Lots of ‘canned hunts’ - animals fenced in behind ‘game fence’ with nowhere to go, really. Most hunts here you go to a deer lease, which is a big land area with lots of game, stay in someones ranch home, have someone wake you up, feed you, drive you to a deer blind with corn feeders, and let you go. They come back, pick you up later, and process (butcher) anything you may have shot. Typically you leave afterwards with Bambi wrapped up in 1lb chubbs, some backstrap tenderloin steaks, and whatever else is left of the poor trapped animal that you didnt blow to smithereens with your overpowered deer rifle.
None of what most rednecks refer to ‘hunting’ is an actual hunt. Its baiting and waiting.
Im not sure what video i was watching. But I found it interesting that basically in Texas there is no 'public' shooting infrastructure. everything is private, so to shoot you need to have land or know someone with land and pay. Is this true in your experience?
one of the funniest short exchanges in True Detective S1, where Rust just casually wipes his ass on Marty's affected and insecure masculinity, while they are tracking Dewall/Reggie into the low country. it's too crass to bring up in polite conversation, but it kills me to even be reminded of it.
"You ever been huntin', Marty?"
"Uh, yeah. Ten-point buck, year before last. Fifty yards."
"I'm not talkin about sittin' in a tree house, waitin' to ambush a buck come to sniff your gash bait. I'm talkin about trackin'."
"Jesus, you're a prick."
the greater context is that Rustin's crazy survivalist/vietnam-vet father taught him bow-hunting in the Alaskan wilderness as a youth and Marty is the exact kind of weekend warrior bozo that trophy hunts in the easiest way possible, so now Rust can see the path taken by the killer and disable booby traps, while Marty is useless and needs to follow behind.
Tracking is incredibly satisfying. I'm no good at it, but wandering around looking at foot prints and putting on a serious face and saying "the tracks have soft edges so they might be old, but there was a freeze and a thaw in the last 24 hours that may have distorted them. At any rate, they pressed over these prints of our own boots from when we came to the park last week to pretend to be cool game stalkers, so that gives us a window"
That is one of my favorite shows ever! But only that season, the rest sucked IMO.
Oh but the new one with Jodi Foster is good too. I just finished watching it last week.
Catching fish with your hands isn't easy, but if you know how and you've got pre-industrial devastation fish stocks it's doable. Fishing spear or gig is easier though.
You're allowed a spear, but it has to be a spear you made yourself. Deer have had four hundred thousand years to invent spears, they're just being lazy asses growing them out of their heads instead.
What's your take on whaling with a knife while singing a 58 verse long song about how much you like killing ala the pilot whale hunters on the Faroe islands?
yeah I was being somewhat facetious but it's truly funny to me how hunters pride themselves on being able to kill an animal while using an advanced piece of technology invented by somebody else hundreds of years ago that they just... bought at a store. like come on
I don't think there is anything wrong with it. You are looking at hunting as a sport. I am looking at hunting as a means of obtaining food. I used to go hunting for rabbit and pheasant mostly, for food. It's way more humane than modern livestock for chicken, pork, cows, etc, and for deer, it keeps the population to a manageable level since most of the natural predators were unfortunately wiped out.
I think this is interesting. What is the specific thing that makes hunting inhumane? Some might say it's about the act of killing, but really it's about the act of suffering and dying that matters.
And then you have to compare that suffering and death to whatever the alternative is. The obvious answer is less suffering and death. But nobody is reducing that, or really planning on reducing that.
The nature of a wild animal is that they don't write wills and crawl into hospital beds and take morphine and kiss their grandchildren goodbye. Every time a deer dies, it's going out a few different ways or a combination of a few different ways. Those ways are all the worst things that can possibly happen to a sapient being.
Usually they'll break a leg, drag themselves around in constant pain for months, and then slowly wither away in the pure agony of starvation.
Or if there are wolves, coyotes, wild dogs etc, those animals will do heinous torture to the deer that barely any human has ever done to an animal, so badly that doing so would put you in the company of our most infamous sadists. It's slow and agonizing and outrageously disgusting. They ram their heads up the deer's ass to tear organs out as the deer watches, for hours.
The other main option for a deer is to be shot in the heart, sprint 100 yards and keel over. When hunters fuck up or take an unethical shot, they begin to approach the standard wild animal death but are very unlikely to get close.
So if you accept that it's not about the human, and it's really about the animal, nothing about the process of hunting is actually adding any suffering to what a wild animal experiences.
Your pet dog basically does get morphine and head pats and euthanasia, so none of that applies there. If deer were getting morphine and euthanasia in old age, it's pretty bad to shoot them. But if you have no intention of reducing animal suffering, I don't think the deer could, should, or even would give a shit about how "natural" a person thinks it is to be starving and devoured by wild dogs
This is one of the logical conclusions of turning hunting into a lifestyle. Eventually some people will realize that the waiting and stalking isn't really different than baiting in outcome, but it makes things quicker.
This kind of thing is actually less contradictory and is in many ways more honest than Honorable Hunter Culture (TM) even though it's still gross (im vegan). Food is actually plentiful for these people due to industrialization and imperialism so hunting is just a form of entertainment for them. It's not for subsistence and it's not part of any culture that deserves respect. They just like to shoot and kill things and go through the process of butchering an animal and justifying having a chest freezer so they can eat meat they actually prefer to eat less than the stuff they can buy at the supermarket. 90% of what they claim to like about hunting is just camping, too. It also integrates with military/veteran culture in buying a bunch of camo shit and practicing surviving in "the wild" or "off grid" for a short period, something much easier to accomplish with a single $20 bag of beans, $10 of water, and $20 of fuel.
It's all aesthetics, it's a hobby, it's a LARP for subscribers to toxic masculinity.
there are probably still a few supplemental hunters who have an heirloom gun and live in a food desert but they aren't gonna be baiting with commercial shit like this.
You have to drop hundreds on the gun and ammo first and then either pay someone to process the carcass or learn how to do it yourself. You also need to cart the thing out, usually meaning you have to buy a truck that costs tens of thousands or pay someone to do that as well.
Makes me recall a native friend of mines father telling us how him and his brothers were getting skunked hunting and as a last resort they decided to 'hunt like white boys'. Sit in their truck with rifles waiting for an animal to walk by.
It is in TN and they are pretty serious about it if you get caught. You are more likely to get your gun taken by a game warden than a cop. This country makes no sense
Looks like it's illegal in some states. Never knew this because I've seen people set up web cameras to watch the deer they feed, unless that's a different type of feed not used for hunting.
With property lines and such, anybody who actually wanted to track an animal as a part of hunting it, can't actually (or shouldn't) hunt an animal unless its on a very very large preserve.