I expected this post. Different culture, Dana, I think we discussed this before. :3eye:

Oh I know it Bruce. I can understand hunting. Not my cup of tea, but I get it. There's a fairly strong heritage of hunting in britain. I've been poaching with my older brother a few times, when we were kids. Went to a poachers convention in Wales once, where Martin entered a rabbit skinning comtest and gave me the rabbit foot as a good luck charm.

What I don't get, is the grinning and lifting it up. It seems...I dunno, disrespectful of one's quarry.

I understand, although poaching is frowned upon here... another culture difference, probably because over there all the game is "owned" by a few.
Keep it mind it wasn't this kids quarry, he didn't even hit it, just holding it up for others to take better pictures. He inadvertently became part owner of this trophy buck... kind of a gift.

Tommy Boy

MUTHAFUGGINN

Not as upset as you would be for the damages to your car.

Oh, and btw. No one eats road kill around here.

They do around here.

I wouldn't have been upset if had been my school bus.:haha:

We eat them up here if they can be retrieved before they get cold or pulped by traffic. Usually the ones that get eaten are the ones hit on secondary roads, and the driver or someone present grabs the carcase.

The last one I killed, was hauled off by the guy that lived right there. That guy was about 75, and said he was going in the house to get help dragging it in. He came back with his Dad. ;)

I would be upset about hitting it too.

As far as killing or maiming it, that part is up to the animal's instincts.

Once it evolves to drive buses I will worry.

Poaching is kind of frowned upon...but it depends what and where you're poaching. People get rightly annoyed at those whopoach the deer in thge valley nearby, because we have such low deer numbers. They reckon we have fewer than ten deer out there now. I don't think people are so upset at the idea of someone off lamping hares with their lurchers.

It's dying out now, as an art. But it used to be a class thing. Pretty much all land was owned after the enclosures of the 18th century, so even into the 20th century there was a sense of poaching as the poor man's game. A working-class thing. The wealthy hunted foxes and 'game' animals. The labouring classes in the countryside would risk severe punishment to hunt food. Then it became more of a sport, a kind of keeping alive of an older culture. Reawakened during the war years once rationing was introduced.

These days, it sems to fall into two brackets. There are those who are keeping alive the old ways. And there are those who like to play with big guns and hunt bigger game. The latter seem to take their cue from you guys. But they don't take into account the fact that you have huge amounts of free roaming deer, whilst ours are endangered. As I say; we're down to a family of about 6 deer in the valley now. If that. There are more on the big landed estates, where stocks are deliberately kept up for the purposes of hunting, but they're quite a rarity in most of England.

And of course, many country estates (especially in Scotland) were not occupied by their owners for most of the year. The gentry would turn up to shoot and fish for sport maybe two or three weeks in a whole year. So those who lived nearby saw it as their right to hunt and kill animals they were not legally entitled to.

I was reading Danny The Champion of the World by Roald Dahl to my kids not too long ago. I loved it as a kid and wanted to share it with them. As I was reading it to them, it really struck me how it embraced breaking the law and fostered a good hatred towards rich people and authority figures. It's a nice story about a boy and his Dad and their poaching adventures, but I had a hard time putting the values it was teaching into context for my kids.

That you know of.

I adored Danny the Champion of the World. Used to make me think of me and my dad off in the park at night spotting owls and bats. And dad coming home with an occasional rabbit for the pot, or Puffball mushrooms from Overdale.