Fun Day

This one’s for Reader Old Texan and all you other pigeon-hunters:

Jonny bags 130 in a day

Of course, it’s always a pleasure when watching a master go about his craft, and Jonny’s teacher Paul Payne is just that — he’s been doing it for forty-seven years.  And of course, Jonny is an excellent student:  despite being a pretty decent shot, he’s always open to learning something new.

It’s an hour out of your day — the shooting ends at about 38 minutes — but if you carry on watching to see the gear they use… whoa.

Whatever, you’ll feel as relaxed as I was at the end of it.  Lovely stuff.

 

Heads On Walls

The Greatest Living Englishman has an opinion on big-game trophy hunting:

People who hunt big game are evil…

That’s why Boris Johnson (remember him) received universal support in 2019 for pledging to end the practice of big-game hunters bringing back the severed heads of animals they’d shot in Africa.

I was so supportive, in fact, that I went outside and banged my frying pans together, like we used to do for the nurses.

Because I just cannot understand why anyone could go to Botswana to shoot a lion or a giraffe.

It simply doesn’t compute in my head.

Fear not, however, because:

…but here’s why they are necessary

Because as the House of Lords debated the ban on severed heads this week, six African governments wrote to The Times newspaper begging them to let the hunting continue.

And they have a point.

They argue the big, wild animals in Africa often attack villagers and trample crops.

They are seen as a nuisance and are often shot by farmers.

But if a rich white hunter arrives on the scene and is prepared to pay upwards of £20,000 to shoot an animal, it’s suddenly worth the farmer’s while to make sure he has something to shoot at.

So instead of killing the wildlife, he starts to protect it.

Because he’s going to get a LOT more money from Hank the Texan dentist than he is from half an acre of maize.

The fact is that the rich white hunters who do this kind of thing are actually paying for the animals to be protected and looked after beforehand by the locals.

They’re even reintroducing rhinos to areas they haven’t been seen in for decades.  I know this. I’ve been to a park and witnessed it happening.  And I’ve met the locals who patrol the area at night, hunting the poachers.

If hunting was banned, all that would stop.

So it’s a weird conclusion but if a halfwit with way more money than sense and no moral fibre at all wants to fly to Africa to shoot an elephant, the kindest thing we can do as a nation of animal lovers is . . . let him.

Here’s my take on all of this.  Firstly, as Clarkson notes, without hunting the game will just disappear.  Farmers will either shoot, shovel and shut up or else they’ll set out poisoned bait.  To a farmer, a predator isn’t just a dangerous pest:  it’s something that takes away his property — and as I’ve said before, a leopard will kill an entire flock of sheep, just because it can, before taking one away to eat.  Lions are not any better.  A large herd of springbok will eat all the farmer’s grazing for his sheep or cattle, and the farmer will end up with starving herds.  Don’t get me started on elephants, which are more destructive than governments.

So spare me the maudlin “O the pore wee beasties”  PETA nonsense.

All that said, however, I should also point out that I’ve never been a trophy hunter.  I’ve hunted either as part of a (very unofficial) game management system — helping a farmer protect his herds from lion and springbok, for example — or on very infrequent occasions for the sheer joy of the stalk, in terrain and climate so inhospitable it would make your nuts retract into your body.  On the latter occasions, I’ve been close to death so many times that my ultimate survival was a matter of pure luck.  That’s why I did it — and that’s why I don’t hunt anymore.

All that said, however, I understand the point of trophy collecting. When you have hunted something and taken its life, it is the ultimate form of possession, and there is a profound intimacy between hunter and prey — an intimacy that demands that one keeps a part of that animal, not as proof, but as a form of gratitude.  Even on those stupid “wilderness survival” TV shows, you’ll see someone who has just killed an animal for food say, “Thank you giving me your life so I can survive.”  It’s not hokum:  it’s about as primal a ritual as one can find, and it’s embedded deep within our hunter-gather gene code.

People like Jeremy Clarkson, who’ve never experienced that emotion, will say that they don’t understand that need to keep a bond with one’s conquest.  The key lies within the phrase “who’ve never experienced that emotion”.  You can’t explain it to them, and they’ll never understand it because, of course, food comes from the supermarket and not from the barrel of your gun.  (You’d think that Clarkson would understand this, seeing as he keeps cattle and — at one time — sheep.  But there ya go.  He may be the Greatest Living Englishman, but he’s not perfect.)

Of course, trophy hunting isn’t about getting food.  But the emotion it brings out is no different — “moral fibre” has nothing to do with it — and if we weren’t so coddled and anesthetized by our oh-so civilized society, we’d all know that.

That aside, we’ll just have to justify big game hunting as “game management” to assuage the hurt feewings of the Weepy Animal Lovers Set.  Like Jeremy Clarkson.

Other People’s Lives

During our semi-regular phone call yesterday, the fiend Mr. Free Market breezily informed me that this coming weekend he will be blasting birds out of the sky at this address:

Even worse, the weather forecast is for “sunny with mild temperatures”, so I can’t even wish that he’ll freeze his nuts off.

ENVIOUS.

Too Much Good Press

Via Insty, I saw this little snippet:

WHO asks people not to attack monkeys over monkeypox

…which makes sense, of course.  Killing monkeys because the thing’s named “monkeypox” makes as much sense as burning the town of Lyme to the ground because of tick bites.

However, that doesn’t mean that killing monkeys is a Bad Thing.

You see, monkeys have always got good Press because they look human, with their sweet little faces and tiny fingers and toes;  and they look so cute as they swing through the trees, chattering and gibbering away.

In fact, monkeys are as evil — or more so — than humans.  They attack human babies, they attack pets, and they’ll attack adult humans, all without reason.  They’ll kill each other — even their troop’s own babies, which is why the babies are always clinging to their mothers, by the way — and woe betide any monkey from one troop who wanders into the “territory” of another.

Ask any farmer about monkeys, and you’ll be rewarded by seeing his trigger finger twitch.  Farmers shoot them on sight, because monkeys will absolutely devastate crops — a 50-strong troop will empty an orchard of its fruit in the space of a couple of hours, and take half a field of corn in a day.

So whenever I see some animal lover wringing his hands because some wee likkul monkey was shot by some eeeevil hunter, I just laugh.  Put said animal lover in the middle of a large troop (of whatever breed), and the odds of survival are about 50-50.

They are truly evil little bastards, only marginally less so than socialists, and like socialists, they should be shot whenever and wherever possible.  And if not for monkeypox, there’s always herpes.

Bear Medicine

Thanks to Reader Evan M for sending this verified data about bears and handguns:

I engaged in a search for instances where pistols were used to defend against bears. I and my associates have found 37 instances that are fairly easily confirmed. The earliest happened in 1987, the latest mere months ago. The incidents are heavily weighted toward the present, as the ability to publish and search for these incidents has increased, along with increases in bear and human populations, and the carry of pistols.

The 37 cases include one that can fairly be described as a “failure”.

The pistol calibers, when known, range from 9 mm to .454 Casull. The most common are .44 magnums.

I’ve never been in bear country (I dunno if Wisconsin- and Michigan forests count), but if I were ever to visit Montana or Alaska, for example, there’s no way I’d get out of the car or house without one of these puppies :

For those unfamiliar, they’re the Ruger Redhawk (top) and S&W Mod 629, both in .44 Magnum… and inside a chest holster:

…AND my 1911 (loaded with 230gr FMJ boolets) in a waistband holster.

(Heh heh heh… a 1911 as a backup.)

Screw that bear spray bullshit.  If the Fishcops want me to use it, they can give me a can beforehand.

Substitute

Because of all this woke bullshit, we are no longer allowed to use the word “Mozambique” for our favorite shooting drill (two shots in center-mass, one in the head) because raayyycisss.

As always, the solution can be found in the Old Country.  At the suggestion of Mr. Free Market, allow me to present the new drill, the Rittenhouse:

Two in the skateboard, one in the elbow.

Of course, the silhouette is white on a night-black background so we don’t get accused of Black genocide or some such, and most of the Pantifa Skateboard Set are White anyway.

Apologies for the poor artwork, but I only had a couple minutes to do it in MS Paint.