It takes a village...

Thanksgiving on the Tidball ranch; a fantastic tradition that brings together family, friends, land, sky, and the creatures therein. Jim and Keith, each having shot multiple deer, felt sorry for my state of deprivation (22 hours in the stand and no deer seen) and devised a plan to push something past me.

The morn dawned grey and windy, strong out of the SE, so we drove around to the W of Keith’s back field and worked our way E. I wore my throwback hunter red and black plaid Woolrich coat that belonged to my grandfather. Jim and I each sat on a fencerow, and Keith chose the hickory lot. A brush-busting neighbor paid me a visit, having managed to sit on his stand for an entire 20 minutes!! After departing, he pushed out a couple of deer a couple hundred yards away. My deer shotgun is pretty low tech (smoothbore and no scope). It is more like bowhunting (gotta upgrade) so a few hundred yards feels like the next county. Probably they had been working their way right to me, but at least I had seen deer.

We regrouped. Keith had seen deer as well: a buck and four does. I still hunted my way along the N fenceline toward a good stand just off the corner of the field and with a good view as well of the big gully. A buck jumped up when I was about 30 yards away, but flashed through the thick stuff and was gone. No shot. I settled into the stand and Keith and Jim began a slow push toward me. Movement in the brush along the fenceline. A coyote! Despite farm protocols that suggest I should take advantage, I really didn’t want to shoot the dang thing.

I still wanted a deer.

About 5 minutes later, from where the coyote disappeared, I caught movement. A doe (or so I thought), working her way toward me, down in one of the smaller gullies that drop into the main branch. About 50 yards. She was coming closer but I saw that if she stayed in the gully, she would soon be below my line of sight. She showed me some chest and I held behind the shoulder and touched the trigger. She tumbled, letting out a bloodcurdling bawl that Jim heard from a couple hundred yards away. She lunged to her feet and then crashed down again, and lay still, white belly toward me. I sat still for 5-10 minutes, watching.

Dead deer.

I still hadn’t moved, but then suddenly she was on her feet, lunging away, too thick for a shot. I called to the boys and told them to watch out. Jim walked toward me along the fence, where I had last seen the deer. I still expected it to be dead along the fenceline.

A single shot from Jim. “Great,” I thought, “the finishing shot”. My heart sank, though, when Jim’s shot was followed by another, 10 seconds later. The deer was on the run, the chase was on, and my role was that of the guy trying to piece it together from afar. More shots from the gully. A call from Keith. “The deer is down!”. Relief. Followed by more shots. “What the ****?”

The deer was running the gully, with Jim following and Keith racing to outflank. He made it, to the promontory that overlooks “possum flats” where we dragged out his deer a couple of days earlier. The deer was trying to climb out of the gully to the east. If he made it to the open field, he’d be across route 89 and into the marsh on the other side. Keith hit him again, from ~150 yards across the gully, and down he went.

Only to get back up again.

To be hit at last from Jim. Bang. Dead deer.

Mostly. After yet another shot in the neck.

I have never seen an animal that wanted to live so much, that fought so hard, as this guy (as he turned out to be a button buck). Altogether we hit him five times. I surely am not proud of this, but I am proud of how well we coordinated as a team. Without the team effort, he surely would have not been ours. Much to be thankful for here—the winter meat yes, but so much more.

New Lyme Vaccine, test results

The next step for Quality Deer Management?

cross-posted from the Fair Chase hunting blog:

This op-ed piece just appeared in today's New York Times. Perhaps the uber-breeding of big-racked, pain-free deer is just what the doctor ordered to keep anti-hunters at bay in the never-ending fight to protect hunting's future. What do you all think??

February 19, 2010

Op-Ed Contributor

Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free

By ADAM SHRIVER

St. Louis

IN the 35 years since Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation” was published, jump-starting the animal rights movement in the United States, the number of animals used in cosmetics testing and scientific research has dropped significantly, and the number of dogs and cats killed in shelters has fallen by more than half. Nevertheless, because the amount of red meat that Americans eat per capita has held steady at more than 100 pounds a year as the population has increased, more animals than ever suffer from injuries and stress on factory farms.

Veal calves and gestating sows are so confined as to suffer painful bone and joint problems. The unnatural high-grain diets provided in feedlots cause severe gastric distress in many animals. And faulty or improperly used stun guns cause the painful deaths of thousands of cows and pigs a year.

We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it is still possible to reduce the animals’ discomfort — through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.

This prospect stems from a new understanding of how mammals sense pain. The brain, it turns out, has two separate pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway that senses the pain’s unpleasantness. This second pathway appears to be associated with activation of the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, because people who have suffered damage to this part of the brain still feel pain but no longer find it unpleasant. (The same is true of people who are given morphine, because there are more receptors for opiates in the affective pain pathway than in the sensory pain pathway.)

Neuroscientists have found that by damaging a laboratory rat’s anterior cingulate cortex, or by injecting the rat with morphine, they can likewise block its affective perception of pain. The rat reacts to a heated cage floor by withdrawing its paws, but it doesn’t bother avoiding the places in its cage where it has learned the floor is likely to be heated up.

Recently, scientists have learned to genetically engineer animals so that they lack certain proteins that are important to the operation of the anterior cingulate cortex. Prof. Min Zhuo and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, for example, have bred mice lacking enzymes that operate in affective pain pathways. When these mice encounter a painful stimulus, they withdraw their paws normally, but they do not become hypersensitive to a subsequent painful stimulus, as ordinary mice do.

Prof. Zhou-Feng Chen and his colleagues here at Washington University have engineered mice so that they lack the gene for a peptide associated with the anterior cingulate gyrus. Like the animals given brain lesions, these mice are normally sensitive to heat and mechanical pain, but they do not avoid situations where they experience such pain.

Given the similarity among all mammals’ neural systems, it is likely that scientists could genetically engineer pigs and cows in the same way. Because the sensory dimension of the animals’ pain would be preserved, they would still be able to recognize and avoid, when possible, situations where they might be bruised or otherwise injured.

The people who consumed meat from such genetically engineered livestock would also be safe. Knockout animals have specific proteins removed, rather than new ones inserted, so there’s no reason to think that their meat would pose more health risks for humans than ordinary meat does.

If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.

Adam Shriver is a doctoral student in the philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program at Washington University.

Or maybe we can develop tougher, pain-free deer THIS way

Perhaps this is a better technique to adapt to create tougher, higher quality deer. well, it's a thought, anyway.

warning: graphic material. Kids do not try this at home.