Posts Tagged → blood
Dogs vs. Drones in deer recovery Part 2
So you hit a deer, with an arrow or a bullet, and it ran, and now you want to find it. As is common, the critter crossed paths with you and your sporting weapon late in the day (deer especially move most at dawn and dusk), and now the sun is setting and daylight is fading. Finding the trail and following it is becoming less and less likely. After ten or fifteen minutes of looking for it, the sun is down and all you know is that you have some blood at the initial point of contact. Yes, the deer jumped high, mule kicked, and tucked its tail as it ran, all of which are good signs of a solid hit. But, you don’t have much of a blood trail and no light to follow one, even if you could find the spoor.
Archery hunters commonly back off at this point, and either wait an hour or two before resuming the search in earnest, using strong lights and extra eyes from friends, or they just leave the site altogether. Returning in the morning provides better light for trailing, and the good likelihood that the deer will have run only a short distance, bedded down because it is wounded and does not feel pressured, and then expired.
But what if you are worried about coyotes eating your prize overnight? And what if you think the hit was really good, and the ground cover is just so thick and difficult that there is a good chance the deer is lying dead just fifty yards away, and yet tough to see from where it was hit? Faced with these prospects, a lot of hunters will go after the deer, good blood trail or not, good visibility, or not.
Comes the question, what is the best way to find this wounded and probably dead deer: Should you stagger about in thick thorns in the dark, losing half your own blood and clothing in the process? Or should you call in the cavalry?
Today, calling in the cavalry means either getting a deer tracking dog (www.unitedbloodtrackers.org here in central PA), or getting a drone operator. Using either dogs or drones is not necessarily permitted in all states. After a ton of political wrangling over a twenty or thirty year period, Pennsylvania only got search dogs for finding wounded deer less than ten years ago, while for hundreds of years many southern states still use dogs to chase deer to hunters. So one state is worried about disturbing the hunting woods at all, while another state is OK with basically setting the woods on fire… for hunting.
Today, using drones to find wounded or expired deer in Pennsylvania is unsettled business. In fact, it is a mess. Here, too.
That is because the PA Game Commission worries about the misuse of drones for unethically looking for wildlife to hunt (gaining an artificial advantage), for herding and moving wildlife, etc. Fair enough, but what about the states that do allow drone recovery? Are those states just made up of unethical slobs who could never do a good job hunting or managing wild game?
And what about all of the cool videos online that show guys using drones to successfully find expired deer in the most improbable places that would have never occurred to even the most experienced band of searchers, or that would not have been accessible to a dog and its handler?
No question about it, recovery drones are both cool new shiny technology, and largely successful.
Deer dogs have their noses and the guidance of their experienced owners, while drones have infrared and thermal cameras that can go over a lot of territory quickly, at night, and often see a warm carcass through cover while the hunter simply stands and watches the video feed. Drones can often do the hours of work of a tracking dog in just a few minutes. On the other hand, dogs can pick up a two day old scent and follow it to the long-cold carcass, something a drone cannot do, unless the carcass is out in the open. In which case it will be but a pile of fresh bones.
But there are real concerns about drones, like spooking and pushing out an entire herd of deer, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, or looking too soon and unnecessarily pushing off the wounded animal to even farther distances, maybe over property lines. Some drone operators mount big flat screen TVs in their vehicles, so the drone search becomes less about recovery and more about entertainment and snooping on trophy deer at night. Some states require that the hunter who wounded the animal not be able to see the drone search results, to eliminate a possible inducement to cheat (like going after another, bigger, animal in the dark).
Of course, in places with big swamps, pythons, and alligators, a drone might be preferred!
One suggestion that Central Pennsylvania tracking dog handler Vicky Church has: Get deer/ game animal recovery drone operators certified. Not just by the FAA, but also by the PGC. Make sure that drone recovery operators are behaving ethically and legally. It is hard to argue with some version of this, even though I am philosophically opposed to any more regulation on our already far overburdened society.
Vicky says the deer dog people had to do it, so the drone people should, too. Hard to argue with her.
Hunting is supposed to be fun, and no wounded wild game animal should be abandoned to the coyotes just because search options were artificially limited by over-anxious regulators. My opinion is drones should be allowed for finding wounded wild game. But let’s face it, it is a lot more fun to watch a dog work the scent and the field.
Nothing beats the happy look of a smiling dog, or the people with it.
Wild Game recovery dog handler, Vicky Church. Photo by Tom, a hunter who benefited from Vicky’s help
Vicky and her dog trailing a wounded buck. Photo by Tom
No way a human is going to do this easily or well. Oh, many of us have tried it, without success. A drone might achieve this, if the cover is not too thick
Dogs vs. Drones in hunting recovery, part 1
If you hunt, you are going to end up tracking at some point.
Like it or not, even fatally hit deer, bear, especially elk, sheep, and other wild game animals can and often do run before they expire. Every single deer that I have shot through the heart has run at least 100 yards, sometimes two hundred, despite being mortally hit and having zero chance of recovering. Shot through the heart, a mammal is kaput, done for, 86ed, iced and dead. Nonetheless, all can run while the hydraulic fluid exits.
And the same holds true for animals hit through both lungs with an arrow, a shotgun slug, a bullet, a spear blade, or a round ball from a historic muzzleloader: All game animals can run, many will run, even while they are mortally hit and dying even more with each bound or step.
So, tracking hit game animals is as important a skill as is shooting them accurately with whatever your weapon of choice. Yes, deer often fall over and expire after being hit once, and that’s great if it happens for you. But for a lot of hunters, it just does not happen that way, and the critter runs a bit.
Depending upon the topography and ground cover of your happy hunting ground, your tracking job might be easy or it might be hard. Depending upon your tracking experience, your hunger pangs, your patience, your tiredness, and the amount of ground cover you have to fight your way through, this tracking job might be even harder.
When tracking gets hard to do, we hunters have four options: Call buddies to help us do a checkerboard search, use a buddy’s hunting dog to try to sniff out the hit animal, which rarely works in my experience, three use a drone with experienced operator, or four, bring in a dedicated tracking dog and handler.
Option one, hunting buddies, is the most common way to track down a hit animal. And it is generally successful. Most people just call in whoever is hunting with them, or whoever they know who is closest, and together they start on the expected path of the critter. Many hands make short work, and regardless of whether it is a night time recovery with headlamps or a brutal daytime slog busting through thorny brush, the more people a hunter has helping, the faster and better likelihood of success.
Option two, any dog, or even a “hunting” dog, almost never works. Yes, dogs can smell way better than us humans, but so what does that matter when the dog is excitedly sniffing and chasing every wild animal track it encounters? I recall using my friend’s duck dog to try to track down a gobbler whose head my Remington 870 had literally severed from its body. The headless beast ran unerringly straight across the field to the worst tangle of brambles, deadfalls, timber tops, regenerating forest, and Asian bittersweet on planet Earth, and then took wing. I have had some real bad luck with doorknob-dead turkeys running and flying away, but this one was the craziest example.
I drove to my friend’s house, got his dog Ori (my friend was at work), and drove back to the scene of first contact. Neck feathers and blood were all around where the load of #5s had separated the head from the body, and indeed, Ori started out strong there. She followed the running scent track into the jungle, and went into creep mode. Looked very promising. We stopped at a couple trees along our way, where she looked up the tree expectedly. I looked up too, because hey, I was just the puny human here among mystical animals with superhuman powers. I was just following directions.
Despite following a flight pattern, which has no scent that I can imagine, Ori took me on a pretty straight line through that jungle mess, that in fact directionally tracked with how the bird had run across the field. And also to her credit, at one tree blood and feathers showed where the turkey had crashed into the trunk. How she found that, I can’t imagine. At another tree, Ori found where the headless bird had lain or fallen at the base. I thought surely by now this bird is lying dead right around here. But the certainly dead turkey was nowhere to be found. Gone, vamoosed, vanished.
Another time, we used the purported “hunting” dog of the man whose son had hit a doe right before closing time. Scene of the hit was easy to see, and the initial tracking was easy. We hung bits of tissue paper along the blood trail and followed what projected as a straight death run.
Dark fell upon us, but blood was everywhere, the path seemed self evident, the deer was obviously hard hit, and our feeble head lamps gave us the impression that we could see. But no luck. The dog was then got from home and brought in. He started out on the actual blood trail, but then started going off in wide tangents. We quit at midnight, shaking our heads. When we returned the next morning, that damned dead doe was lying a few feet away from where several of us searchers, AND THAT DAMNED DOG, had walked many times the night before. It just blended in with the forest floor, and the dog’s nose never picked it up.
So, don’t waste your time with option two, a dog not trained to track wounded game, unless you enjoy telling hunting stories of woe and frustration.
Part Two on Dogs vs Drones coming up soon.
Flintlock season recap
- Gunmaker Mark Wheland with the gun of my dreams, a flintlock English Sporting Rifle made just for me
Writing a blog is a delicate walk, because as much as I want to write about the righteous boss daddy treatment President Trump gave to weasel rat dictator Zelensky the other day, I have to stay focused on what our audience of exactly One Person has requested. If I turn off my one reader, then I will literally be writing solely for the air and the stars.
For the record, just because you or I call Zelensky (Ukraine) the weasel rat dictator he is, does not mean that you or I automatically like or support dictator Putin (Russia). Both of these men are in power because they have subverted their nations’ elections, amassed wealth and power at the expense of their countrymen, etc. Yes, Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and yes, Ukraine can and should negotiate a settlement that ends the bloodshed. And yes, Trump should demand and expect to receive rare earth metals in return for all of the taxpayer support Americans have given to Ukraine. This is all normal.
Wanting the war to go on and on with greater bloodshed and destruction on both sides and with more powerful rockets is not normal. That is warmongering.
Anyhow, the late hunting season here in Central Pennsylvania was exciting, but had no filled tags. I used to rabbit hunt a lot, but gave up when the rabbit populations showed signs of vaporizing due to abundant fishers and bobcats. For five or six years now I have hardly seen one rabbit in places where I have created the best habitat, and where rabbits should be swarming. So for many years I have just hunted the late flintlock season for deer, instead, just about daily.
And also trapped for predators, including fishers and bobcats. Not this season, however. On the December flight back from Florida, a man behind me kept coughing and sneezing. He never covered his mouth, and made no attempt to keep from infecting everyone around him. Sure enough, a week later I was showing signs of the same horrible illness half the country has now had, a persistent dry cough and a close brush with pneumonia. Lots of people are getting the pneumonia. So, I was sick as hell during the time I normally set traps, and my kit and steel just sat and sat.
Instead, just about every day after Christmas, I would go out for a couple hours and try to intercept a deer with the new flintlock, coughing quietly into my clothes to muffle the bark. I got off a lot of shots, collected blood and hair, but filled no tags. A new white checked Filson wool coat helped me blend in with the snowy woods.
Made for me by Mark Wheland, the new flintlock is a 62-caliber rifle based on the English Sporting Rifle design, which I have come to admire. It has a 28 inch decently swamped octagonal barrel by Getz from about 15 years ago, a beautiful patent breech made by Jason Schneider at Rice Barrels, a RE Davis late-flintlock era Manton-style waterproof lock, and a gorgeous stock of highly figured and irridescent English walnut. Wheland turned a perfect ebony ramrod, as well as its horn end and its threaded steel connector end.
The Manton-style lock has a roller frizzen, which is both very fast and also very touchy. Hunting in brush without bumping the heel of my hand up against the back of the frizzen would result in some blade of grass flicking it open and dumping the priming powder on the ground. So it requires some special handling, because it is so sensitive.
I also struggled with this gun’s sights all season long, probably also slowly acclimating to the short barrel. This barrel is ten inches shorter than that on my long-time go-to 54 caliber flintlock barrel, that is 38″ long, and my eyes have not yet made the transition. Moreover, the new gun has classic British rear sights, one standing and one folding leaf. The rear sites were conveyed to me with only the most rudimentary and shallow “V” filed in the standing sight, and the front sight was about a half inch high. It was up to me, in a short amount of time, to get this gun sighted in just days before bear season began, which is just days before deer season started.
So I just struggled to get the gun sighted in, and by the time actual flintlock season began, the day after Xmas, it was printing dead center and 2.5″ high at 50 yards. With 130 grains of FFG Swiss pushing the 335-grain lead round ball about 1500 feet per second, I reckoned it was probably dead-on at 100 yards. Or minute-of-deer chest within 100 yards.
I lost track of how many shots I took at deer. Mostly at does. One probably legal buck I let walk past me. Some deer I literally just walked right up to in the snow, and missed, maybe forty yards away. Others I ambushed from concealment on trail crossings, from fifty out to about 95 yards, while sitting. Each miss resulted in a little more blacking being put on the rear sight, a little more color added here or there, and by the end of the season the front sight was filed down to about 1/8″ high and painted bright neon orange. The rear sight has a bright neon yellow inverted V wedge under the V aperature, surrounded by black. I am thinking about scrapping the entire arrangement and going to front and rear fiber optic sights. Old eyes…
One doe was flattened by what seemed like a perfect broadside at 75 yards. I saw her go down through the cloud of smoke, and when I walked up I expected to find her stone cold dead. But while there was a perfect outline of her body in the snow, with plenty of blood, the actual deer was nowhere to be found. With dusk fast approaching, I used my headlamp to follow as far as I could in the snow and the thick brambles, and then went home. The next morning I returned and took up the trail, which resulted in three deer fleeing from fresh beds, one of which had some fresh drips of blood, but not much. Not even the coyotes would end up eating her.
My last shot of the season was taken like a mortar, at the biggest buck I have ever seen in the wild. He was just a bit over 200 yards away, and had been spooked out of his hidey nook by my prowling. When I snuck back towards the anticipated cut-off, he was indeed standing right there, looking all around, on high alert. While down wind, I was as close as I could get without being seen. So I took some pictures of him, which of course did not come out well, and then took careful aim with plenty of “Kentucky elevation” and let ‘er rip. At the shot he flew away with wings, and on my follow up I found where the big lead ball had hit the ground at plane, leaving a 20-foot-long long streak through the snow and dirt directly in line with the buck’s shoulder, but about 20 yards too short. His tracks were among the biggest I have ever seen. Guessing a 200″ buck.
The doe was flattened, and leaked some hydraulic fluid, but was gone and lived on
I have a lot more practice to do with this gun.
What looks like a shallow white “W” is just the higher visibility part of the huge buck’s enormous rack
Overnight beds, tiny amount of blood, a mere flesh wound and a long-lived lucky deer
The long path cut by the 335-grain round ball on its way towards the big buck
Nice view down into the woods, perfect for a flintlock. Yes, the barrel key is loose, which accounted for two missed shots
Hunting around an enormous buck capable of leaving big rubs like this one is excitement enough. Actually seeing him and getting a shot…even the miss is the highlight of the season
Sweet Ellen Greenberg’s last two minutes alive
On a cold winter evening in January, 2011, pretty, sweet, gentle, tiny 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg was brutally murdered, stabbed to death in her back and chest twenty times with a kitchen knife that only moments before she had been using.
In addition to the homicidal wounds, one of which severed her spinal cord and rendered her body completely limp, which meant subsequent stabs must have been done with real rage, the autopsy of her body also showed deep bruising on her legs, torso, and arms, old and new. Marks around her neck showed that she had been recently strangled. Her body showed the signs that physically abused people typically carry. Ellen had probably been physically abused for a long time.
So when Ellen was making herself a small meal in the kitchen in which she was about to be attacked, she had already packed up her personal things, including her makeup. She had locked the apartment door, including the inner latch, because she wanted to be left alone. She had made up her mind to move out of the apartment she shared with her fiance, Sam Goldberg, either going home to Harrisburg, or moving in with one of her friends. Ellen had not yet made up her mind where.
For the past fifteen minutes, Sam had been texting Ellen, asking her to unlock the inner door latch, so that he could get into the apartment. Apparently Ellen had been ignoring him, because his last text said “You have no idea.”
Apparently Sam was in a rage.
Seconds later Sam kicked in the door, which broke the inner latch, and the rest of what happened seems clearly obvious to everyone except the corrupt Philadelphia Police, the corrupt Philadelphia DA’s office, and now a formerly corrupted or confused medical examiner, Dr. Marlon Osbourne, all of whom said sweet Ellen’s death was a suicide.
The man who conducted Ellen’s autopsy, who saw the bruises and the stab wounds from behind, who saw the photo of a large clump of Ellen’s hair on the kitchen floor, who initially ruled her death a suicide, Dr. Osbourne, has now changed his official opinion to “death not by suicide,” which sounds a hell of a lot like a line from a purposefully ridiculous Monty Python skit.
In other words, Dr. Osbourne now says Ellen was murdered, to which everyone around the world who has a heart and a brain says “No sh*t, Sherlock.” We already knew this years ago. It only took a lawsuit against Dr. Osbourne by Ellen’s parents and a pending court appearance to finally elicit his honest opinion, again.
Minutes after Ellen had slumped to the floor, Sam Goldberg called his uncle and his cousin, both of whom are criminal defense lawyers who live near the apartment Ellen shared with Sam. Only after Sam spoke with his lawyer relatives did he call 911, and tell the dispatcher “She fell on a knife.”
Now that Dr. Osbourne has changed his opinion about Ellen’s death, the law demands that a real criminal investigation be conducted. There is no statute of limitations on murder. And Ellen’s personal journal can finally be released from Dr. Osbourne’s office to her parents and to whomever is going to be investigating her murder, and whomever is going to be investigating the blatant coverup.
I mean, surely someone in law enforcement wants to know how Sam’s uncle, who is both a criminal defense lawyer and a former judge, was allowed full access into the apartment right after Ellen’s death. We know that the lawyer uncle left the apartment with some of Ellen’s personal belongings, including her computer.
Other glaringly obvious questions come to mind: What did Sam’s uncle take from the apartment? Why did he take them? What did he do with them?
Why has Dr. Osbourne’s office clung to Ellen’s personal journal all these years, unwilling to release it? If no murder happened, then why not release it, right? Why say Ellen suicided herself, but then act like you know she was murdered, Dr. Osbourne? Wonder what that journal says!
Why did the Philadelphia Police behave so casually about Ellen’s death? Her blood was splattered all over her kitchen, and her battered body showed the usual signs of a homicide. Her clump of hair on the kitchen floor was from someone grabbing her hair and violently pulling it (probably to bend her over to be able to stab her in the back of her neck).
Why did the Philadelphia DA’s office send representatives to an early 2011 meeting with the Medical Examiner and the Philly police, and have them ask that Ellen’s death certificate be changed from homicide to suicide?
What is the connection between the 2011 Philadephia DA’s office and Sam’s family? Obviously both were “in the business” together, and probably knew each other. Did that relationship somehow color the medical examiner’s decision to change his office’s initial finding of homicide?
Even more bizarre was the decision by then – PA AG Josh Shapiro to let stand the suicide ruling just a couple years ago, despite lots of new evidence that said otherwise. Shapiro also had a personal relationship with Sam’s family, and a political relationship, too.
Just so, so many tangled relationships in this whodunit murder, and not enough transparency about them!
Justice for Ellen demands that some outside professional outfit conduct the subsequent investigation into who murdered her. Who can do it? Josh Shapiro is now the governor, and he oversees the PA State Police. That means he could influence any investigation they would do. The FBI is completely corrupt, infiltrated, politicized, and untrustworthy, so they are out.
I don’t know who can investigate who murdered sweet Ellen Greenberg, but at this point, there is so much physical and circumstantial evidence out in public already that all we really need is an outdoor court room with split rail seating, a horse, a rope, and a tree.
I volunteer to slap the horse in the ass.
Ballistics Lesson #439
Today I learned a ballistics lesson that I have learned before, that everyone under the sun knows, but which I always seem to forget every few years. Maybe it is not forgetting, but curious wondering that gets the better of me. If you are interested in reading about an old man making a foolish mistake, read on.
So late this morning I set out to still hunt a large section of reverting, regenerating forest. It is brutal stuff – blackberry, briars, weeds of every sort, and jungle-thick growth of oak and popar saplings and whips, all anchored in downed tree tops and branches from a timber sale we did about twelve years ago. It is hell to hunt, and that is why this place is full of hiding deer. So, we go to where the deer are, and if we do it right, we can still-hunt our way into close range of a fat doe or a decent buck just rising out of his bed.
When I finally got there after a fifteen minute hike, the wind was howling, tree branches were falling, leaves were flying, and the couple inches of snow on the ground made it all perfect. And so I set out very slowly walking into the wind, taking a few steps, then stopping to look all around, watching not to step on any big sticks that would make a loud crack, and also moving quickly when the wind raged. My own movements and sounds were masked by the crazy roaring winds and falling tree debris from above.
After about ten minutes of slowly picking my way downhill and into the wind, I was looking at a nice juicy doe. Probably two years old and plump, she was just 25 yards away and looking around. She probably was getting brief whiffs of me, but in the blasting seesawing winds she was not able to get a read on where the scent was coming from. Too late for her, I raised the rifle and bang, watched her standing there, unfazed. A clear miss.
Levering another round into the chamber, I took more careful aim at her, now acutely aware of the chunky backpack strap on my shoulder that was making it difficult to correctly anchor the buttstock to my cheek. With her right shoulder clearly centered in the ghost ring, I pulled the trigger and again, watched as she just stood there, stock still and unable to detect where the strange sounds and smells were coming from.
As I jacked a third round in, she suddenly jumped up and took off running fast, downhill, her head pointed low and her tail tucked. She was obviously hit by the second shot, but usually the 325 grain 45-70 caliber bullets just absolutely smash critters at that close range. I know from my own experience. But this running after the smashing blow was a new one to me.
And so I took my time to catch up to her clear trail in the leaves and snow. I searched around on the ground and found the two spent brass shells ejected from the Marlin, shook off the snow, and put them in my left front pocket.
Initially, no blood was visible, but her feet were going in all directions as she staggered. She was hard hit and struggling. A hundred yards later, large smudges of blood and hair appeared on trees. Then blood on the snow. Another hundred yards and we were out of the more open forest regeneration and back into the thick jungle. Her clumsy hoof marks were easy to see, and here and there was blood. This animal was dying and did not know it. At every turn I expected to find her lying there, expired. So much indication of impending death, and yet so much resilience to live on.
The long and short of this tale is, I ended up tracking her for over an hour, which is an eternity. During this time I had bedded deer up and running in all directions, including a large buck. If you really want deer, the thick, nasty, gnarly places are where they are hiding. But I was after this one wounded doe, and I had no eyes for any others, including one that stood up almost in front of me. After quickly checking that she was not bleeding, I let her leave.
Doing a 360 degree circle around where her last blood sign was located, I determined that she was either dead or close to dying in a large tangle of old rotting tree tops covered in Japanese stiltgrass, burdock, mile-a-minute, bramble, and briar. Nasty, difficult, not a place for a man to easily or comfortably move in, I marked where she was and moved on to the afternoon sit a mile away. Tomorrow morning I will return and find her frozen body. Unless the coyotes get to her first, she will feed a hungry family here in Central PA.
After withstanding the afternoon’s buffeting winds and feeling colder than I have in years on the edge of the crop field, I finally gathered my kit, ducked out of my friend’s blind, and headed back to the truck. He later sent me a trail camera picture of the local deer herd walking out into the crop field literally one minute after I had exited the blind. They knew I was there and were just waiting for me to leave.
Back home I emptied my pockets onto the kitchen island, including the two empty 45-70 brass cases I had emptied at the doe. Picking them up to look at them, I noticed that one of them had the Hornady stamp, and the other bore the Star Line stamp. I use the factory 325 grain Hornady FTX bullets for bear and deer hunting (very successfully with both species), and I reload the Star Line with 325 grain brass solids, from Cutting Edge Bullets, for grizzly self defense in Alaska and for black bear hunting here in Pennsylvania. Especially on drives through the laurel. These brass solids will absolutely and unstoppably smash their way through a tough grizzly bear with its heavy bones and super tough muscles, but they will ziiiiip right through a whitetail deer.
And suddenly it dawned on me. I had first overshot and missed the doe with the Hornady FTX, and then literally drilled her body through-and-through with the brass solid second shot. I had jumbled up the two loads in my pockets, and when loading the rifle I had failed to put a second Hornady FTX round in the gun as the initial followup shot. Instead, I had a grizzly bear load as the followup shot, and as one might expect, the grizzly bear load did not kill the doe on the spot. Nope. That brass solid at 2100 feet per second just zipped cleanly through her entire body like a small laser beam. None of its energy was dumped into her by the bullet mushrooming, with massive terminal shock, as the FTX is designed to do.
And only then, when back at home, did I understand why the doe had reacted that way, how she took a few seconds to realize that something bad had happened to her, but that while fatal, it was not something that was going to kill her dead right there. She was only mostly dead from the brass solid. By now, as I write this, she is most assuredly frozen solid in that tangled hell that I will go back to tomorrow morning. Hopefully the coyotes will not have found her.
Had I used the correct expanding bullet, I would have had nothing to write about tonight. It would have been just another successful slow stalk through the thick ‘n nasty, with the rifle butt up at my shoulder, the hammer back, and me ready to jump shoot a deer.
Instead, I had to re-learn a rudimentary ballistics lesson, which is if you want to kill thin skinned game, use expanding bullets that transfer all of their energy into the prey animal’s body. If you shoot a high velocity scalpel at the prey animal, it will cleanly and surgically cut it, even make neat clean holes through bones, but that wound might not bleed much and the animal might not know it is supposed to be dead until it has run a long distance away from the man with the gun, and into impossible cover.
Sign like this, blood smear and hair at deer chest height, says this is a dead deer running.
A 325 grain solid brass Cutting Edge Bullets 45-70 load I make for grizzly in Alaska is a terrible backup load for whitetail deer
The deer that got away, but shouldn’t have
Below is the buck after the second bullet, at about 140 yards, the hole of which is visible behind his shoulder; a classic behind-the-shoulder double lung/ top of heart hit. Usually it’s immediately fatal. Usually the animal is knocked down by the impact. But not that day. He absorbed the second soft point without moving, just standing there broadside, as if I had completely missed him. Even after he dropped he had a lot of life and fight left, as can be seen in his death spiral in the snow.
My challenge was that I did not see him fall, which happened while I was fumbling with my binoculars. Because I do not often use a rifle scope, I do not maintain a magnified field of view after my shot. Going back and forth between open sights and binoculars is my process.
As an aside, you may wonder why I use open sights, or you may be one of those people who deride open sights. Shooting instinctively with open sights is how I grew up and how I learned to hunt. Unlike a scope, open sights can take a lot more abuse in the field before they go out of whack. Unlike a scope, they cannot possibly lose their “zero” after spending eleven months in a closet. Open sights are absolutely reliable, and perfectly effective. Recall that American infantry are qualified on open sights out to 600 yards (or meters), so it is not like these things are relics from the past. Open sights are the best option, provided they are installed correctly and checked annually.
My preference for open sights is about more than performance, however. It has to do with how I like to hunt: On foot, getting close to the animal, within its sensory zone, and trying to kill it on its own terms, up close. This is a true contest of skill, not an assassination. And I hardly think an open-sighted center fire rifle is a disadvantage; it is a huge advantage over a spear or a bow. Scoped rifles are just that much more of an advantage.
So, I did not see the buck fall, and he fell into a small swale where I could not see him. Not wanting to stink up the woods and ruin further hunting, I sat on my butt and scoured the woods for signs of a deer. In fact, I saw a large buck a couple hundred yards away sneak into a thick tree top blowdown. It made me think the buck I had shot at was gut-shot and sneaking away to lie down, and so I did not push him. Only when the crows showed up over an hour later was it evident that the buck was in fact dead right where I had last seen him.
Time to create Kurdistan out of Iraq
Now that a slim majority of the Iraqi parliament has voted to demand the full exit of American everything from Iraq, it is time for America, the liberator and vanquisher of Iraq, to decide what to do next.
Note that Iraq is roughly 60% Shia Muslim, who identify closely with Shia-majority Iran. That 60% of Iraq’s population lives in a relatively small region adjoining Iran, and despite holding such a small geographical area, about 15% of Iraq’s surface area, the population dominates the entire country.
One of the enormous mistakes made by the Bush administration when invading Iraq were these assumptions: 1) Iraqis will welcome Americans as liberators the same way Europeans welcomed American GIs in World War II; 2) Iraqis will be forever grateful for America’s liberation of Iraq, and they will therefore become a key ally in the region; 3) Iraq was, is, and will be fertile ground for planting western-style democracy, thereby creating some form of democratic government that will naturally cooperate with America and other Western nations.
These assumptions were rightly questioned at the time of the Iraq invasion, and they were further questioned during the occupation and subjugation of the native jihadis there. In recent years a kind of quiet war of careful positioning has followed, and so the newest assumption was that America had been successful in all ways, and had brought lasting peace to Iraq. And so, the thinking has gone, America can just pull up stakes and move everyone back home.
Not so fast.
Being anti-war is understandable if it applies to unjust wars, unwarranted wars, stupid wars, wasteful wars, and artificially inhibited wars, all of which applied up front to the American invasion of Iraq and then the occupation. Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the Iraq occupation was the ridiculous “rules of engagement,” created by Bush and further tightened by Obama, whereby our own troops pretty much had to bleed before they were allowed to return fire against aggressors. These insanely restrictive rules of engagement inhibited American forces from doing their job effectively, quickly, and safely. These rules led to years of IEDs and snipers killing and badly wounding American military personnel who were in Iraq to bring peace and prosperity to Iraqis, and to an anti-warrior culture at the Pentagon back home, whereby devoted fighters like Navy SEAL operations chief Edward “Eddie” Gallagher were often held to impossibly impractical standards for conduct on the field of battle against merciless enemies. And then made an example of by desk jockeys and armchair generals.
Almost all of those IED and sniper attacks on American forces could have been prevented by having either no rules of engagement, or rules of engagement that greatly and quite naturally favored the interests of our forces over vague concerns about perceptions and lingering “feelings” of Iraqis.
However, the rules of engagement stayed on and what was done was done; now twenty years later, America has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars and tanker trucks of American blood to bring peace and prosperity to yet another group of Middle East/Near East/ Muslim people who really don’t value peace and prosperity, nor democracy, either. None of these things that Americans and Europeans value are valued by Muslims, plain and simple. This is proven by the lack of peace, the lack of prosperity, and the lack of democracy or the rule of law in every..single…Muslim country.
So now that the vanquished are demanding that the conqueror leave Iraq, what should America do?
Our main options are to stay and fight all over again, or to appease the Iraqi government, which is now largely a Shia proxy of Iran’s theocracy, or to turn and leave.
Staying and fighting is unappealing, because we did that already, at great cost. The “no blood for oil” cries of the initial invasion were prophetic, as America stupidly declined to take any payment of any sort for our efforts. Not even in abundant Iraqi oil, which could have been easily and fairly shipped home to offset our huge investment in Iraq’s freedom and stability.
Appeasing the Shia-led Iraqi government is also unappealing and impractical, as appeasement never works, it just delays the inevitable conflict while our enemy prepares overtime for violent conflict. Thus prolonging the inevitable.
Finally, America can turn and leave, pulling up stakes and bidding farewell to Iraq with a “pox on your house” tossed over our shoulder as we send everyone home. This option has the greatest emotional appeal, and for good reason: Those who love and cherish American military personnel are loathe to see them sacrificed once again or any longer in the pursuit of vague, poorly defined, or improbable geopolitical goals. And the oil-less Iraq war and occupation was nothing if not poorly defined with vague, improbable goals at huge cost. But leaving cold turkey is a terrible option, because it will mean America invested trillions of dollars and thousands of wonderful young men for nothing. Not even for oil, and yet we will be in a worse position than we were when we first invaded.
A fourth option exists, and will take some creativity to implement. But it is doable, and is the best of all our options, because it allows America to meet all of its geopolitical and strategic goals at minimal cost to our servicemen and taxpayers.
This fourth option is to subdivide Iraq into new states, based on ethnicity and or religious makeup. Similar to how Pakistan was created out of India in 1948.
We will support those new states that share our interests, and we will harass and undermine those states that ally themselves with our sworn enemies, like Iran (and yes, theocratic Iran has been America’s sworn enemy long before Israel had a dog in that fight). Thus, breaking up Iraq into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish states will allow us to more easily identify and help our friends, and more easily isolate and fight our enemies. It will take the vast majority of Iraq’s Shia Muslims and keep them in the smallest geographical area of Iraq where they already live. It will also enable America to finally begin to take payment from the vast oil fields that are mostly surrounded by pro-America Kurds. Most of Iraq’s geography is already divided up along ethnic and sectarian lines, so the new state lines on the map can be pretty easily drawn to match.
By creating the modern Kurdistan, America will implement several goals. First, we will be placing most of the existing oil fields in the hands of a people who have been and who still are naturally inclined to ally with America. America will benefit from the oil not going to Iran, and we can always set up a long-overdue financial debt repayment program with the Kurds, in oil or in oil receipts.
Second, we will be undermining two of the most dangerous states in the region, Iran and Turkey, both of whom have openly demonstrated clear goals of regional domination at any cost and with any method. Recall that Turkey has been quietly allied with ISIS, and also has been openly in pursuit of genocide against the Kurds while lusting after their oil fields. Iran’s ideological threat needs no explanation, as they openly wish to explode many nuclear bombs across America, and for years they have been quietly exploiting our open southern border in preparation to do just this.
In the spirit of the times, I propose the creation of Shiastan (capital city of Najaf), Sunnistan (capital city of Baghdad), and Kurdistan (capital city of Kirkuk) in response to Iraq’s declaration of war against America.
Source: Ohio State University Department of History, which in turns attributes the US government
409+
Last week, under pressure to perform at an adult, professional level, the senior staff at the NCAA folded right before appearing in court.
The discovery phase of a lawsuit brought against the NCAA for its disproportionate over-correction of Penn State University was about to begin, and with a handful of damning NCAA emails already in hand, the meaty part of discovery would have exposed the heavy handed NCAA overlords for what they are: Incompetent, vacuous bullies.
The fictional Louis Freeh “report” aka Hit Piece and Flaming Bomb Meant to Humble Penn State has gradually yielded to the collective bits of disbelief and basic deductive logic surrounding the Joe Paterno Assassination aka The Oxbow Incident.
Knowing now what we already knew two years ago, the NCAA storm trooper and tactical nuke assault on one of the very few pristine colleges in the nation has blown up in the NCAA’s own face.
Yes, we got our 409 wins back, but we deserve so much more.
And to have undergone so much knee-jerk reaction injustice…..Penn State deserves compensation, to be made whole, to get back what we lost, if it’s remotely possible.
I want blood.
I want guts.
I want a shred of public justice for Joe Paterno and Penn State, and for the student athletes immorally saddled with faux guilt from the sick, distant actions of a man they’d never met, let alone heard of (Jerry Sandusky).
To begin with, the Joe Paterno statue immediately goes back to its original prominent place on campus.
Then, every member of the PSU board involved in the debacle issues a personal, hand written apology. And then each resigns. I’ve got a few names to go with that demand.
Then each NCAA staff member associated with the debacle issues a hand written apology, and then resigns.
That’s what real leaders do when they fail badly.
And for those folks who really want to demonstrate their earnest attitude, I’ve got some old Japanese swords you can fall on. I’m tempted to serve as your second….to ensure a clean ending, of course.
A clean ending to a tragedy, a failure to protect little boys, a failure to act like grown men and women and apply justice carefully, a failure to protect the grown boys on the team and the many professional educators and students unfairly tarnished by the NCAA’s hasty, shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude.
And then there’s the scholarships, the bowl money PSU lost. The opportunities unfairly crushed. How do we get all that back?
And Mr Louis Freeh, you may be ex-FBI, but I’m ex-Penn State Nittany Lion. Don’t meet me in a dark alley.