All....

I'm looking for quotes, pithy sayings, or thought provoking short items that relate to hunting.
With respect, I'm not so interested in American politics, but the traditions and general condition of man as a hunter and his instinct to pursue game.

With Thanks,,,,,,,, Peter

My Dad used to say "hunting is nothing more than being in the right place at the right time", and he called his deer rifle his "Flinta"

Blue

The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information. Ed Abbey from his Vox

Brent

Vegetarian is an old Indian word for cant shoot worth shit

Use enough gun. Rourke(sp?)

Lock, stock and barrel (meaning the whole thing)

Make your first shot count.

Jeff

"The HUNTING has been great, but the FINDING has been lousy!"

AD

Thats why they call it hunting. If it were easier we would call it getting groceries.

Two best times for hunting are when its raining, and when it aint.

I will tell you that despite what people think the phrase

"the whole nine yards" refers to a belt of ammo for a browning machine gun, makes it more useful as a quote now. :-)

don't know who said it, but I like,"we do not hunt to have killed, we kill to have hunted." Or the jist of that statment.

Also, from an article about an Elk hunter who said,"nobody that woke up next to a woman ever got an elk."

Red

My favorite,
"Hell, I was there". Elmer Keith
second favorite,
"I think the men's curiosity of the Grizzly Bear has been satisfied". Merriwether Lewis

"Its 99% scouting and 1% hunting"

One does not hunt in order to kill...he hunts in order to avoid chores.

"It had been the lousiest hunting trip of my life....and then the rains came." -(me)

"Sure I'll help you. I won't have to put my beer down will I?" -(acquaintance of mine)

"Spooked? That deer was six inches high and twenty feet long!" - (hunting buddy)

I knew I could rely on the gentlefolk of this forum.

My thanks to you all....

Cooch

PS...
A few others that I've come up with include:-

��Unting is all that�s worth living for - all time is lost wot is not spent in �unting - it is like the hair we breathe - if we have it not we die - it�s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger.�
Surtees - Handley Cross (1843)

"'Unting fills my thoughts by day, and many a good run I have in my sleep. Many a dig in the ribs I gives Mrs. J. when I thinks they're running into the warmint. No man is fit to be called a sportsman wot doesn't kick his wife out of bed on haverage once in three weeks!"
Surtees
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"A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact."
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac ========================

"One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted...If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.
Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting. ========================

"All animals will not only be not shot, they will be protected -- not only from people but as much as possible from each other. Prey will be separated from predator, and there will be no overpopulation or starvation because all will be controlled by sterilization or implant."
Cleveland Amory, founder of The Fund For Animals, describing his ideal world, in Sierra, June 1992.
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"How, given the canine teeth and close-set eyes that declare the human animal to be a predator, had we come up with the notion that oat bran is more natural to eat than chicken?"
Valerie Martin, The Great Divorce
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"The true trophy hunter is a self-disciplined perfectionist seeking a single animal, the ancient patriarch well past his prime that is often an outcast from his own kind... If successful, he will enshrine the trophy in a place of honor. This is a more noble and fitting end than dying on some lost and lonely ledge where the scavengers will pick his bones, and his magnificent horns will weather away and be lost forever."
Elgin Gates, Trophy Hunter in Asia
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"The emotions that good hunters need to cultivate are love and service more than courage. The sentiments of the hunt then become translated into art.
James Swan, In Defense of Hunting
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WHY I HUNT, by Ron Spomer
Hunting is one of those pleasures that you won't understand if you have to have it explained, which is good because folks who enjoy it can't fully explain why.
Obviously hunting is more than shooting animals. As the philosopher Ortega y Gassett said, one doesn't hunt in order to kill, one kills in order to have hunted.
If hunters were really bloodthirsty killers, they could buy a barn full of chickens and get a whole lot more bloodletting for their dollar than the average pheasant hunt yields.
Hunting is more than a pastime or an autumn ritual for some; it's a way of life. Dedicated hunters see the world with a special perspective. When they drive through farmland they don't see wheat fields and pastures, they see lost upland bird habitat. When they tour a new shopping mall, they don't see new businesses, they see destroyed deer habitat. When they pass a forest, they don't see trees, they see bedding cover, travel routes and feeding sites.
Hunters live for the first cold front of September. They listen for the cry of snow geese on a blustery October night. They inhale the scent of rotting leaves, watch for tracks in the mud and curse meteorologists for predicting another warm, dry November day. Hunters don't brace themselves to withstand nature, they welcome her.
To be healthy and hungry in the wilds is the way of the hunter. He strips himself of society's insulating layers of artificiality and becomes a player, a predator alive on a primal level. No longer just an observer, the hunter becomes an integral, working part of nature.
Being a part of it, that's the thing.
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Ron Spomer is a writer/photographer who lives in Moscow, Idaho. The above was excerpted from "Why Hunt," in Wildlife Art News, September/October 1990. Copyright by Ron Spomer.
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FAIR CHASE: What Does It Mean In The 90's?
The traditions of hunting dictate that game be taken in the spirt of fair play. In other words, pitting the human's skills against the animal's strong instincts for survival.
Theodore Roosevelt established his "Credo of Fair Chase" back in 1893. It is the pattern for hunting that exists to this day in the rulings of the Boone and Crockett Club...
"The term 'Fair Chase' shall not be held to include killing bear, wolf, or cougar in traps, nor 'fire hunting,' nor 'crusting' moose, elk or deer in deep snow, nor killing game from a boat while it is swimming in the water, nor killing deer by any other method than fair stalking or still hunting."
One who has spent time thinking about "Fair Chase" is Jim Posewitz, a biologist who founded Orion - The Hunters' Institute, in 1993. Posewitz also wrote the book Beyond Fair Chase: The Ethic and Tradition of Hunting. The book is used in hunter education classes in 38 states. The following is excerpted from Beyond Fair Chase.
"Fundamental to ethical hunting is the idea of fair chase. This concept addresses the balance between the hunter and the hunted. it is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken." (p.57)
"There are some activities that are clearly unfair as well as unethical. At the top of the list is shooting captive or domesticated big game animals in commercial killing areas where a person with a gun is guaranteed an animal to shoot. These shooting grounds are alien to any consideration of ethical hunting. When discussing the ethic of fair chase, it is important to clarify that we are talking about hunting free-ranging wild animals." (p.59)
"The ethical hunter must make many fair-chase choices. In some areas, chasing big game with dogs is an accepted custom. In other places, it is considered an unfair advantage for the hunter. Likewise, luring animals with bait or hunting in certain seasons sometimes is viewed as giving unfair advantage to the hunter. While local custom and practice need to be respected, it is equally important to be honest about the result of these practices. If there is a doubt, advantage must be given to the animal being hunted." (p.61)
"In addition to hunting practices, there is a constant flow of products developed to provide advantages to hunters. Sights, scents, calls, baits, decoys, devices, and techniques of infinite variety fill the marketplace. In each case an individual choice must be made as to what sustains fair chase and what violates that concept." (p.62)
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Jim Posewitz. Beyond Fair Chase: The Ethic and Tradition of Hunting. 1994. Falcon Press, Helena, Montana.
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� "for a long time -- most of my adult life -- I have thought about how we might relearn to venerate these cycles of eating and being eaten, of recombination and transformation, especially as we destroy the wild and rural landscapes where these cycles operate most visibly."
"What exactly does "the least harm possible" mean? Does it mean becoming a fossil fuel vegetarian -- those people who with a clear conscience buy vegetables at the supermarket, never realizing that America's factory farms, intensively subsidized by petroleum from the wellhead to the combine and on to the interstate highway system, inflict an enormous toll on wildlife as they grow and deliver such seemingly benign products as cereal, bread, beans and milk? Or does doing the least harm possible mean becoming an organic farmer, growing everything one needs alongside one's house? Could it mean hunting and gathering the animals and plants of one's bioregion?" Bloodties: Nature, Culture, and the Hunt, by Ted Kerasote (Kodansha International).
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Meditations on Hunting, by Jose Ortega y Gasset (Charles Scribner & Sons).
Ortega writes: "One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted."
"I have said "religious," and the word does not seem excessive to me. A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.
"Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, in the laws of nature."
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"Fundamental to ethical hunting is the idea of fair chase. This concept addresses the balance between the hunter and the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken."
"The mechanized pursuit of wildlife is high on the list of violating fair chase principles. We have invented machines to carry ourselves over land, sea, and air. Evolution of the animals we pursue can not keep pace with these inventions. If we are to pursue animals fairly, the ethical choice is clear -- we pursue them on foot. The ethical hunter never chases or harasses wildlife with a machine." Beyond Fair Chase: The Ethic and Tradition of Hunting, by Jim Posewitz
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: "The hunting instinct is bred into the bones and blood of at least most of us and is one of the most fundamental elements of human nature. Our challenge as humans is to find the best ways to express our instinctual nature. That is where ethics, values, mythology, the higher self, and spirituality come into play as guides enabling us to be healthy, happy human beings."
In Defense of Hunting, by James W. Swan

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"For a moment I am shocked at my deed; I stare at the quiet rabbit, his glazed eyes, his blood drying in the dust. Something vital is lacking. But shock is succeeded by a mild elation. Leaving my victim to the vultures and maggots, who will appreciate him more than I could -- the flesh is probaly infected with tularemia -- I continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand but is unmistakable. What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added, by processes too subtle to fathom, to my own soul.
"I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul: white as snow. Check my hands: not a trace of blood. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!"
Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey (Henry Holt )

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In his book of collected essays, Harrison writes about hunting and fishing and eating and writing, which makes it a wonderful book to take on an extended hunting trip.
"There is something about eating game that resists the homogeneity of taste found in even the best of our restaurants. A few years back when we were quite poor, lower class by all the charts, we had a game dinner at our house. There were about twelve people contributing food, and with a check for a long poem I bought two cases of a white bordeaux. We ate, fixed in a number of ways, venison, duck, trout, woodcock, snipe, grouse, rabbit, and drank both cases of wine. I doubt you could buy the meal on earth." Just Before Dark, by Jim Harrison
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HUNTING BRINGS YOU FACE TO FACE WITH THE CYCLES THAT SUPPORT YOU. WHEN YOU GO OUT AND YOU TAKE THE LIVE OF A BIG BEAUTIFUL ANIMAL, AS WE'VE SEEN, YOU CAN'T DENY ANY LONGER THAT LIFE, SOME LIFE HAS TO DIE TO FEED OTHER LIFE. AND YOU BECOME MUCH MORE PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR IT.
Ted Kerasote
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YOU KNOW, ONCE YOU START HUNTING WITH A DOG, IT BECOMES SUCH AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE HUNT THAT, YOU KNOW, I KNOW FELLOWS WHO WILL GO OUT AND JUST MARVEL AT THE DOG AND ENJOY WATCHING WHAT THAT DOG CAN DO, AND BIRDS ARE SECONDARY. YOU KNOW, THE HUNT IS SO MUCH DOG WORK THAT WHETHER OR NOT THEY GET GAME IS IMMATERIAL.
Ron Spomer
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"Some people ask why men go hunting. They must be the kind of people who seldom get far from highways. What do they know of the trust a hunting man keeps with the wind and the trees and the sky? Hunting? The means are greater than the end, and every hunter knows it."
Gordon Macquarrie, Author, November 1939
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A variation of a previous quote:

"If it was easy it wouldn't be called hunting, it would be called shooting."

You may quote my tag line below if you want to.

I collected a thread called
"Favorite outdoor/hunting/shooting quotes?" from
Coffee Shop Big Game Forum
You could find them at the end om my page
My hunting page (English)
PerN

I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun YOU!

" So many animals, so little time." said by RustyF after having hunted in Africa 2002

"If you shoot it you eat it." or you don't go hunting.

my father when I first started to hunt
"one shot=one kill or don't shoot"
he did not own but a single shot weapon all of his life
I have to say we ate good!!!

I don't know if this is a quote or not, but I liked it.

Aim small, miss small.- Movie "The Patriot"

Use a 375 H&H and you can eat right up to the hole.

Hey Bustinbucks? What's up with that little troll? What program is that?

Cooch:

"I hunt - therefore - I am"!

Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

As my buddy's nephew said about the missed duck headin' south, "I almost got him."