I have read my Bell books and articles and as far as I can figure out, he actually shot sometimes from standing on his big telescope tripod - and because the grass was too high to see over. John Boyes in the same situation used to sit on the shoulders of his tracker...Sutherland did the same. Why do people put down Walter in this fashion?

People are always saying this in a derogatory fashion and I don't get it - Where does this came from and what is its significance anyway? If I was elephant hunting and couldn't see over the 6- 8 foot grasses I'd stand on my telescope tripod as well....so what?

Also, why is he always described by the naysayers, as being a 'poacher'. I cant find anything about him being a poacher or hunting illegally, except for hunting in the Lado when the Belgian King died, but in his own words, once the Belgian King died, the Lado Enclave was to go back to Sudan in six months by treaty and it was no longer under Belgian control. JA Hunter said the same.
Surely not in Scotland, he could never have dared and I am sure wouldn't have wanted or needed too.

Last year Walter shot Saeed! Enough said.

Mike

Because it is easier to attack someone that is dead and was hunting under completely different circumstances and for completely different reasons, than these modern day Nimrods who seem to have what they consider ETHICS dripping out their arses.

Bell was not hunting elephants for sport, he was doing it as a business. The modern day jerk wads that look down on the way Bell did things,. would not be able to keep up with Bell or kill as many elephants as he did.

Jealousy causes much of the deragatory comments.

I never thought of shooting elephants from a ladder as being unethical. Does that mean that tree stands for deer are unethical? Boring, yes, unethical, no!

465H&H

Well, exactly. The way it goes is someone brings up Mr Bell, and then soon enough some know-it-all goes, ah, yes but he shot his elephants from a ladder, dont you know...as if tha puts everything in its proper light...
I mean, one, it was because the grass was too high to see over, and two, it wasnt a ladder it was a tripod, and three, so what anyway? And how many did he shoot that way? Ten ? thirty? He didnt shoot all one thousand of them like that for the love of god.
I read something where is suppossed to use a ladder to go and find elephant who were sleeping and then shoot them in the ear. Sounds like a perfectly sound way to go elephant hunting to me. (I do recall he wrote about shooting a sleeping elephant once. I dont recall the ladder.)
I read somewhere else on the net that he
used to deliberately wound them with his little 7mm and then run after them for miles, or simply come back a few days later after they had died - find them (somehow) and take the ivory. Sure. Your going to get a lot of elephants like that.
Another place - that he used to get the africans to slash the tendons in the hind legs of the elephants so they couldnt run away and then he would shoot them with his 7mm. I mean, really.

Has nobody actually read his books that owns an interweb posting machine?

All of this it seems is to simply explain how he could shoot a lot of elephants with a 7mm Mauser.
People dont seem to realise that it wasn't totally unprecedented going ivory hunting with a light rifle. Lots were shot with .303's and the 6.5x54mm by many different people.

I mean, all kind of people seem to think that what he was doing needed some extra 'special' circumstance - like when he was using a .22 Hipower on some game. Craig Boddington, who knows a few things, still fell afoul of it when he talked about WDM Bell shooting buffalo with a .22 hipower, and asserted that he would have taken headshots only, and used FMJ's.
Well, they didnt have FMJ's for the .22 Hipower, put Bell writes plainly about shooting buffalo with a .22 - he simply lung shot the lot of them as they milled around goring each other over the smell of blood; and then they died. (He was shooting them for their meat and hides and even he mentioned (writing many years later) that the ethics of it were different for a meat shooter in his position at that time.)

I dont know, maybe I am just a picky history fan, but I cannot understand why people just make things up when there is perfectly good source material written by the man himself, as well as anecdotes from people who knew him, to build a perfectly clear picture of how he operated.

In the area where Bell had to climb a tripod in order to be able to shoot elephant, the grass is 7' to 9' tall and very thick. The general visibility must be about 10 inches, and there are square miles after square miles of the stuff.

Just to go in there after elephant takes more cojones than many armchair detractors could probably muster.

Why are ethics different when one is hunting for "business" and one is hunting for "sport". When a "sport hunter" is using a PH "business" does that combo have yet another set of ethics?

The real question is whether it is unethical too shoot an elephant for its ivory while standing on a tripod...

No.

quote:

Why are ethics different when one is hunting for "business" and one is hunting for "sport". When a "sport hunter" is using a PH "business" does that combo have yet another set of ethics?

You forgot about Internet ethics vs. bragging on the trophy ethics vs. situational ethics.

Besides, Everyone knows that if you are successful as a hunter, you are not really a truely ethical hunter.

Groucho Marx once had an even more difficult time of it.

One Morning I Shot An Elephant In My Pajamas

quote:

Originally posted by retreever:
Last year Walter shot Saeed! Enough said.

Mike

Was Walter on the ladder or was Saeed?

OK so Bell may have shot quite a few Elephant off a ladder and it was deployed in tall, dense grass where the Elephant liked to feed - it was to give him a better vantage point obviously.

Has anyone given thouht as to how many he must have shot from his perch in the branches of an old Mahogany tree?

Was he unethical? .... I don't see anything wrong in using such improvised, rudimentary and somewhat precarious means to his advantage.

How many of you have climbed atop an anthill to get a better shot at whatever?

How many have staked out a salt lick or a waterhole? (bow-hunters for sure).

How many have shot game, Lion in particular, from a tree blind?

IMO Bell, who apart from having lived and roamed Africa in different times when ethics were used to describe manners at the table, hunted the way he knew best and had his style of hunting been considered distasteful, would not have had the privilege of being recognized as the legendary hunter that he was.

Did he poach a few Elephant?..more than likely.

I suppose none of us have any skeletons in the closet (not necessarily Elephant bones, but some of the lesser species must be hidden in some dark corner).

I imagine it would be extremely exciting and challenging to hunt elephant in the long grass with or without a ladder or tripod, and I cannot imagine how anyone would consider it unethical. My 2 cents.

Pondoro Taylor and George Rushby also reported shooting elephants off of ladders. Not so common now, me thinks!

465H&H

Why would Bell using a ladder to gain a vantage point be considered unethical? I don't get it.

Just like I don't understand why shooting an animal laying down is considered unethical by some. I saw a Whitetail show on TV the other day that took it a bit further. The deer was standing and feeding in a corn field (conveniently harvested recently so as not to confuse with hunting around a feeder as that is unethical to some but a freshly harvested corn field is not! ) and had it's head down eating. The voice on camera said "wait until he puts his head up". Why? Is it less ethical to shoot a deer with it's head down than head up?

What will the ethics police come up with next? "Wait until the deer swallows what he's chewing! We don't want him to choke on his cud while dying from a heart shot"!!

Would those who condem shooting from a ladder or tripod also condem using a set of sticks, either bipod or tripod, to shoot over. Sometimes the ethics boundaries are are rather flimsy to say the least.

"wait until he puts his head up". Why? Is less ethical to shoot a deer with its head down than head up?

I learnt to hunt in the Highlands of Scotland stalking Red Deer, my Ghillie instructed me to wait until my quarry had their head up as this improved the blood flow from the bullet hole, if they did not go down immediately. His theory was that it you fired when they had their head down as they straightened their neck up the skin tended to close up the bullet hole hindering the flow of blood. More often than not we had no snow so tracking was challenging. I was taught to take neck shots from a supported position, a rock etc and the object was a quick clean kill with minimum meat damage.

Hunting ethics is very much a personal thing, it can vary depending on the quarry, time and place. In England after harvest we regular shot rabbits from the back of a Land Rover in the headlamps sometimes with shotguns but often with silenced .22 LR rifles. As a young lad I honed my skills with a double by shooting rabbits at night in the head lamps of a tractor (a little International B275 with no cab) driving at a good speed working the gear lever, hand throttle and handling my Grandfathers’ double barreled hammer Wesley Richards 12 Bore, all this in a muddy sugar beet field. Small wonder that almost 50 years later I find handling my double .470 while on the run in the African bush no problem.

In my opinion it is not so much how you hunt but much more importantly the respect that one feels to your quarry. There have been times in my life when I have poached (Pheasants and Deer) it never lessened my respect for the game, in fact trying to knock out Cock Pheasants with a silenced .22 from the top of Oak trees on a dark stormy night heighten my respect for these old birds. All done on foot with no flash light but with the assistance of an amazing dog.

Having read some of Bell’s books, I believe that Bell also had this deep respect for the Ellie he hunted, I can’t see that hunting from an elevated position was unethical. Anything that improves the ability of a hunter to insure a quick one shot kill must be good.

quote:

Originally posted by John Hipwell:
"wait until he puts his head up". Why? Is less ethical to shoot a deer with its head down than head up?

I learnt to hunt in the Highlands of Scotland stalking Red Deer, my Ghillie instructed me to wait until my quarry had their head up as this improved the blood flow from the bullet hole, if they did not go down immediately. His theory was that it you fired when they had their head down as they straightened their neck up the skin tended to close up the bullet hole hindering the flow of blood. More often than not we had no snow so tracking was challenging. I was taught to take neck shots from a supported position, a rock etc and the object was a quick clean kill with minimum meat damage.

Todd, I have heard both sides of the head up/head down angle. Some feel that shooting an animal with its head up is providing that animal with one last chance to escape. I don't think I have ever heard anyone embrace that theory, if it was a true trophy/"Book" animal that was being looked at. JMO.

quote:

Originally posted by Crazyhorseconsulting:
Todd, I have heard both sides of the head up/head down angle. Some feel that shooting an animal with its head up is providing that animal with one last chance to escape. I don't think I have ever heard anyone embrace that theory, if it was a true trophy/"Book" animal that was being looked at. JMO.

Agreed. When I decide to take an animal, providing it with an opportunity to escape is usually not something I'm inclined to do!

I think Bell was a gifted and amazing man that is documented beyond doubt and have written that on this site.
But I could not resist the temptation to say in jest: With the Internet ablaze over the last 10 years about the folly of shooting an elephant with a 7mm 175 grain RN solid like the Ne'er-do-well WDM Bell, I would suggest the following. Now that we have advanced in knowledge and ability to the place where we have the mighty 458 Lott, or it’s like, with a 1 x 6 Scope and Mono-metal solids with flat points, cup points Hydro stabilized design and surely some other kind of point, all of which can produce ½” groups at 100 yards, while providing 10 feet of penetration in an elephants frontal cranium structure the only to “fair” way to hunt Elephants would be on a unicycle with no seat, just the seat pole, and shooting from one’s weak side. Oh and if one hunted in the tall grass, instead of a tripod for a survey device with an 8” or so platform like Bell had, would do so on said unicycle while standing on a broomstick. Surely any other way would not be sporting considering how much better and more sporting hunters we are today.

All these hunting ethics threads have me so confused on what to do that I am just going to quit killing animals and join PETA!


GO VEGAN!!!