Several years back a rancher here in Texas supposedly went out the week before deer season opened and painted the price of his few cattle and a horse I believe on their side.
Dtala, I can understand the dead mule, it probably just threw the rider down the mountain for the 10th time, but an arrow does seem a bit cold.
"The liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshiping Almighty God agreeably to their conscience, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights." ~George Washington - 1789
Posts: 2135 | Location: Where God breathes life into the Amber Waves of Grain and owns the cattle on a thousand hills. | Registered: 20 August 2002
Reminds me of the joke about the guy and his wife who went on their first elk hunt. The first morning they split up and were doing some spot/stalk when Boom, the guy hears his wife shoot. He heads her way and all of a sudden he hears her screaming, so he rushes to get over to where she's screaming bloody murder for a guy to leave the elk she shot alone. The guy says to her that she can have it, but he'd like his bridle and saddle back before she field dresses it, LOL!!!
Being from more southern and warmer paces in the US, the deer I hunt are rather small (100-150 pounds live). When I was in Montana, noticed how incredibly large the deer start getting as you move further from the equator (I know there is a name for this, but don't recall it). Anyway, when I mentioned the deer in Montana being so big, one of our long time friends we were hunting with told me about the time she came up on a hunter who had just shot a real dandy of a mule deer. The hunter (out-of-stater) was insistent he shot an elk because it was so large bodied. She said congrats, but asked he put his deer tag on it so no one laughed at him at the check-in point on the way in to town.
Sounds dumb to think people could shoot a horse or cow, but I'm sure we have all glassed plenty of stumps and logs thinking it was a deer.
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If you died tomorrow, what would you have done today ...
Sevens---That would be Bergmanns Rule that's a theory which states that animals will tend to be larger at higher latitudes than they will be at the equator, correlating average temperatures with body size. Bergmann's Rule is not without controversy as there are exceptions which would seem to disprove the rule, like the African elephant.
The idea is that the lower the ratio of body mass to surface area, the less heat loss an animal will experience. The larger the ratio, the more heat loss will be experienced. In regions like the Arctic, animals naturally want to reduce the amount of heat they lose so that they don't become hypothermic and die. In equatorial regions, on the other hand, animals want to lose heat, so that they do not turn hyperthermic and suffer the related health complications.
According to Bergmann's Rule, populations of the same species of animal should appear in different sizes, depending on their latitude, and closely-related species should also demonstrate size variance which can be correlated with their natural habitat. As a general rule, equatorial animals are supposed to be smaller, while Arctic animals should be correspondingly larger.
Two stories come to mind on this topic. The first occurred 30 years ago here in Utah. We were eating lunch at the truck and a doe was below us with 2 fawns. A truck pulls up and 3 or 4 guys get out and one says "There goes one big buck and 2 little bucks". They got off one shot before a member of our group could stop them. Before Utahns are blamed, the truck had California plates.
The other incident was also in Utah, during the anybull elk season, in 2001. The unit we were on had too many elk so the Fish and Game allowed anyone with a bull tag to also purchase a cow permit. We had ridden our horses in 4 miles and then hiked another ways in to hunt. Lots of shooting followed that morning and I just sat in an aspen stand waiting. A hunter came quickly up to me and asked if I had seen a wounded elk. I said no and asked him if it was a bull or a cow. He said "I don't know. It doesn't matter. I have tags for either a bull or a cow." Never worried much about my stock until that guy.
Lots of uneducated people out there.
Posts: 789 | Location: Utah, USA | Registered: 14 January 2005
While living in WV, you could ask a local if they'd SEEN anything and their reply might be "no, but I gotten off a couple of sound shots." That's when I posted my property.
My father was working a check station in the late 1970s when a husband and wife came in with the biggest mule deer they had ever seen....a 4 point bull elk.
