You guys and your guns...

[mistermack]

I tried hunting rabbits with a bow once. I wasn't too bad a shot at a normal archery target, but I never hit a single bunny in the field. I soon returned to my trusty .22

We didn't have a choice. We would have attracted unwanted attention if we carried guns at that age.
But we got a lot of rabbits with the bows. And rats.

You had to really hone your stalking skills to hit something with a bow.
The rats were actually easier than rabbits. We used to hunt them along the banks of a local brook, and they would hide behind a clump of grass on the far side, and think they were safe.
We just synchronised our shots, and shot them through the grass.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I went on a stalk with Max Bear once, bow hunter supreme. A friend of mine organizes razorback hunts in Arkansas. He invited me when I was seventeen. Much fun, except I didn't care for the killing that much.

[mistermack]

I should think pigs are well worth hunting, if they are in the area.

We have wild boar in the Forest of Dean, about fifteen miles from here. They are hard to spot during the day, but easier to get close to at night. If you put bait out, they would be easy enough to shoot.

There's a lot of meat on one pig, but I would have to make sure that it was REALLY well cooked. They can pick up some pretty nasty parasites in the wild.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You want to hunt pig, go to Hawaii, the Big Island. Ferals are destroying the ecology.

[Blind groper]

The same here in NZ. Pigs are a curse.
Locals hunt them with teams of trained dogs. The actual kill is just an act of butchery, and there are some guys who do it with a knife. The dogs bail up the pigs to render them almost helpless. Occasionally a dog gets gored, and less often a hunter. I have never done it myself, but I have heard that the hunt is really, really exciting.

The other thing done here in NZ is hunting the Australian furry tailed opossum at night. A .22 rifle is sufficient, and the hunters normally have a spotlight clamped to the barrel. The bright light freezes the opossums, making them easier to shoot. Their eyes shine like two spotlights. I have done this, myself, and it is not very difficult.

Unlike that rat found in America and called an opossum, the one we have is covered with luxuriant fur, and the fur-on skins have some commercial value. At one stage, opossum skins were used to make rather nice fur coats, but the anti-fur campaigners wrecked that industry, which spawned an ecological crisis with opossums multiplying in number. Anyone who shoots those furry pests is doing the ecology a favour.

[Seth]

Pigs are not naturally aggressive until they feel they are trapped.. in my extensive experience. Unless Aussie country kids hunt in packs, I think this would be hugely impractical 'snipe hunting'. I assume the real hunting is done with bows and arrows, as mentioned in the article, while the children are allowed to also carry hunting knives.

From personal experience, I know what kids are like with weapons.

No you don't, you only know what kids you know are like with weapons.

They do mental things when they are not supervised.

How strange, You must know a lot of fuckwitted kids because I got my first .22 when I was 10 and I spent many a day shooting and hunting on the ranch all by myself without any adult supervision at all without ever doing anything "mental." In fact, I took my rifle with me on the school bus once a week for marksmanship training at the school indoor shooting range for three years. So did a bunch of my friends. And none of my friends when I was growing up ever got shot or shot someone else. That's because they received proper training from their parents and the school.

I was really into archery as a kid, along with my friends. We were members of an archery club, and strictly observed all the safety precautions.

But we used to go hunting rabbits and rats in our spare time, on our own, and safety just went out of the window.
We had powerful bows, and one game was to shoot an arrow vertically as high as you possibly could, and see how close you could get the arrow to land to where you were standing. It was usually a reasonable distance away, and we could watch it come down.

But then we started playing the same game as it was getting dark, and you couldn't see the arrow coming down. You just heard a whizz and a thump, to tell you where the arrow landed.
We stood there like idiots, with our hands over our heads, waiting for the arrow to come down. It was playing chicken in a really lethal way.
I get the heebie jeebies now whenever I remember it.
But that's the sort of thing that kids will get up to when they go out on their own.

Darwinism in action I'd say. Stupid fuckers who do stuff like that need to be eliminated from the gene pool early, before they breed more congenital idiots.

[Seth]

I should think pigs are well worth hunting, if they are in the area.

We have wild boar in the Forest of Dean, about fifteen miles from here. They are hard to spot during the day, but easier to get close to at night. If you put bait out, they would be easy enough to shoot.

There's a lot of meat on one pig, but I would have to make sure that it was REALLY well cooked. They can pick up some pretty nasty parasites in the wild.

I go hunting feral pigs in Texas a couple of times a year (soon again I hope, after the corn harvest) and we hunt them at night, with machine guns, silencers, night vision and thermal weapons sights. They are a plague on agriculture in the south, and you can kill as many as you like, any time, using any method.

We leave them where they fall because of the disease potential. They make great fertilizer, and a dead hog will attract more hogs that will eat it.

[mistermack]

Seth, you're so full of shit, I treat all of it as lies, and hardly read any of it any more.

But if you're addicted to trolling, just keep at it, I don't mind.

[SteveB]

Ever tried hunting pigs with pigs?

[Seth]

Seth, you're so full of shit, I treat all of it as lies, and hardly read any of it any more.

Which is a lie of course.

But if you're addicted to trolling, just keep at it, I don't mind.

You're easy.

But, if you were referring to my techniques for hunting pigs, it's the absolute truth. I know a Class III machine-gun dealer who also manufactures silencers near Dallas and he takes a friend and I out a couple of times a year. Sometimes we use semi-autos as well. I'll be taking my LaRue OBR .308 and an AR-15 with Lewis Machine Tool quad-rail upper along this time, along with my PVS-14 binocular NVDs and my Raytheon W-1000 thermal weapon sight.



And here's a pig hunt: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWLq40Dk ... ure=relmfu[/youtube]

So when it comes to being full of shit, I'm afraid it's you, not me.

[JimC]

If I were hunting pigs in scrubby terrain, where a wild boar could pop up close by, I wouldn't mind having a rifle I once read about, but have never seen or used. It was a Ruger semi-automatic, with a fairly short barrel, chambered for .44 magnum pistol rounds... Not much good beyond 40 metres or so, but more accurate than any pistol, and a higher muzzle velocity too. I suspect it would knock 'em down...

At longer range, I once owned a Mauser bolt action 303/250, with a decent 8x telescopic sight. Second hand, and fairly old, but a very accurate rifle...

So, I was kind of a gun nut in my youth...

[mozg]

I went on a stalk with Max Bear once, bow hunter supreme. A friend of mine organizes razorback hunts in Arkansas. He invited me when I was seventeen. Much fun, except I didn't care for the killing that much.

I find that the killing part makes the eating part so much more possible.

[mistermack]

I find that the killing part makes the eating part so much more possible.

Somebody must have TOLD you that.
I don't believe you just worked it out yourself.

[Coito ergo sum]

I went on a stalk with Max Bear once, bow hunter supreme. A friend of mine organizes razorback hunts in Arkansas. He invited me when I was seventeen. Much fun, except I didn't care for the killing that much.

Max Baer was the boxer...

Wasn't Fred Bear the bow hunter?

[mistermack]

I think if you check your facts, you'll find that Yogi was the naughty one, and Boo Boo was the dumb one.

It comes to something when a Brit has to put you right.