Posted on 09/17/2005 9:08:12 PM PDT by neverdem
GREEN MOUNTAIN NATIONAL FOREST, Vt. - Chomping wad after wad of Bubblicious Strawberry Splash gum and giggling as she tickled people's necks with a piece of grass she pretended was a spider, Samantha Marley could have been any 9-year-old girl.
A couple of things set her apart, though. She was cloaked in camouflage from boots to baseball cap. And propped next to her on the seat of a truck was her very own 20-gauge shotgun.
Samantha, a freckle-faced, pony-tailed fourth grader, was on a bear hunt. Not the pretend kind memorialized in picture books and summer-camp chants, but a real one for black bears that live in the woods of southwestern Vermont and can weigh 150 pounds or more.
She had won a "dream hunt" given away by a Vermont man whose goal is to get more children to hunt, and she had traveled about 200 miles from her home in Bellingham, Mass., and was missing three days of school to take him up on his offer.
"Almost everything you hunt is pretty fun," said Samantha, grinning and perfectly at home with a group of five men, the youngest of whom was nearly three times her age.
At one point, as the group crossed a wooden bridge, Samantha's father, Scott, who had accompanied her - and had filled out her application for the hunting contest - teased her that trolls lived under the bridge.
"Dad," Samantha said with bravado, "I got a gun."
The dream hunt - all expenses paid, including taxidermy - was the brainchild of Kevin Hoyt, a 35-year-old hunting instructor who quit a job as a structural steel draftsman a few years ago and decided to dedicate himself to getting children across the country interested in hunting.
His efforts reflect...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"Few people even know what a -real- egg tastes like.
I've actually seen people that prefer the tasteless, anemic things that are sold in stores."
Thing that kills me is what's happened to chicken. And I'm comparing it to store-bought 40 years ago, not country fresh. The taste is gone. Same with tomatoes.
I had three girls and two boys. They were all hunting by age eight. Now in their 20's and 30's, they all still hunt and shoot. In fact, my youngest daughter is considered the best shot in the county.
No to what? College in Brooklyn or driving a car?
"It's coming to an end, But, the bright side is that the coyotes are encroaching on urban areas. The overpopulation of small dogs, cats and foxes will ease up soon."
I enjoyed that.
You pulled that far out of context. It's a shabby trick.
"20 gauge slugs would be OK if it was a pump. I wouldn’t try it with a single shot without a .44 mag backup."
Sort of interesting. Mind giving a fairly short explanation of this statement to someone who knows nothing about guns? (Why would 20 gauge slugs be OK, "if it was a pump"? Faster rate of fire? Otherwise carry a giant pistol as a backup? Interesting thoughts. You sound like a former soldier.
Quite a confession. Your interest in hunting derives from blood lust? Surely you misspoke.
"I hope we never have occasion to have to rely on getting our own food in this country, because most of our citizens would starve to death if there wasn't a supermarket available."
Little realism here. 300 million people could not gain a very big percentage of their food from hunting in the US.
"Fighting back is a good idea screaming biting, kicking ect anything to make someone else take notice that the child isn't going along freely."
Valid point. In addition, there are sometimes odd psychological factors. We had a recent incident here in Western PA where a man abducted a 12 year old girl into his car and drove away. She never stopped fighting him, insulting him, calling him wierd, etc. After a short while, the guy just stopped the car and let her out. She is now safe and he is in custody. (Not saying this is remotely guaranteed to work.)
I noticed those in NY Chinatown. I wanted to buy one, cause I had them when I was a kid and they were legal. But I was thinking, you know, if it's illegal and from China, maybe it's diseased.
I'd just about give my right arm to be that 'poor' again...
"10 different vegetables"
You'd explode!....:))
This may sound weird but what's *really* given me a lift of late is plain ol' V8 with Calcium.
If I go a day without it, I -feel- it.
I also chomp on alfalfa tablets like candy....:)
I do take several vitamins a day mainly because I'm "recovering" from 10 years of unskilled vegetarianism.
I couldn't eat all the "necessary" vegetables [food sensitiviies] and evrything got seriously out a of whack.
As luck would have it, early perimenopause provoked panic attacks and the anxiety doctor I found also holds a master's degree in nutrition.
Remarkably, she cured the panic attacks by simply [but for me] radically changing my diet....which apparently *sucked*...LOL!
[and I've had panic attacks off and on since I was 10 so that's no mean feat]
I could go all biblical on ya by saying that God Himself said He gave us everything in the garden for our healing.
Unfortunately, the frankenfoods that pass for "vegetables" these days are probably not what He intended....:)
I was raised on a farm [no wisecracks please...;))] and until I got married and moved away from home I had no real idea what "store bought" stuff tasted like.
Everything from chickens, pigs and cows to tomatoes and corn were all home-grown.
Fresh bread was baked twice a week and pies were made from fruit canned in the fall.
The cellar was loaded with canned and dried *everything*.
Heck, we even made our own potato chips.
[and they are better than anything you've ever ate from a store]
Just a few years away from all that and this formerly 'pleasingly plump' little farm gal lost a lot of weight.
I simply had no apppetite for anything in the stores and stopped eating very much.
"Chicken" tasted like only what you'd seasoned it with and scrambled eggs just tasted like butter-fried salty fluff.
I'm not *even* gonna start on the whole "sausage" issue....LOL!
We are lucky in that we have a local seasonal farm market and several slaughterhouses where everything is raised and processed right there and *not* in a "mass production" sort of way.
The only milk I drink comes from a local dairy.
It's very limited in supply and the cows are all happy, coddled creatures.
I wish you could've tasted the tomatoes my one grandfather used to grow.
His house was built on what used to be a river bottom and they were the reddest, juiciest, most delicious things you could ever imagine.
The dirt in his yard was rich and coal-black.
Come fall, everyone wanted to be his "best buddy"...:))
It's all an issue of profit.
Kill 'em fast and cheap and get 'em to market.
Our cows were always affectionately raised and humanely shot just as they were finishing a huge bucket of sweet feed.
They fell instantly dead and never suffered a second of pain or terror.
The last things they knew of this life were kind words, gentle pats and tasty food.
There was always an atmosphere of resigned sadness involved.
Same with the pigs.
Each was taken away from the others so that the ones awaiting their death would not be terrified by the noise or smell of blood.
That's what I meant in an earlier post about "respect and reverence" for the beast you had to kill.
In a perfect world we'd not need to do such things but the world is, for the time being, fallen.
You've been on FR for ages.
Surely you know by now that "context" usually has very little bearing on *anything* in threads such as these.....;)
The kid must have read "The Ransom of Red Chief" at some point.
My parents always told me that if somebody kidnapped me they'd probably get money from the kidnapper just to take me *back*....LOL!
My Uncle is in his 80's. I feel for him and other family members in their early teens. These people can sit there and tell out of a pack of thirty dogs which one is barking. how close to the lead he is in the pack and whether he is "on the scent" or just running along with the other dogs. Something I could never do.
Even though they mostly sat on the side of minor county roads in their pickups, or were chasing around to get closer so they could hear better, it was their sport, even if it didn't have the elegance of English foxhunts.
Certain rules also prevailed. Coyotes were never shot. If they eluded the dogs, or just plain whipped the dogs butts out of the pasture, so be it.
In the 50's, when probably only two coyotes existed in all of Guadalupe county, after 2 hours they would start catching off their dogs so the dogs wouldn't be able to catch the coyote.
Sad in many ways, to see it ending.
Or, “I knew you were there – honest!”
Yep – former soldier – 20 years.
The 20 gauge slug is about .6 inch diameter and weighs in at 3/4 ounce (Winchester) or 5/8 ounce (Federal and Remington) at a MV of 1600 fps. For hunting there are also sabot slugs weighing 5/8 ounce, but these are for use in rifled shotgun barrels only. Large enough to stop a bear – if you get a kill shot and the bear isn’t charging from close up. The single shot gives you one shot. If that shot isn’t 100% effective you break open the breech and reload, close the breech and (if enough time) fire again. That is why I would either have a pump (five of six rapid shots) or a very large handgun for the additional shots if needed.
I know it was. I could not discern the person's point so I didn't answer.
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