of the ritual of the chase, and for the sense of self-identification with a rich, immemorial tradition would be wrong. It is only right, she tells us, to hunt in order to acquire “healthy, clean meat to feed my family.”

It is typical of self-congratulatory liberal narcissism to think that one’s own provincial and Philistine outlook and motivations represent the supreme moral ideal that the rest of mankind needs to be taught to emulate.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

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