Doc

Alien mutilations

It sounds to me like a huge majority of the replies to this thread agree with me. Blow your damned hands to pieces if that's what you need to do for kicks, but when your nonsense begins to infringe on my safety and quality of life ...... KNOCK IT OFF!!!! I have seen people who otherwise are fairly intelligent, reasonable, people setting off fireworks during a county fire alert warning. I have seen them setting off aerial fireworks in cities and tightly packed suburbs. As others have said, no one gives a rip anymore about what kinds of disturbances that are caused to their neighbors because of their love of noise. Leave the danged things illegal and only in the hands of professionals.

Lol.... Imagine how great the forest regeneration would be if the deer were made extinct. We all seem to suffer from a bit of tunnel vision at times. We only seem to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Somebody says that the forest regeneration is being hampered by deer, we seem to think the only alternative is to eradicate the deer. I hate to say it, but that is not management. That is knee-jerk over reaction to accommodate some earlier knee-jerk over reactions. Setting those deer density "perfect" levels always seems to be a bit of black magic that involves more art than science. But the one thing that we have gotten real good at is inventing some real good stories that make it sound like we really know what we are doing.

4' high welded wire fencing plus 2 strands of electric fence. 1 strand above the welded wire fence and one strand 2" to 3" above ground. Nothing has gotten into the garden in 15 years except us.

I find it interesting that these mass murderers take advantage of places where they know they are unlikely to find firearms. In fact in the case of schools, that fact is backed up by the force of law. It appears that he more we disarm, the more these wackos take advantage of that situation. And there are those that want to increase potential safe targets for these guys.

Get ready for another round of outrage against guns and calls for more gun control laws.

I haven't put any cameras out yet, but have seen one doe/fawn down in the driveway a few times. I have to get the cameras back out and see what the heck is going on around me.

That thought was running through my mind too. Could that be construed as violating rules of fair chase? ....lol. It certainly would be legal (not a motorized vehicle), and if the deer are becoming accustomed to horses and horseback riders, given the right conditions, it could almost seem like cheating.

It appears that the deer and the horseback riders coexist quite nicely. I would have thought that the horses and riders would have had the deer a little more screwed up as far as walking around the same area in the daylight.

I was wondering what was going to get my garden this year. Looking at the water drowning out the veggies yesterday, I don't have to wonder anymore. "......How high's the water Mama..... three feet high and rising ....." Yup, there's parts of my driveway where Johnny Cash had it exactly right. And the water depth in the garden is trying to catch up.

I am sitting here 1000' off the road with no driveway in sight for an escape. It is not all that unusual for us to periodically get flooded, but this is the highest I have seen the water .... ever. We built up the hill a bit, so we are high and dry, so to speak. But I worry about those people down along side the road. I'll be making some calls later on to see how people are making out. I am suspecting the worst from what I can see up here.

And so the hunters did as they have been instructed to do by what passes for the game management authority and competency center. You have a permit, your state's game biologists and experts expect you to fill it. They're supposed to be the experts, and if things go wrong, they are the one's who should be shouldering the blame, not the hunters, (yucking it up notwithstanding...lol). The system worked as it was designed. The experts issued the calculated number of permits and the hunters did their part by filling them as they are expected to. By the way, anybody got any clue as to why that system works so thoroughly in PA, but here in NYS, our DEC claims that they can't make the permit system work so they have to bastardize game regulations with more hair-brained schemes? That's a bit off topic, but the point just occurred to me,so I just thought I would ask.

Yes, hunters do the dirty work. But let's understand who it is that is charged with the responsibility of game management and who it is who is drawing a paycheck for that function. We hire biologists and maintain a DEC (DNR) as the supposed competency center of wildlife management. So when the agency issues more permits, those who believe they really know what they are doing, do their best to fill whatever permits that they have been given. So whatever management shortfalls that occur come on the shoulders of those claiming authority and expertise. So management mistakes are not the fault of the hunters. They are simply victims of putting their faith in those that supposedly know and claim to know, what they are doing.

Many food biases are not based on actual fact, but rather perceptions, and other lifetime experiences that created those biases. However, don't think for a moment that those biases are not just as engrained and powerful as any logic based feelings toward food. For example, you can tell me how delicious rattlesnake meat is, but don't ever expect me to even go near a plate of it ..... lol. No logic or fact involved there, but my aversion to eating a snake is just as powerful as it would be if it were a plate of fly covered garbage. I can't see any situation other than starvation where I would eat dog meat either, but there are cultures that have no problem with it. That doesn't mean that I feel deprived because I don't dine on Fido. I don't see woodchuck becoming part of my diet anytime soon.....lol

I wonder how many non-hunters really don't distinguish between poachers and legal hunters when they read these stories. I can imagine the comments as people read that story. Do non-hunters even know what is legal hunting and what is not? Do they start assuming that most hunters just cut the heads off and leave the rest? Do they assume that bait is a normal hunting act in NYS? I really cringe everytime I hear those kinds of stories. I'm not sure how much of that crap is rubbing off on me strictly by erroneous association.

Lol ..... I take a geezer out hunting everytime I go out ....... Me.

This would be a pretty quiet forum if the prerequisite for making a comment was that you had to first become an activist.

That is hunting with all the tactics, strategy, and challenge and all the other aspects of hunting except the killing and eating. And I'm sure it results in all the same emotions and satisfactions of hunting, when things go right, and the same levels of disappointments when things go bad. No food motives at all. It is a good indicator that there is a lot more to this hunting stuff than simply food gathering.

This is another example of poor shot selection. The kid was not trying to hit the deer behind, but had the father been on the ball, he would have seen a very bad shot being set up and should have told the kid to wait. He dropped the ball there, and it could have turned out very ugly. I am going to give them the benefit of a doubt and assume that wherever they were hunting, he had the appropriate tags to cover the two deer. But I would have liked to have seen the father say something about taking that kind of shot so the kid could have learned something, and anybody watching that video does not take this double kill on as a goal. We can only hope that that point was made off-camera. I think the father gets the "unethical" ding on this one.

If I am to be honest, I have to say that if you have a plate of venison on the table along side of a plate of greasy, drippy beef homburgs, I'll grab the burger everytime. So I don't hunt for the meat. Sure, I eat what I kill, but that is not the reason that I go out and freeze myself for hours on stand. When I am interested in meat, I head out to my favorite restaurant or supermarket, not to a tree stand.

Lol ..... Perfect response.

There is no reason for a woodchuck to taste bad. They are vegetarians with the same diet as rabbits ..... BUT ..... I just can't do it. I have even gone as far as dressing one out in preparation for eating, and still couldn't do it. It's just another one of those unexplainable biases. Of course those remembered images of some of those nasty disgusting, runny, maggoty, stinking, oozing, woodchucks that our dog used to drag home and roll in may have something to do with that particular bias. Can't get that picture out of my mind.

You comments on the size of the deer herd is simply hear-say that doesn't rely on the mysterious world of statistics. They don't care about your observations. You and I are simply untrained observers who do not have the ability to know what we are seeing. They are the experts, and they have no interest in hearing from those who actually walk out into the woods. If it can't be reduced to ones and zeros, it is worthless noise. Seriously, you would have thought after all these decades, someone in the DEC would have figured out how to gather and use the inputs of those thousands of willing observers. If for no other reason than to verify their statistical analysis that feeds their management policies. Maybe just a little something that might tell them when they are encountering statistical drift and results are not what they are supposed to be. But then that would be admitting a slight dent in their façade of perfection.

An editorial in New York Outdoor News put it best when they said that the DEC suffers from a "crisis of credibility", which is what I think you are alluding to. There are certain statements being made all the time that really sound like they are tap-dancing all around the actual truth. I think that most hunters are starting to catch on to that, and are beginning to be quite vocal about it. As I said in a prior reply, when the hunters don't believe or trust what the DEC is saying, they lose all cooperation. As it turns out, the hunters are an essential and vital tool in game management, and without their cooperation, whatever the DEC wants to do simply turns to garbage. I think the DEC has a lot of fence-mending to do with the hunters. And I am not talking about taking polls and doing whatever hunters want. I am talking about educational, no B.S., explanations of their systems, including how they verify their statistical analysis. They need to re-establish trust and credibility and perhaps somewhere along the line pick up some info themselves as to where their systems might be lacking and need improvement. Stop the stone-walling and the cutsey little remarks like, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Never mind the "Relax and trust me" attitude and start explaining why their systems aren't the secret black magic and collection of faulty guestimates, concocted factors and compounding applications of bad info after bad info, year after year, that they appear to be.

I have no problem with a one-buck rule, but if the goal really is to whack the population of deer down, I don't know why they are not promoting a few days of gun season that are doe-only. Perhaps opening weekend would decimate the herd to the DEC's liking. Doe-only is the most effective way to trim the herd, but put it in a season where it will actually do some good. That is assuming that they are serious about cutting the herd. Where they decided to put the doe-only season does put their real motives in serious question.