Category: Hunting

Ahab doesn’t think the EU should be butting into the sovereign affairs of certain countries to regulate hunting.   I agree, but with the caveat that it does sound like Malta isn’t engaging in sound wildlife management practices here.

The devil, you say

This is from the comments, but I thought it warranted highlighting in a separate post.

Thankfully, Philly Chefs for Choice are striking back against the crazed bunch of zealots who would love nothing more than to take away more and more of our choices. In an event called “Philly Foie For Five,” about 20 Philly restaurants will offer foie gras dishes for just $5. The event goes from October 1st to October 7th. (More info at www.artisanfarmers.org )

The event is designed to expose more people to foie gras. If no one speaks against the minority activists, we will lose the right to eat foie gras. And the slope is slippery. Veal may go next. Then chicken. These activists aren’t going to stop until they have us all eating legumes and liking it. The final strike, if it were up to these activists, truly would be an end to meat-eating.

There are only three foie gras farms in the United States. We aren’t talking about “agri-business” here. We’re talking about small farms producing a small amount of product. But this is why foie gras has become an easy target for the minority zealots in Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, and many states. In many situations, property owners have been targeted with vandalism and threats have been made against the lives of their families. Protesting is one thing, terrorism is quite another.

Ultimately, business owners are punished by these people for running their businesses legally, in the way they see fit. They lose customers to the screaming hordes (who wants to walk through a screaming band of zealots for lunch?) and lose more when they are forced to give in and take foie gras off the menu. Business owners lose thousands of dollars just fighting these people off. Commerce suffers in cities where these activists attack.

Those who talk about the cruelty of the foie gras process are sadly misinformed. They are putting humans in the place of the animals. By this logic, we should be horrified that the poor things stand around in the winter without shoes and socks.

That is the basic misconception exploited by animal rights organizations, that ducks are like people. Yes, a tube in the throat is not comfortable for humans. Neither is swallowing whole, spiny wriggling fish, which many species of ducks delight in.

In the same way, an enlarged liver in water fowl is a normal process, not a disease process. In fact, most birds have the same mechanism. Have you ever seen fat hummingbirds? Yet they sure take on a lot of sugar water before they migrate. The extra energy is stored in an enlarged liver.

For the activists and others not well-informed on the issue, foie gras production has been carefully examined by animal welfare advocates who have determined it to be humane. Unfortunately, these activists (or terrorists, if you will) are uneducated and ignorant of the truth. They may even know the facts but chose to ignore them out of zealotry for their cause.

Those who wish to know more about foie gras production, there are two articles at the bottom of the first page of www.artisanfarmers.org that discuss the animal welfare aspects of it. For some additional perspective, see: http://www.avma.org/onlnews/javma/sep05/050901q.asp

Actually, even for people it’s not all that uncomfortable to have a tube down your throat.  Endoscopes are typically done while the patient is awake, sometimes with drugs to suppress the gag reflex.  Birds don’t have gag reflexes, and many young are fed through regurgitation by the parent its young’s mouth.

What a shocker this article is:

According to McNally, their tactics have ranged from chants and name-calling (addressing individuals as “duck rapists”) to firing bullhorns directly in her face. Other restaurant owners have taken foie gras items off their menus, but so far, McNally hasn’t backed down. “We don’t believe that, overall, we should be told what to eat,” she says.

As we talked on the drive, it became clear that there is more at issue than animal welfare — the way McNally sees it, her business is at stake as well. London has 70 outdoor seats that she needs to turn over at least twice a night to make payroll. “With the bullhorns and the screaming, you can’t sit there and dine,” she says. “That’s taking money away from the waiter and from us.”

Everyone has a right to free speech, but that doesn’t cross into disrupting your neighborhood such that your neighbors “quiet enjoyment” is disrupted.  The Philadelphia Police should be allowed to arrest these people for disturbing the peace.

Turns out that maybe Foie Gras isn’t as cruel as the animal rights psychos are making it out to be:

McNally and I arrived at the farm around noon and met Izzay Yanay, co-owner of Hudson Valley. A former member of the Israeli Defense Force, Yanay projects an intense, almost defiant pride when showing off his farm. “Make them come — all of them,” he says. He’s entertained roughly two tours a week for the past 20 years, hosting chefs and journalists alike. He promises unrestricted access and encourages me to take pictures.

Dr. Lawrence Bartholf, a practicing livestock veterinarian who operates independent of the farm, accompanies us. Bartholf often chaperones Hudson Valley tours to answer questions related to the birds’ physiology “It’s one thing to use facts to argue a point,” he says. “But when [protesters] use outright lies and distortions and half-truths, that’s where I draw the line.”

Leftist activists using outright lies, distortions and half-truths?  Nah…. you don’t say?  What a pity Philadelphia City Council is buying this crap, instead of arresting these people.

I think it’s safe to say that the California Condor is a species that’s poorly adapted to life on this planet, and they probably would have gone extinct regardless of what humans did.   Especially when you read stuff like this:

At the time of human settlement of the Americas, the California Condor was widespread across North America. However, climate changes associated with the end of the last ice age and the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna led to a subsequent reduction in range and population. Prehistorically, California Condors are known from Arizona,^[28] Nevada,^[29] New Mexico,^[30][31] and Texas.^[32]

In modern times, a wide variety of causes helped lead to the condor’s decline. The condor’s fickle mating habits and resulting low birth rate combined with a late age of sexual maturity make the bird vulnerable to loss of population.

Now they blame man, and Governor Schwarzenegger is faced with whether to agree to ban lead bullets in Condor habitat.  Here’s where I start getting offensive: let them go extinct already!  It’s pretty clear they were on their way toward that without any help from humans, and I don’t think we should go to extremes to prolong the inevitable.  Yep, sometimes I believe species should just be allowed to go extinct.  You can add Pandas to that list as well.

I’m glad Countertop is dedicated to helping me overcome my inherent issues with the idea of eating squirrel. Given that I seem to be collecting friends who view squirrels as delectable lunchables, I may have to give this a try at some point.

The subject of my very first post, Loretta, was a recent convert to the idea of eating squirrel. She had been converted to it by my friend Carrie, who I had previously been pursuing before Bitter.  She is the sister of a friend of mine, who also also speaks highly of dining on tree rat.

So we really have quite the squirrel eating happy family going on here at Snowflakes in Hell, so I will have to reconsider my belief that squirrels not fit for human consumption.

You have to love cooking a steak with a computer controlled laser.   Especially when you can spell this out:

 

See the entire project here.

Courtesy of Greg and Beth.

John Lott certainly hits on several of them. I’m definitely the hopeless suburban kid who was never exposed to it. I understand the importance of hunting for wildlife management, and certainly don’t have any problem with it, but I’m just not one. The barriers to entry for this sport are certainly rather high, wouldn’t you agree? And I don’t just mean the fees.

Looks like Countertop has found himself a friend.  I have to admit, the video he chose for an update was choice.

If  call your vegan movement “abolitionists”, the term for people who in the early to mid 19th century were dedicated to the ending of human slavery, your moral compass has wandered hopelessly off course.

According to SayUncle, the kid that shot the monster pig is getting hate mail from PETA types.   I have to wonder how many of them would have been happier if the hog had killed the kid.   I wonder how many of them know that was a very real possibility with a wild pig this large.