Two new elk hunters, a breath of fresh air

[MTLabrador]

That is totally up to you to decide. But I would offer some quotes by Aldo Leopold first.

://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/43828.Aldo_Leopold

On another note, when I was about 15 I bought a subscription to Outdoor Life. I paid for it picking stones out of a just plowed field. I got $1 dollar for every tractor bucket load.

One issue was very disturbing. It showed a bear in snare being shot on timber company land. The title was "Is this any way to treat bears."?

The article went on to describe the tremendous damage bears do to a forest when they came out of hibernation in the spring, girthing/killing as many as 80 trees/day to eat sweet cambium layer.

From a lumber company perSpective this more than justified killing them, yet still this seemed wrong. Years even decades went by, I became a field biologist and studied bears.

From a big game hunter's perspective, each bear killing 80 tress/day is just opening up the forest to allow light to come the forest floor and create a place for photosynthesis to provide browse plants for deer and elk and moose. This is great news for hunters as the mature forest is pretty sterile of big game, save for burns,

Bears are doing hunters of deer, elk and moose even some woodland caribou a great service. I tend not to want to kill things that are providing me with a valuable service, like filling my freezer with hooved animals

Back to the lumber issues. Bears, especially black bears in the presence of Grizzles each carry about 700 pounds of salmon deep into the forest during salmon runs. This fertilizes the forest big time and causes huge growth spurts verified by tree rings analysis. Bears earn their keep even from a logging perspective too.

Again, I do not like to kill things that are working in my favor and especially when creating an economic benefit.

What makes being with these two young elk hunters such a breath of fresh air is that they are current in their overall outdoor/wildlife knowledge and not coming from ideas that are at least 75 years or even 100's of years,,,old ideas which could never stand up to current science or even economic evaluations

These old ideas only work when they are looked at through a "straw" and one chooses to ignore the big, bigger, and biggest pictures.

If you want to get medical, Yale Medical school did the best research ever on what has become the scourge of Lymes Disease.

Lymes has been around North America for about 60,000 years and it only exploded into an epidemic of humans when multiple conditions were met, one being a lack of predators.

In northern Europe the number of people who got Lymes there dropped significantly when the killing and trapping of small predators was banned. Mice, which they eat are also a major carrier of Lymes.

It is fun to hunt with guys who are not looking through a straw

Core AF.

 

[Sagebrush1]

I have no idea who’s side I’m supposed to be on in this thread

 

[HuntTalk Freak]

Epstein DID kill himself; the CIA had a monotone old man read mustangs post to him 24/7… after one hour on the first day he day enough.

This story is about as true as anything posted by MustangMan.

 

[WYelker]

So when all 3 of you sleep in a oversized sleeping bag together, how can you determine the big spoon and little spoon?

 

[old270hunter]

I realize I must have gotten lead poisoning over the last 40 years. Who knew?

 

[BigHornRam]

Are you sure they hunt and kill elk? Sounds like a couple hippies to me. mtmuley

 

[Hotrodlincoln]

Look! It’s one of the

These guys clearly suck each others dongs. Not that I have anything against that.

Here’s an elk rifle..
View attachment 247054

this brings new meaning to the term snowballs!