Doc

From age 6 or so, I had some pretty heavy chores to do around the farm. Feeding and watering the sheep. Water had to be wheeled up to the barn from the house in a milk can in a wheelbarrow. Haying (I was the little guy up in the mow tramping in the loose hay when it was dropped off the overhead hay forks. There were all kinds of household jobs to be done too. For that I got a $1.00 a week allowance. Don't laugh, that financed my trapline which in turn bought clothes. The first off-property job was at age 12, and it was filling and tying bags of wheat on the combine, and picking berries. 1st picking was $.08 per quart. Last picking was $0.10 a quart. I don't remember what I was making bagging grain, but I did ok. Oh, and the farm chores at home were still being done for $1.00 a week.

It sounds like she ha been doing that for a while. Great sound!

Those volumes, and volumes, and volumes of gun laws really worked well there .....eh? I wonder if they filled out all that paper work that we have to fill out when we get a gun....... "Only the outlaws will have guns"

Deer drives are legal.

And perhaps the DEC is privately saying, "yeah ..... sure ..... and your point is?" I believe the draw-down of deer numbers is intentional. I sense panic in the DEC activities regarding their ability to manage populations. I think they are engaged in a lot of experiments and "what-ifs" to try to control deer numbers with fewer hunters/ lesser enthusiasm. Couple the hunting loss of popularity with the ever increasing demands of industries that are basically anti-deer in nature, and you have a recipe for panic among those charged with deer management. This latest fiasco with the antlerless archery deer season was simply the DEC taking the temperature of hunters to see at what point they get a reaction, hoping that they could find out where the breaking point of such activities occurs for future similar maneuvers when needed elsewhere. Jamming firearms into bow seasons is yet another creeping maneuver to see just how far they can go with that. There are all these little signs that the DEC wants to increase productivity and efficiency of hunters to try to figure out what to do when hunting popularity continues to slide toward inadequacy. Hey, it's just a theory, but does explain a lot of irrational decisions lately by the DEC.

I am impressed that anyone's mind even works that way to come up with such a concept. It is totally unconventional, but fits the definition of art bout as perfectly as you can. But it's true. After all that work and creativity who is going to destroy it all to burn the wood?

This stuff all sounds like a great new topic.

Yeah, perhaps it is more the title of the thread that I disagree with than the content of the artile. Actually hound hunting is quite far along the time scale of hunting.

All this fighting is great until the guy that goes down never gets back up again.

Maybe I wouldn't have dreaded sighting in the old Ithaca 12 Ga. so much if I had been using a Lead sled. Now, I don't have any guns that punish me that much, so I use the open set-up with sand bags for checking out the rifles. As far as repeatability, I have 100% confidence in the bags.

If you had tried to get out of the car, you might have found out exactly what the cranky old bird really had on his mind.

What we have to do is to cheapen up heat seeking technology and self-propelled arrows. Now that would be real hunting ..... eh? Let's take his "anything goes" philosophy to it's logical conclusion.....lol. That would almost be as much fun as that computer hunting they tried to get legalized a few years back. That kind of fits real well into the "anything goes" hunting philosophy.

Yeah, there isn't a lot of compounding going on if the interest is annually pulled and spent.

Probably not too many people here remember putting up hay loose in the mow. I was that 5 year old kid that was up in the mow tramping in the hay. Yeah ...... The kid with hay fever coated with chaff stomping around in the air so full of dust that you could hardly see through it. Oh yeah, I worked for one of he neighbors bagging oats on the combine, choking and sneezing. We were a hard-core farming community with big houses and lots of family members in each house. Yeah everyone up and down the valley had those huge houses with several adult family members and even family units under the same roof. We had my grandparents living with us until they all passed. No, we wouldn't think of packing them off to a nursing home as long as we had a roof to offer. In some ways, that style of life was a lot better than today. We took care of our own.

There was a time in America when most rural folks lived that way. Kids were created as a tool for family subsistence. Why do you think all these big old farmhouses looked like they could house several families. That wasn't because they enjoyed cutting firewood to heat unused space. We didn't always live a lifestyle where kids grew up and then headed for opposite ends of the country/world. There was a time when several generations of people lived in the same house.

Thanks for the info. Years ago, we used to boil sap using one of those big galvanized wash tubs, but stopped doing that when somebody mentioned that it might not be a real good idea. Actually nobody got sick, but that doesn't mean that it was a good idea. Also, I did come across an old broken down sugar shack that had a huge galvanized tank over the fire pit. The outfit was a fair sized operation. I knew the guy that ran the outfit, back in the 40's. However, we used to do a lot of things that have since been proven to be not so healthy .... lol.

I knew this would be an interesting topic. When I bought my lifetime hunting/fishing license a few years ago, I hit the jackpot. I got it for the grand total of $50. The state lost money on me the very first year that I bought it, and I know they haven't made a cent off of me. But of course that was a special circumstance that doesn't represent a whole lot of people. But for me, it was an offer I couldn't refuse.

Question ..... Is it true that if you boil using a galvanized wash tub, there are some kind of toxins or something released into the syrup from the galvanized coating?

My gosh she is going to bite her chin!

If I had that attitude that I need every advantage that I can get, I would be a regular around the canned hunt game farms. I certainly would not be messing around with some bow or some air rifle either. Could be that attitude wouldn't make me real popular with the game wardens either. Yes, we all hunt for our own reasons, but those that adopt the "anything goes" attitudes really aren't the hunters that I have much in common with.

There was a time when I believe I could have. But then I wonder what it would be like to reach my age and still have to hunt for my food and go out and lug firewood. I suspect it is on thing to go hunting because you just want to vs. doing it because you have to. Most people don't burn wood because they have to. If you have lived long enough to reach old age, things like ready access to doctors and hospitals and pharmacies take on a bit more reality than they did years ago. That spirit of invincibility now focuses on putting on just a few more years .... ha-ha-ha.... No I have gotten very used to going hunting when I want to . The idea of turning up the thermostat to get through these winters is far more appealing than cutting, stacking and feeding firewood into a stove or fireplace. And if we have a bad hunting year it is always comforting to know I can jump in my car and go into town for some grocery shopping.

Disgust with poaching by a huge percentage of hunters goes without saying. That message never has a shortage of supporters. Believe me, there are plenty of anti-hunters who are quick to pile onto that message and attempt to link poaching with hunting. We even have hunters who for some unknown reason would like to have all hunters tarred with the same brush as poachers. To me disgust for poaching does not need us running for cover or welcoming any connection between poaching and hunting. I am tired with being stirred in with lawbreakers and always being on the defensive as if I had done something wrong. My attitude is that there is nothing gained by restating what I consider to be obvious. Poaching is an offense against hunters .... period. And if someone wants to look at this story and point out what happens when wildlife is mis-managed, I welcome that half of the story that never gets told enough.

So the annual interest on the $765 lifetime license fee (for those 12 - 69 years old as an example) makes up for the revenue missing from those hunters that otherwise would have bought all the individual licenses each year? I'm just asking. I haven't done the math, so I don't know. I'm not trying to be that precise anyway, I was just curious if it all adds up. I've never seen the management plan actually laid out anywhere.

Quote: "What Would You Buy If You Left NY?" A quick ticket back.

I think that most gun control advocates see the problem purely as being the gun, and fail to make the connection to the person pulling the trigger. The guy who said that they wanted to learn how to shoot, but had no interest in owning a "gun", clearly shows a dissociation between the gun and the shooter. To that one, the gun all by itself is evil, even when it is sitting locked up with no one around it. And then there was the other one who does not condone firearms for self defense. Those people apparently don't realize that when seconds count in life threatening situations, the police are just minutes away. In other words they believe that government law enforcement agencies are actually going to save your live if you just wait for them to arrive. The fact is that such confrontations are so frightening to consider that they simply have blocked reality right out of their minds. I don't know how you combat such irrational thinking as that. I guess you simply can't.