doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Lead & Condor deaths

LR, you would have enjoyed the home I grew up in. In 1960 my father gave a hot young architect a building lot he split off an acreage he owned in return for designing, building and furnishing our family home. The architect built his home next door. Both houses and the furnishings within were paeans to the mid century style and designers you mentioned. The homes were odd doppelgangers of each other, ours designed for a family of seven with somewhat traditional values, the other for a family of four with adults as hip and swinging as it was possible to be. His wife was, at the time, the prima ballarina of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and their home a centre for artists and urban culture. Yet the two homes were remarkably similar in many respects.

The Habs are tanking so I'm depressed....the Jets are worse than last year so I'm getting the razors out. And New England is out so what is the point of going on! The only sporting salvation comes from Serena's ouster and Vonn's continued dominance.

King's blather about our new defense minister is more national insecurity masked as pride.....a Liberal fixation on personality rather than policy. It is his, and our nation's, Achilles Heel. The Libs are busy reclaiming Canada's role as a "soft" power and crowing about it too. We all know what soft power is.....impotence. Only the left can make that a virtue.

Trump will implode in the coming months leaving behind the particular gift of destroying PC, at least for a while, and enabling true conversations to happen. Rubio will overtake Cruz because Cruz just happens to be a particularly unlikable guy. And with any luck, Saunders will end Hillary's presidential aspirations and get the true leftist ambitions of the Democrats out in the open.

How does this relate to condors and lead? Regardless of who wins, the war on hunters will continue, with bad science that has emotional impact continuing to take precedence over sound science, reason and evidence based policy.

In politics there are no "true conversations"....

Good for you and your son. The wording of King's note was about someone, here as a fan of the double gun, encouraging grandkids and great grandkids, not just his, to 'progress' away from the barbaric and toxic nature of the blood sports.

Way back a bunch of pages, you mentioned that lead levels of 5 point something can be found in eagles, and .2 ppm is considered toxic. I'm confident that you're aware of 'studies' that show normal acting and appearing pheasant can have bone lead levels in the mid four hundreds ppm. Are you going to insist that the only source of that lead came from expended lead shot?

Speaking from familiarity with my part of the world, a virtual Shangri-la for those inclined to hunt and fish, there has been little or no increase in participants over the last 50 years.

Acadians still come down from Cape Breton to hammer away at "fish" ducks in our district, a few from cities and towns within 150 miles for other ducks and geese, but no increase in numbers of locals.

There's a strong consensus on this board for the reasons of a generational decline in interest everywhere. Publics wait for me as a dinosaur to be buried.

King, that's pretty true in the core duck hunting areas of Manitoba as well. Delta Waterfowl is trying hard to get youngsters involved but those kids tend to be the offspring of hunters and were going to be introduced to it anyway. Little new blood.

Not so horrible here. I had a new grad student walk in to my office yesterday and ask me if I could take him and teach him about hunting. And he is not alone, nor does he come from a hunting background, so he is entirely tableau rosa at this point. This is not too unusual for me actually and as often as not, it is women who are looking to hunt.

We shall begin with turkeys.

Well, a little increase shouldn't be minimized, as Canada has seen a significant population transition to urban areas, in much less than that time.

My understanding is ducks up around by you are just 'rats with wings', a position that the publics appreciate in terms of drawing agenda lines and labeling ethical hunters as slobs.

You should do a 'host a hunt' for one or two inner city kids that win a letter writing contest about why I'd like to try duck hunting, but don't have the opportunity. Heck, you could sit in your easy chair, stuff a few shells in their pocket, and point 'em towards the water while you watch with your morning coffee. Remind them, no eagle for lunch though. Just a thought.

Yes I have ran into quite few 'young' (25 - 35) year olds wanting to take up hunting. About half female and half male. Hunting in reality is a difficult sport to get into. It has a very costly start up cost (guns, shells, clothes and accessories, gas, food, etc), more than hockey (which is the most expensive sport for school kids) the amount of knowledge about the many different facets takes years to accumulate and it is hard work in many cases and takes time. Success does not come easily so there can be little gratification. After a few times out many of these 'young' people realize this and drop off.

The other reality is that in Calgary the divorce rate is around 60%, I believe somewhere in the +40% across Canada. That means single young mothers bringing up kids on their own. Most sports are out of the question due to time and cost and hunting doesn't rate a discussion.

It is super difficult and it's not just the cost. It is access to everything - access to land to hunt of course, access to places to shoot, access to licenses (either because of lottery or things like hunter-safety training, etc.).

I don't think single moms are really that big of a deal. Kids with single moms still have dads. I would say there is just a whole lot more competition for a kid's time and then there is pressure or at least a bias towards playing things like team sports and other organized things where there are mechanisms to get it started.

FWIW, in rural Iowa (and esp. semirural Iowa) schools the hottest sport in the last 5-10 years seems to be.... Trap shooting. No injury risk like football, no requirements for ridiculous training schedules like the big team sports, no equipment to speak of - a shotgun is easy and can even be shared or team-owned, and lots of kids that have been disenfranchised by the Friday Night Lights syndrome, so they shoot. Both boys and girls. Seems to be a lot of it going on, so much so that all my local trap ranges are running almost every night with one school or another borrowing the range for practice.

Brent, you Iowans are on to something. We had seven-time world and Olympic champion Susan Nattrass running a university sports program here for years. It didn't translate into greater interest among females and males.

From my experience with scads of young people, females have shown more interest, stick-with-it than males but I think the attraction is competition, and the females excel at competition. Shooting anything with feathers, no way.

Iowans obviously introduced shooting properly.