doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Why "high" birds?

Ethics is in the eyes of the beholder. I just spent the last 6 weeks in your home state of Texas where deer feeders on timers abound, and near San Antone, in the "Hill County," all the deer and exotics are crammed in behind eight-foot fences where "sports" pay mucho dinero to shoot their big game on the clock when the feeder spreads its bait. To paraphrase the man from Austin TX, "How challenging is it to shoot at a flock...[of hapless caged deer trained to feed at the appointed hour]...you're bound to knock something down..." Methinks that there are sporting issues closer to home in Texas than worrying about "flocks of hundreds and even thousands" of doves that are farm pests in Argentina. But having a "humble opinion" about shooting in a foreign country half a world away makes me wonder if maybe a little bit of local (Texas state) retrospection (hand wringing?) might not be time better spent...shooting fenced deer at a feeder: Gimme a break! And worrying about pen raised chickens released according to a controlled template and schedule for "sports" pretending to be Lord of the Manor in days of yore...so what. As the old farmer said as he lifted his cow's tail, "It's all a matter of taste." EDM

EDM

Methinks that it would be appropriate for you to start another thread to discuss your topic. So far I think we have had a rather pleasant and cilvlized discussion about something we all share an interest in. Oh BTW do you think it would be ok if we shoot Bambi out of a heated and insulated blind with a satelite dish so we can catch the game? Gimme a break indeed.

I pointed out that certain modes of hunting--shooting deer at feeders in your home state of Texas, for example--are situational, legally sanctioned, and endemic to different locales. How you jumped to conclude that anybody would sanction shooting "Bambi" via the Internet, is the kind of faulty thought process that can lead to Internet postings questioning other peoples' hunting methods half a world away in Argentina, or the shooting of "high birds" closer to home: Versus what? ground swatting? To question one man's sport while being blind to equally subjective sporting practices in one's own back yard was my only point.

In other words, sportsmen are often their own worst enemy when they criticize by innuendo: "Why 'high' birds?" as if there should be some approved method of bagging released barnyard pheasants, or that sports going to Argentina to shoot farm pests is somehow beneath the high sporting concepts (baiting deer) adopted and legalized by one's home venue. I am not for or against the Texas deer hunting mode, but simply point out "Different strokes..."

Shooting high birds is some peoples' sport as much as traveling to Argentina for dove shooting or going to Scotland to shoot golden plover or to extreme eastern Canada to use a sink box for ducks. Here in Illinois it is illegal to bait deer in any way, thus shooting Bambi via a satelite dish from a heated blind isn't even an option.

In Texas, however, elevated "house blinds" overlooking deer feeders are the mode, many are heated, which is easy enough to do---insulated? I don't know. But baiting deer with a timed feeder to a narrowly defined location is how the remote-location Internet shooters were able to pull the trigger via a keystroke. In Texas, maybe; Illinois, certainly not. How this red herring got injected into the conversation is a puzzlement...well, no. Questioning "High Bird" pheasant shooting itself was a red herring, and the sarcasm of my response in re: the poster questioning other peoples' sport was not well understood. So to make my point blatant:

People who live in glass houses shouldn't criticize other peoples' shooting sports. This is a job for PETA (Bambi is people too), but not sportsmen on a shooting sports website. Further EDM sayeth naught.

I dunno, Ed. I like it always whatever you sayeth. If only all opinions were as honest and reasonable as yours.

EDM, you don't have to wander very far north of your stomping grounds to find states where baiting deer (and bear) is perfectly legal; likewise, hunting bear with hounds, to which some object. I'm not a bear hunter, but I had a friend who, after having shot one over bait, said he didn't see a lot of sport in popping Yogi with a Twinkie in his mouth.

I think quite a few of us Yanks, used to hunting pheasants over dogs, will pass up the tough shots for fear of crippling and losing birds. That's quite ethical, IMO. The discussion on "high birds" has likewise surfaced excellent points re ethics. I like the statement by the chap who said that if the bird's too high for you, then it's not an ethical shot. That being said, having played the driven game in Scotland once, each "gun" in our line had a "picker-up" whose only task was to mark and recover the birds we dropped. Seeing that driven pheasants are somewhat more akin to our preserve pheasants (not exactly however, and with a FAR better chance of survival when they run the gauntlet of guns) than they are to wild birds, the concept of challenging onesself while not overreaching seems reasonable to me. And there's no quicker way to get disinvited from a driven shoot than to take a bird so low that the shot endangers the beaters, or to consistently take only easy birds.