Time to break out the loincloth and flint knapped spear.............oh wait, spear is long range. Make it a knapped knife.
What a stupid thing for them to publish. Talk about dividing the ranks.
Randy
(I'm currently looking for my camo loincloth---would that be an unfair advantage?)
Lol. Amen brother. That's exactly what I was thinking. The real issue is that while hunting is great and I love the outdoors, I want to come home with meat at the end of it all. There is more pressure on the animals as more hunters are in the field, at least here in Idaho. The number of people pursuing tags has doubled in many areas over the last 10 years and the open hunts can be downright ridiculous. Last year we scouted for a month... Picked our spot... Got there about 2 hours before light, way up on top of a mountain, and 8 other people showed up. One guy got ****ed because we were there first and he was yelling and carrying on when we told him where we were setting up... He basically just told us that he and his group were going to hunt there. I thought it might actually end up coming to blows but my compatriots and I kept our cool and just started towards our location. In the meantime, 3 big bucks took off over the ridge and we're long gone due to the other groups noise. The whole day was like being at Disneyland and I'll never do that again.
Pressure on animals and idiots out there make the animals more wary and alert, pushes them back into difficult terrain, which means that sometimes, a long shot is all you are ever gonna get, unless you end up lucky. We have tried to setup where low altitude hunters will push the bucks up to us, but it's totally dependent on whether the other hunters park 100 yards back, or 100 yards forward as to where to animals are going to go. All the prep work is great, but it is all hunting and some companies notion about what is fair and what isn't doesn't feed my family at the end of the day.... I do. That's why this year, I've been working on my loads and skills so that I can reach out to 600 yards. I'm tired of passing on game because I lack the necessary skill and knowledge about my gun to make a good accurate clean kill at distance... And both deer and elk run a hell of a lot faster than me, so if I can take a good shot at 500 to 600 yards, well you better believe I'm not going to give one iota of a sh!t about what B&C thinks is fairplay when it comes to hunting. My job is to put the game down cleanly and do my part as a hunter to make sure I retrieve my animal.
If they want to come out and chuck spears, hey... The more power to them. In the meantime, I'm not going to loose any sleep about the ethics of long range hunting. As hunters, we have to adapt to our environment, and long range hunting has a place in it, more and more.