Enjoy!

I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it.

The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not 4 feet away), it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down) then hog tie it and transport it home.

I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it.

After about 20 minutes, my deer showed up — 3 of them. One stepped out from the end of the feeder, and I threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me. I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step towards it…it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and then received an education.

The first thing that I learned is that, while a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, they are spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope.

That deer EXPLODED.

The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope and with some dignity.

A deer? No chance.

That thing ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined.

The only up side is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals. A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head. At that point, I had lost my taste for corn-fed venison. I just wanted to get that devil creature off the end of that rope.

I figured if I just let it go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die slow and painfully somewhere. At the time, there was no love at all between me and that deer. At that moment, I hated the thing, and I would venture a guess that the feeling was mutual.

Despite the gash in my head and the several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer’s momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think clearly enough to
recognize that there was a small chance that I shared some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in, so I didn’t want the deer to have to suffer a slow death, so I managed to get it lined back up in between my truck and the feeder – a little trap I had set before hand…kind of like a squeeze chute.

I got it to back in there and I started moving up so I could get my rope back.

Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years would have thought that a deer would bite somebody, so I was very surprised when…

I reached up there to grab that rope and the deer grabbed hold of my wrist. Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse where they just bite you and then let go. A deer bites you and shakes its head –almost like a pit bull. They bite HARD and it hurts.

The proper thing to do when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back slowly. I tried screaming and shaking instead. My method was ineffective. It seems like the deer was biting and shaking for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds.

I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that claim by now), tricked it.

While I kept it busy tearing the tendons out of my right arm, I reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose. That was when I got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.

Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right up on their back feet and strike right about head and shoulder level, and their hooves are surprisingly sharp. I learned a long time ago that, when an animal –like a horse –strikes at you with their hooves and you can’t get away easily, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and make an aggressive move towards the animal. This will usually cause them to back down a bit so you can escape.

This was not a horse. This was a deer, so obviously, such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy.

I screamed like a woman and tried to turn and run.

The reason I had always been told NOT to try to turn and run from a horse that paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. Deer may not be so different from horses after all, besides being twice as strong and 3 times as evil, because the second I turned to run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down.

Now, when a deer paws at you and knocks you down, it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What they do instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you while you are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head. I finally managed to crawl under the truck and the deer went away.

So now I know why when people go deer hunting they bring a rifle with a scope to sort of even the odds.

All these events are true so help me God…

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

The speaker’s point was we live out our collective need for the latter is each by participating in the former in each pair. We have a tribal background that makes us warlike, so we engage in sports. I think the point is fundamentally flawed. I, like most people I know, have a healthy competitive streak, but engage in sports because it’s fun and I get exercise. It’s not because I want to act out conflict issues.

What was more interesting about the TED discussion, though, was the exploration of the different moral values shared by liberals and conservatives. The site drove to a website where you can participate in the mass moral survey. I tripped on over and took the test and here are my results compared to the larger populations of “conservatives” versus “liberals”.

My Moral Compass

What I find fascinating is how far out of sync I am with liberals and conservatives. The site doesn’t give you the option to explore your score as it relates to others with ideological interests matched to your own. I’d be curious to see if other “libertarians” had similar scores. I scored far lower on the religion/purity scale than even the liberals, but I also had far less respect for “authority” and “loyalty” than even the lefties. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of my membership in the “leave me the hell alone” coalition.

Some of the questions about “harm” were a bit skewed by the study’s lack of distinction between harming people and harming animals. I’m a hunter. I like to put meat in my fridge. Yet the test asks whether I think “it’s morally wrong to harm a defenseless animal.”

I said I absolutely disagreed for the simple reason that shooting a deer could be described that way. Frankly, I think anyone who has used shampoo tested on animals that had their tear ducts removed or eaten a Thanksgiving turkey that has been force fed growth hormone injected grain for a year or two has done more to “harm” defenseless animals than my one bullet, one kill hunt. But that’s another discussion.

That view does, however, account for the low number on my “harm” trait. It was also impacted, apparently, by my negative response to the statement that the single greatest concern we should have in life is that nobody suffer. Suffering is part of life, and common to every animal in the animal kingdom. We’re never going to change that.

My larger question still remains. Are libertarians dramatically different from liberals and conservatives? If you’re interested in answering that question, and consider yourself libertarian, register at yourmorals.org and take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Once you have, leave me a comment with your political ideology and scores. I’ll compile them and report back in the future.

It’s now become sort of a weird obsession. I’m currently awaiting the draw results for an elk tag and an antelope tag, and this year hope to add bow and muzzleloader hunting to my list of skills. I’m really psyched.

When Micah Sifry sent the following twitter, I had to check it out.

A deer is blogging its position straight to a Google Map. OMG: http://tinyurl.com/2mxzpc

The deer in question is “Thor”. Thor is a study animal in a project run by Bryn Athyn College. While the project page is somewhat lacking for details on the project, it would seem the fine folks at Bryn Athyn seem to be doing two things simultaneously.

First, they’re looking at the movement patterns of three deer – including Thor.

Second, they seem to be signing a death warrant for poor Thor.

Now I am not, by any stretch, condoning the poaching of Thor. Poachers have a special place reserved in hell next to cab drivers and Elliott Spitzer. However, I acknowledge the reality of the world. Giving a nice buck like that a name, a picture and a way to tell exactly where he is, just begs for some poacher to go after him. If you make it that easy for someone to take a quick drive, whip out a bow or rifle, and go home with a really big deer, someone is going to do it.

This deer is a nice wide 7-8 point deer in the photo. Given deer have shed their antlers by now, it’s likely this is an old photo and Thor is likely wider, with more, bigger points now. You might as well make him where a collar of bells and light him with follow spots.

I appreciate the efforts of the Bryn Athyn College folks to educate us on the behavior patterns of deer. However, I think their eagerness to use new technology to demonstrate their work is going to result in someone collecting their test animal.

For more on Thor’s movement, see the map below.

View Larger Map

For my part, I took the 9 point buck last night right as shooting light was just about over. Another two minutes and I never would have had the shot. I know this because my father-in-law came up about one minute after I took my buck (I called him on the radio to let him know I had taken the buck and that another was still mulling about). He got his binoculars on the second buck, but by the time he lowered them, drew his rifle and got the deer in the scope, he said he couldn’t tell if it was a) the same deer or b) even a buck. The light was dropping off that fast.

The deer would have been a 10-point buck but there’s just a little burr where the tenth point would have been. It was almost perfectly symmetrical otherwise.

I spent the day getting the deer skinned and off to the processor, and the cape off to the taxidermist for mounting. The taxidermy process will take about 7-9 months, so that leaves plenty of time for Mrs. Quip and I to argue about hanging it in the house. If I win, you can drop by our living room next summer and check it out.

With any luck at all, by the end of next week I’ll be able to post a picture of me grinning like an idiot and a giant muley looking rather unhappy about the fact that he’s going to be dinner for some time to come. If not, I can always go buy a bow and hunt off the back porch…

Of the humorous clips, this one tied with the deer for my favorite.

Many of the clips I received were funny and some were tragic. Some of these were downright horrendous. I had seen a piece of this next clip with a startled bear attacking a woman in a TV studio, but I had never seen the full length clip. Not only does the bear attack the woman, but it then attacks a guy that tried to help her before turning briefly on its handler.

If I get better clips after this post, I’ll follow up with Animals Attack Part II, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with one more. This little clip teaches us a valuable lesson – he who puts his hand in alligator’s mouth sometimes gets bit.

Google, in an effort to provide more and better data, should enter into an agreement with a company providing such imagery (or simply launch their own satellites, after all, they’ve got the dough) and allow users of Google Earth to request a fly-by of a specific area. You could enter the lat/long of the area you wanted to see, and submit a request. To prevent some idiot from snapping ever more recent photos of his house on their dime, they could charge for priority imaging. The upside is two-fold.

First, Google makes even more money by charging you for the imaging. Second, Google makes the newly snapped image available to everyone else, thereby enhancing the value of the service (better, newer maps underwritten by those who want them most would still carry value for others). The newer. more reliable maps would drive more traffic and more users.

Granted, the land we’re hunting is private land, so the marginal value it gets under the second point is less. For hunters on public lands, however, it would benefit anyone getting a tag there next year because the map is only six months old, not six years.

I’ve never had a deer try to eat my face for taking a shot at him… That, and I have heard that lions are pretty gamey…