Here’s an update on the wounded deer I posted about two days ago: https://exposingthebiggame.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/wildlife-vet-or-rehabber-needed-asap/
If you know anyone who might have a new suggestion (aside from shooting him or doing nothing), or if you have experience with this and can determine from this photo what should be done to help this poor guy, please post it here or email: exposingthebiggame@gmail.com
Today I received this message and photos from a friend in need who lives in rural Oregon:
“F-ing bow hunters. I took this pic in my backyard minutes ago. Arrow sticking out his back, bleeding. How do I help him?! Do you know anyone who works with wildlife? This buck spent the entire summer with me….I can’t stop shaking. ”
Desperate to help the poor deer and hoping to find help getting the arrow removed, the friend had called the game department, who told her it wouldn’t be safe to tranquilize the deer. Next she reached a vet, who said she was in luck because a wildlife vet was visiting and that they would come over and see what they could do. Well, they never showed up! Here are some of the posts she made throughout the day:
“He’s laying down surrounded by the other bucks, does and fawns. It seems as though they are trying to help him, protect him, support him. You have to love the culture of animals. Still waiting for help…”
“…this buck is very comfortable around me. I think that’s why he came here. I don’t want to approach him until help arrives. If he runs off, we can’t help him. If he says here, hunters can’t see him from the road (see the big wood fence in the photo.) I’m sure the person who shot him is trying to find him so he can mount his head on his wall. Thanks for all the suggestions. Just waiting for help.”
“I’m shaking too bad to get any video….I’m so worried about him. I also want to keep a good distance so he doesn’t leave. If he takes off, I can’t help him. Still waiting for help.”
“F&W have told me it’s too risky to tranquilize him. He could fall in the pond and drown, or fall and roll on the arrow. I’m desperately trying to find other avenues for help.”
“I’m just trying to make sure he stays. He walks just fine. He’s sleeping now. If a hunter crosses my fence and comes into my yard, it won’t bode well for him. He wouuld have to kill me. Whoever shot him is gone. The deer has been here wounded for at least 7 hours, probably a lot longer. I’m just waiting for the wildlife vets to see if there is anything we can do. They are professionals from Minnesota, who just happen to be visiting the area.”
Another friend of hers posted: “I just did some research and found some interesting info. In Oregon it is NOT legal for any person to enter your property to retrieve wounded game without permission. They have to get permission no matter what. If you deny them and the animal dies and you do not claim it than you can be (supposedly) charged with waste.”
To which she replied: “Thanks TJ. How likely do you think it would be that I would give them permission to come on my property? Not likely at all. Like I said, anyone who wants to kill this deer on my property will have to kill me first. Still waiting for the vets. He’s resting now.”
“Still waiting for help. He’s doing remarkably well, considering the circumstances. I’m not handling as well as he is. I’m so sick over this.”
“Just found out that early bow season ended 4 WEEKS AGO! This animal was poached, and I think I know who did it. Bow hunting needs to be outlawed. 2 out of 3 animals hit aren’t killed immediately and suffer….enough!”
“It’s going to be dark soon and the deer will leave. Still waiting. This may have to be handled tomorrow. The good news is that he’s hanging in there.”
” I’ve known him since he was a fawn. No sleep for me tonight. He’s family…”
Bowhunting must end!! If anyone knows of a wildlife rehabber who will take this on, please let me know and I’ll pass her your info. You can email me at: exposingthebiggame@gmail.com
The archery season for wolves north of Yellowstone National Park came to an abrupt halt this week after the pre-established sub-quota of one wolf was met.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks noted that the wolf archery-only season will close a half-hour after sunset on Friday in Wolf Management Unit 313, which include portions of Park County.
This hunting district will re-open for the hunting of wolves for the general season in this district beginning Sept. 15.
Check helenair.com for more on this breaking story.
In agreeing with President Obama’s plan to strike Syria, Representative Nancy Pelosi was quoted as saying we must respond to actions “outside the circle of civilized human behavior.” Nice to hear that the U.S. Government thinks it has the moral authority to respond to such actions. While they’re at it, I can think of a whole lot of other actions which should be considered “outside the circle of civilized human behavior” that are desperately in need of responding to.
I’m referring, of course, to the innumerable abuses of non-human animals by humans—many that go on every day right here in the U.S. of A. I’m afraid if I were to try to list all the instances of human mistreatment of other animals which should fall outside the “circle of civilized human behavior,” the pages would fill the halls of justice, spill out onto the streets and overflow the banks of Potomac River in an unending tsunami of savagery.
So here’s just a partial list…
Wolf Hunting—No sooner did grey wolves begin to make a comeback in the Lower 48 than did the feds jerk the rug out from under them by lifting their endangered species protections and casting their fate into the clutches of hostile states. Now, hunters in Wyoming have a year-round season on them while anti-wolf fanatics in Montana have quadrupled their per person yearly kill quota.
Trapping—Only the creepiest arachnid would leave a victim suffering and struggling for days until it suits them to come along for the “harvest.” Yet “law abiding trappers” routinely leave highly sentient, social animals clamped by the foot and chained to a log to endlessly await their fate.
Hound-Hunting—“Sportsmen” not content to shoot unsuspecting prey from a distance of a hundred yards or more sometimes use hounds to make their blood-sport even more outrageously one-sided.
Bowhunting—Those who want to add a bit of challenge to their unnecessary kill-fest like to try their luck at archery. Though they often go home empty-handed, they can always boast about the “ones that got away”… with arrows painfully stuck in them.
Contest Hunts—Prairie dogs, coyotes, and in Canada, wolves, are among the noble, intelligent animals that ignoble dimwits are allowed to massacre during bloody tournaments reminiscent of the bestial Roman Games.
Horse Slaughter—After all that our equine friends have done for us over the centuries, the administration sees fit to send them in cattle trucks to those nightmarish death-camps where so many other forcibly domesticated herbivores meet their tragic ends.
Factory farming—Whether cows, sheep, pigs, chickens or turkeys, the conditions animals are forced to withstand on modern day factory farms fall well outside even the narrowest circle of civilized human compassion. To call their situations overcrowded, inhumane or unnatural does not do justice to the fiendish cruelty that farmed animals endure each and every day of their lives.
Atrocious conditions are not confined to this continent. Chickens in China (the ancestral home of some new strain of bird flu just about every other week) are treated worse than inanimate objects. Bears, rhinoceros and any other animal whose body parts are said to have properties that will harden the wieners of hard-hearted humans are hunted like there’s no tomorrow. And let’s not forget the South Korean dog and cat slaughter, or Japan’s annual dolphin round up…
Far be it from me to belittle the use of chemical weapons—my Grandfather received a purple heart after the Germans dropped mustard gas on his foxhole during World War One. I just feel that if we’re considering responding to actions “outside the circle of civilized human behavior,” we might want to strike a few targets closer to home as well. Or better yet, reign in some of our own ill-behaviors so we can justifiably call ourselves “civilized.”
Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2013. All Rights Reserved
Here’s my letter to the Daily Astorian in response to their article, “Bowhunting and Elk.”
When they printed it, the newspaper simply titled the letter, “In Agreement.” But a more fitting title would have been: “In Agreement With a Hunter, This One Time…To a Point.”
Dear Editor,
Although I don’t usually find myself in agreement with hunters on much of anything, I had to concur with the rifle hunter who stated last week that bowhunting’s 50 percent crippling rate is a calamity and absurdly unfair to elk (“Bowhunting and elk,” The Daily Astorian, Aug. 23). For every elk the average bowhunter kills, at least one escapes with an arrow painfully stuck in them.
However, I was disappointed that the rifle hunter’s main concern was for his chosen sport, not for the elk themselves. His final line, “It’s high time to care about elk seasons,” should have read, “It’s high time to care about elk.”
Jim Robertson
This columnist–a rifle hunter–brings up some good points about the cruelty and waste of bowhunting, but he perceives himself the victim and only mentions the suffering of wounded elk to help make his case…
Bowhunting and elk
Posted: Friday, August 23, 2013
DICK MATTSON
Warrenton
I have hunted elk, usually successfully, in Clatsop County for 60 years, all with a big game rifle, hopefully with one merciful shot. I write to share my experience and knowledge, as I also studied elk habits during my lifetmie, much of it during wonderful scouting trips with my brother, Jim.
The current Clatsop County archery season of 30 days was politically driven by archers to take advantage of the unwary bulls during the mating “rut” season in September. This is wrong, both by lack of biological insight, and by the great disparity to rifle bull elk hunters, who are allowed only a four-day season, or seven days for the last elk season.
House ad: Northwest Opinions website – ros in article ad
During my investigation years ago, I found that 50 percent of elk wounded by arrows get away to suffer. This was illustrated by a Bill Monroe column where he wrote of two archers’ “success” near Jewell with bow hunting a bull elk. However, both archers had wounded two other elk, which they did not look for. This is a calamity, as well as highly absurd and unfair to elk rifle hunters.
If elk rifle hunters do not care enough to do something, archers will continue to dominate. I suggest a 10 day bull elk rifle season and a 16 day archery elk season, ending by Sept. 10, allowing time for more herd bulls to escape arrows. Herd bulls are needed for a stronger, healthy elk herd.
It’s high time to care about elk seasons.
Cannon Beach, nestled along the northern Oregon Coast, used to be a pretty
peaceful place. It’s a nice, romantic getaway or a great place to bring the entire clan. Haystack Rock, perched immediately off CB’s two mile stretch of sand, appears on more post cards and magazine covers than any other feature on the entire coast.
Folks stay there to escape the noise and manic pace of Portland or Seattle, enjoying quiet walks, hoping to catch a glimpse of some of the native wildlife. A small herd of elk lives there and can sometimes be seen taking their own cautious walks out on the beach in the early morning, foraging on the thick, leafy salal bushes in Ecola State Park or resting on the grass in city parks at the edge of town, adding to the natural character of area.
Cannon Beach is not the kind of place people expect to run into cammo-clad Elmers with shotguns or compound bows stalking the area’s half-tame animals.
But when the town’s parks and community services committee wanted to limit the local hunting season to only one month, the Oregon state Department of Fish and Wildlife told them they could not limit the hunting season and instead set five seasons there, totaling 90 days. And although the town of Cannon Beach wanted to restrict hunting to bows and arrows and shotgun slugs, the ODFW informed them that buckshot would be allowed as well.
Yes, you read that right—now any hunter who wants to can blast a 700 pound bull elk with a shotgun. What a mess that would be for some sightseeing family to come across. And how many elk and deer, who were nearly out of range at the time they were shot at, will escape with a gaping, bleeding, lead-filled hole in them?!!
According to the almighty ODFW, hunting on the Ecola Creek Forest Reserve will be extended from one month to 92 days, beginning Aug. 24. And rather than being limited to one season from Sept. 28 through Nov. 1, five seasons will be allowed through Dec. 8!
The great and powerful ODFW have decreed that hunting dates in the reserve shall be:
• Aug. 24 through Sept. 22: bow hunting for deer and elk.
• Sept. 28 through Nov. 1: shotgun hunting for buck deer.
• Nov. 9 through Nov.12: shotgun hunting for bull elk.
• Nov. 16 through Nov. 22: shotgun hunting for bull elk.
• Nov. 23 through Dec. 8: bow hunting for deer.
This is just another example of state game departments pushing their weight around, defying the will of the people and town councils, not to mention the will of the wildlife. Who do “game” regulators think they are, God? Sorry, but I hear that position has already been filled.
Text and Wildlife Photography © Jim Robertson
The first day of August: summer is at its peak, young birds have fledged and the wild berries are just now ripening up…
But on this very same day, demonic dimwits and narcissistic nimrods that enjoy making sport of murdering animals are out trying to end the life of a humble being whose only focus lately is filling up on fresh fruit.
That’s right; believe it or not, August 1st is the beginning of bear season across much of Washington! From today until November 15th, any loathsome scumbag with a bear tag and an unwholesome urge to kill can “bag” himself a bruin—just for the sport of it—in this presumably progressive state.
Sure, one or two people may be killed by bears in a given year, but over that same time period 50 will die from bee stings, 70 will be fatally struck by lightning and 300 will meet their maker due to hunting accidents. A person has about as good a chance of spontaneously combusting as being killed by a bear.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of bears are killed by people each year, and no one is keeping track of how many are wounded, only to crawl off and die slowly without hospital care to pamper them back to health. 30,000 black bears are slain during legal hunting seasons in the US alone. Possibly another 30,000 fall prey each year to ethically impotent poachers seeking gall bladders to sell on the Chinese black market. Victims lost to that vile trade are eviscerated and left to rot, since bear meat is not considered a desirable taste treat. To make it palatable, backwoods chefs traditionally douse the flesh and offal with salt and grind the whole mess into sausage.
Why then, is it legal to kill bears when we have long since concocted a myriad of ways to turn high protein plant foods (such as soy, seitan or tempeh) into a perfectly scrumptious, spicy sausage, sans intestines? Unquestionably, the hunting of bears is nothing but a warped distraction motivated by a lecherous desire to make trophies of their heads and hides. But, dangerous and terrifying as they must seem to trophy hunters out to prove their manhood from behind the security blanket of a loaded weapon, they aren’t the “most dangerous game,” as the serial killer, Zodiac (an avid hunter who grew bored with “lesser” prey and progressed to hunting humans) divulged.
An irrational fear of bears dates back to the earliest days of American history and is customarily accompanied by obtuse thinking and quirky spelling. The most famous inscription (carved into a tree, naturally) attributable to Daniel Boone (that guy who went around with a dead raccoon on his head) bragged how he “…cilled a bar…in the year 1760.” The bears Boone killed (and there were many) in North Carolina and Tennessee were black bears, a uniquely American species that, like coyotes, evolved on the Western Hemisphere.
Every year a fresh crop of Elmers decides to play Daniel Boone and blast a poor little black bear with a musket ball (which, although extremely painful and traumatic, often isn’t enough to kill them outright). Others prefer the test of archery, savagely impaling innocent bears who are just out trying to find enough berries to get them through the winter.
Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book, Silent Spring, advanced the environmental movement, saw the brutality of hunting as a detriment to civilized society:
“Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is—whether its victim is human or animal—we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity.”
The question is, how long will society continue to tolerate the moronic act of sport hunting?
————
This post contained excerpts from my book, Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport
http://www.earth-books.net/books/exposing-the-big-game
Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2013. All Rights Reserved
In 2002, the website Right Wing Watch reported that at the NRA’s national convention, Ted Nugent called President Obama a criminal and denounced his “vile, evil, America-hating administration” which is “wiping its ass with the Constitution.”
It seems to me it’s time for die-hard bowhunting fanatic, Ted Nugent, to live up to (so to speak) a promise he made back in April when Nugent swore that: “If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” If Nugent’s a man of his word, he’s got only around two more months to either die or go to jail.
Well, Ted, we’re STILL waiting…
After posting “Crippling Animals Should Weigh on One’s Conscience” yesterday, I remembered that I actually do know someone who said he swore off bowhunting after his arrow went clear through a deer, which ran off somewhere far away to die. He was an avid “modern rifle” hunter and Forest Service employee I worked with in Montana.
He certainly wasn’t going to go so far as to quit hunting completely—every time we saw a deer his eyes would glaze over; he was clearly daydreaming about hunting season. I didn’t get the idea he felt all that bad about the deer he mortally wounded—he just thought it was a “waste of meat” to shoot an animal with a weapon that’s not up to the task of outright killing.
Unfortunately, bowhunting is growing in popularity. Because local governments and town councils don’t want people getting shot by stray bullets in parks or other semi-urban areas where “game” animals thrive—yet they don’t want to upset hunters by outlawing hunting—they all-too-often allow bowhunting, just to pacify the bloodthirsty, who in turn are fond of portraying themselves as selfless do-gooders out to save the animals from overpopulation. (Funny that you never hear them mention immunocontraception, or the fact that hunting unnaturally increases ungulate populations.)
A case in point of a city council deciding to allow bowhunting is found in the article I mentioned yesterday with a headline that reads, “Shotguns and bow hunting will be allowed in Ecola reserve.”
Here are a few highlights from that article:
CANNON BEACH — Hunters using either bows and arrows or shotguns with slugs will be allowed to hunt in the Ecola Creek Forest Reserve for the next five years.
Although hunting had been allowed temporarily for bow hunters only during the deer and elk season last fall, the Cannon Beach City Council agreed 4-1 Tuesday night to extend the hunting period five years. The council also decided to allow hunters who use shotguns with slugs as well.
The proposed area set aside for hunting in the reserve took up half of the reserve’s acreage… (One city council member) said she supported a public survey taken by a professional survey company that indicated most of the respondents opposed hunting in the reserve. In addition, (Councilmember) Cadwallader said, hunting didn’t meet the definition of the “passive recreation” promised during the campaign to seek voter support for the ballot measure. Using “a firearm on a wild creature in the reserve does not seem to be passive to me,” Cadwallader said.
Herman Bierderbeck, district wildlife biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the council that shotgun slugs had an effective range of 80 yards for killing an elk or a deer. The slugs travel about 150 yards, he said.
Although the council had closed the hearing several weeks ago and didn’t accept public testimony Tuesday night, Cannon Beach resident Ed Johnson told the council he was “very upset” at the decision. He suggested the council submit a referendum to voters.
“I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face,” Johnson said. “You not only included bow hunting, you went further and allowed shotguns.”
“The bottom of my heart aches,” he said. “Guns are not the answer.”
Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2012. All Rights Reserved
Exposing the Big Game 