That business today went quicker than expected.

We're do a 'lil overgeneralizing here, don't we? Us "Europeans"? Let me tell you that the Swedes and Fins, also the Norwegians, are known to do a lot of hunting, too. Also the people in parts of Poland, Germany, and the Alpine forest regions anyway. It'S just that it is not a majority doing so.

And I bet money on that a majority of Americans do not leave the metropoles every weekend by the dozens of millions to go hunting either.

On the other hand, remember the big conflict there was in Britian some years ago about fox hunts being banned yes or no.

I do not care for hunting being labelled as a "tradition". And declaring a whole nation's spirit on basis of the practicing of a minorty, has its intrinsic definition problem anyway. The dolphin massacres they commit once a year in that Japanese village also is a "tradition". To hell with that latter tradition, I prefer the villagers slitting their own throats instead of massacring the sea. Killing for trophies and for fun, is despicable. Always. You could as well defend the torturing of cats and horses for fun. Or those stalkers sometimes haunting the farms over here by night and killing horses with speers or knifes or small callibre rifles. Just for fun, or their own pathologic personality's satisfaction.

The argument of controlling animal population, is a two-sided sword. Sometimes it hits the truth. Sometimes its being abused for defending hunter's interests to go out there and shoot at something. Sometimes population control is only needed because man before has messed up the balance in the ecosystem all by himself, and then wants to repair it. It can be complicated matter to argue about. It is not that simple and self-explanatory as you just made it appear by giving it one single sentence.

And the experience of my father, he is sports pistol shooter, doing the sports precision thing, don'T knbow how to call that in English. Spoirts shotters have very bad opinion of the many sunday hunters we have in Germany. Idiots that run into the forst during a hunt and shoot many empty holes into the sky and have not a clue of what it means to shoot with real precisiuon. The club my father is in - has banned hunters from membership. Too little discipline, too big mouths, to incompetent skill. Some policeman train there occasionally, too. German police hates our hunters as well. Too incompetent, too much Wild Bill Hickock wanting to shoot from the hip, literally. Hunters over here have an extremely bad reputation. Occasionally some soldiers come to his club too, to practice real pistol precision shooting - in the army, these guys say, they are not practicing that with that consequence at all. There is a distinctive difference between a trained sniper and a regular soldier. A soldier fires a LMG or MMG, a hundred rounds and does not hit anything. A sniper fires five rounds and hits five times.

As a side note anecdote: I once read how they counted Vietnamese losses in the war: the American unit leader calculated how many guns fired for how long into how wide a green wall of trees, then there was a total number of rounds spend from all that M16 and MMG fire, and that translated into so and so many "kills". This number then was reported to Washington. Bodies were not cpounted most of thew time - nor found. :woot: If reality does not please you, invent your own - preciseöly calculated. :haha:

In Bavaria, there is one village, where they practice a shooting event that I think is unique in the world. I saw a movie about that some time ago, but I forgot title and names. They shoot at targets over the lake. And they aim not at the targets but the reflections on the water. The bullets get bounced off the water' surface - and then hit the targets. I think it was called "Spiegelschießen", combined with that village's name.

Us Europeans have been at this civilization thing a few thousand years longer; we have no have proper forests left to hunt in, nor wildlife to hunt. :O:

Our wildlife is managed by the DOW (department of wildlife). My state is divided into many "zones" which are labled, or numbered. The DOW has the job of dealing with poachers and managing wildlife numbers.

Example: If zone 14 experienced a very harsh winter and many more animals than usual perished, then the DOW will issue very few hunting licenses for that zone in the autumn hunting season. Hunters must enter a lottery to draw a license. My son who hunts elk and mule deer sometimes is allowed to harvest one elk bull but no deer. The following year he may draw a license for one elk tag which can be either sex, and also a deer tag but perhaps only be allowed to take a buck. Every year, the number of licenses that are issued changes, and that number is set by the DOW. Every animal harvested must be tagged and taken to a DOW checkpoint and registered. They track what % of hunters were successful and what % were not.

Each year is different, and the DOW is very very good at knowing the animal population, and it is there job to keep the herds at a healthy number for their area of habitat. Overpopulation is more common a problem than under population.

While it is true man has messed up the eco system and animal populations are not the same as 150 years ago, what I think is true is that the animal species that are commonly hunted today are as populated as is healthy.....meaning for their health.

Who pays for all this? Hunters! The license fees paid by hunters fund the DOW.

God, I hope this was not true.
I once read somewhere how many rounds of rifle fire was fired for each and every casualty in WWII and the number was so staggering it was difficult to believe as truth.

What a GREAT idea! But wait.....maybe not!

I once stumbled on a website designed by a private hunting reserve located somewhere in Texas. They advertised a "real hunt".....right from your desk!

They set up a rifle with motors which allowed you sitting at your computer to elevate and traverse and fire. They then charged many many thousands of dollars which allowed anyone in the world to kill a deer.
They then butchered the animal, froze the meat and sent it to the customer. Their claim was that most of their customers were from countries that outlawed guns or simply lived where hunting was something one could not do.

I am quite certain this required reserve employees "shooing" a passive, probably drugged animal in front of the rifle's field of fire, which was quite narrow.

Thankfully they were in operation only a short time.
:ping:

I had something more basic on mind, Rick. Like first destroying natural habitats, by that bringing relations between predators and prey off balance, and then wondering why the ecosphere is going over the cliff. Or like introducing a foreign species into another country, continent, where it spreads like crazy since it has no niche in the ecosystem - and due to that messing up the ecosystem for all other species as well. Ask the Australians. They can sing a song of this, going back to when the British colonized the continent and thought they must rearrange nature a bit down there, both zoologically and botanically. The disastrous consequences from that can still be seen and felt until today.

Nature is a perfect self-regulator, for hundreds of thousands of years. If left to itself, it regulates its business better than man ever could. In non-static but fluctuating, dynamic balances maybe, but still.

On Australia, Jared Diamond has a great summarizing chapter of roughly 50 pages about the problems I hinted at in his highly recommendable book "Collapse" (LINK). There he gives many other exmaples on societies around the globe who messed up their surrounding ecosystems by overfishing and overhunting, and by that destroyed themselves in the end.

Samsung Sentry Drone? Sony Autonomous Combat Droid? Those things are real, unfortunately, though under different names.

And they all run by Chinese-made chips, like almost all Western hightech weaponry as well.

I wonder if that is clever.

Hm. I am hijacking my own thread again. :D

The Superperforator song (from a German comedy that was very successful over here).

I couldn't agree with you more if I tried Skybird. There have been numerous disasterous attempts to 'manage' nature in this country, and around the world. From introducing Myxomatosis to rabbits in Australia, to culling falcons in the UK in order to try and help the sparrow population to grow. Man never knows the balance like nature does, it's a self-regulating machine and every time we interact with it, we break it.

In regards to hunting being a more American thing...nonsense. It's very popular around the whole of Europe and is a way of life in parts of Russia. However, Skybird is again right in that for most people in the UK it involves copious amounts of alcohol from hip flasks, a shotgun and a very docile bird...which they usually miss because they're so drunk. That is not hunting, there is very little skill involved in it, and it's primarily for rich merchant bankers to get together and get drunk whilst maintaining their air of richness since it's primarily a 'sport' that rich and upper class people do, whilst the lower classes go and act as 'beaters' (disturbing the game birds so they fly up into the sights of the shotguns). Proper hunting, the likes of which this game simulates, is a relatively rare thing and has declined over the years as tougher laws on what can be shot have come in, because of overhunting.

I too have heard about the hunting website nonsense, and am glad that the site in question has shut down, however, sadly, I am sure that there are others.

I guess you guys just don't understand the people of Southeast Missouri. Deer season is treated as an annual holiday.


I'll let you guys have your thread back. :salute:

@ Oberon,

off topic, but I don'T know if you still patrol the flightsim forum. The long awaited extended version of the Airbus 320 by Aerosoft that you once asked me about (years ago), has been released two days ago. Five manuals. So far download only, boxed version follows by the end of January. First feedback in their forum I read yesterday was very positive. But customer demand has brought down their servers.

I downloaded this sim last night. Played a few tutorials. Kind of fun and relaxing.

Oooh, thanks for the heads up, I'll have to take a look at that. :salute:

Another (virtual) hunter here. This game is a pearl, just a little expensive for my taste (the ingame currency for example).
One has to invest a nice sum to enjoy everything the game has to offer - but still, its everyones choice how much to spend on it...
I just reactivated my membership for 3 month and went to explore Hirschfelden and its new prey a little more. And I was very lucky as well.
My new favorite weapon is definately the Recurve Bow with illuminated arrows. They help a ton to track and find wounded animals - and look fancy.


https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-J...2/IllArrow.jpg

Tried it out, it's a very nice game! As someone who has 0 interest or experience in real-life hunting, it's certainly making for some interesting new things to learn. It's both relaxing but also gives you those nice moments of tension and stealth. It certainly plays well as a game.

Not sure if I'm ready to go all-in and pay money for it yet, but I'll play more with the mule deer and see if it sticks with me.

You think the game is pricey yet you use the Lumenok (or Luminox) arrows?

I'm confused.
Standard arrows are just as lethal and free. Once you shoot a Lumenok it is gone and you must buy more. And they are expensive!


Edit: I love that picture you posted.

Yes I think it is and yes I do spent money on those fancy arrows. The first does not eradicate the latter, does it? I think it is simply called "weakness" and "addiction". I cant help it :nope:

And for smaller EM$ sums, I usually "earn" some by watching commercials and stuff. You can sum up a neat sum quickly.