Silly on a Stick

Specialized things are specialized for a reason.

This is true of dogs, as I have noted in the past. A terrier small enough to go to ground cannot also be large enough to be a really excellent all-day retriever. You may get a small dog that can retrieve a few birds, but it will not be as good a dog as a dedicated breed on either end of the spectrum.

More likely, by planting one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat, you are going to end up in the water. Sometimes it's best to make a decision and not get somewhere in the middle.

And so it is with guns and fishing rods. One is not like the other, and if you need both out in the woods, might I suggest a reasonably-priced four-piece Eagle Claw pack rod paired with a Smith and Wesson .22 Kit Gun or its analog made by Taurus?

But no, an American genius has decided what the world really needs is a 1-pound pack-rifle and fishing pole combination.

As a fishing pole, it appears to be a wonderful tire iron, and as a rifle it appears to be a wonderful tire iron that loads one shot at a time and might blow up in your face. 

To repeat: Specialized things are specialized for a reason.
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The Benefits and Limits of Artifice

A repost from March 2007

Upon first inspection, the above picture seems absurd: an African Martial Hawk named "Zulu" flying across a field to pounce on a toy bunny which has a slot in its back filled with a morsel of meat.

Is this some kind of weird alternative to true hunting dreamed up by some misguided animal rights lunatic?

Well, actually, no. The eagle is a resident of the Eagle Heights Bird of Prey Centre in Kent England, and my notes say that the bunny is part of the public display that the Centre puts on for visitors. Though the bunny is a bit comical, the string that is tied to its body is used to pull it across the grass at a leisurely pace so that the eagle has to gauge speed and distance properly in order to get a proper "kill and fill" from this plush toy.

Those of us who hunt with hawks and dogs are not above such artifice, especially in the off-season when the goal is to keep our animals fit and sharp.

In the off-season, a greyhound owner may course his dogs to a white plastic bag tied to a string that is zipping around a pulley-course set up in a back pasture.

A terrier owner may run his dogs through a go-to-ground tunnel in the back yard, with a rat or squirrel safely in a cage at the stop end to approximate true quarry.

A falconer may fly a balloon or kite with a pigeon in harness at the end of a string in order to get his or her falcon to fly higher and develop sharper skills.

The tricks we have developed to achieve improved results with our animals are a marvel. That said, I sometime worry about the artifice.

Go-to-ground is not true terrier work -- it is boring and predictable, and there is no element of wood craft, no real physical output for the human, no element of risk for the dog. Above all, it is not hunting.

Coursing plastic bags with greyhounds is more of the same -- a way to keep the dog in shape and perhaps "explode the code within" the dog, but it is not hunting.

I feel a bit differently about training falcons with kites and balloons. Here there is an element of risk -- the risk that the falcon will fly away over the horizon. Though training a falcon with a kite and balloon is not quite hunting, it does have an element of true risk that I can appreciate.

The bottom line is that artifice has its place in training, but never get confused that it is even remotely equivalent to real work.

Aldo Leopold on Gadgets and Fox Hunting

Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold, who was born on this day in 1887, was one of the most important people in the history of U.S. conservation. A 1909 graduate of the Yale Forestry School, Leopold wrote the first book on Game Management (it is still in print and it is still used at a text book), and was the first person to predict that the widespread extirpation of wolves through poison and trapping would result in an explosion in the deer population that, in turn, would wipe out much of the understory of American forests. Most famous for his eco-philosophical journal A Sand County Almanac, about his Wisconsin farm, Leopold also explored the role of wilderness and hunting in American culture.

In an early essay entitled Wildlife in American Culture, Leopold noted that even in the era before World War II, "the gadgeter, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer," was dominating the sporting press and warping America's understanding of the outdoors.

The phenomenon is very easy to see today, with hunting and fishing magazines centered less on wildlife and wild places than on the Quad Bikes, scent sprays, lures, bait, and expensive guns, rods, and reels that we are told we will need before we even think about going into the woods.

This ethos has now expanded into the world of camping and hiking, where everything has to be rip-stop, multi-fuel, Goretex, and composite construction. Not only must everything be lighter weight, there must be more luxury and options than ever before. As Leopold noted in this 1940-era essay, describing the beginning of the modern ethos:

"Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto trunk, and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage. The traffic in gadgets adds up to astronomical sums, which are soberly published as representing 'the economic value of wildlife.' But what of cultural values?"

The great thing about fox hunting and terrier work is that, with the exception of the locator collar, the equipment we use to today would need no explanation to Jaques Du Fouilloux (1560) or Sir Walter Scott (1810). Nothing much has changed, and very little has gone "high tech," in large part because the intervening variable -- the dog -- is immune to mechanical intervention.

At its core, the fox hunter is a primitive hunter and the dog is a primitive animal. As Leopold noted about mounted American fox hunting (which has never included killing the animal being chased):

"Fox-hunting with hounds, backwoods style, presents a dramatic instance of partial and perhaps harmless mechanized invasion. This is one of the purest of sports; it has real split-rail flavor; it has man-earth drama of the first water. The fox is deliberately left unshot, hence ethical restraint is also present. But we now follow the chase in Fords! The voice of Bugle-Anne mingles with the honk of the flivver! However, no one is likely to invent a mechanical foxhound, nor to screw a polychoke on the hound's nose. No one is likely to teach dog-training by phonograph, or by other painless shortcuts. I think the gadgeteer has reached the end of his tether in dogdom."
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Why the Indians Attacked at Dawn

I continue to engage in free reading thank to my Kindle Fire.

From "A Flintlock in the Rain" by Lionel Atwill in The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told, edited by Jay Cassell, comes this little gem about getting ready for deer hunting with flintlocks in the Adirondack wilderness of New York:

Loading a flintlock at five in the morning by the light of a Coleman lantern is a ticklish feat. It is hard to tell if the powder goes down the barrel or down your boots. The temptation is to stand smack next to the light and see what you are doing, until the thought of the lantern igniting the powderhorn in your hand soaks through your coffee-laced brain. Then you step back even farther and forget if you have tossed a charge down the barrel or not.

"This," says Hatfield, "is why Indians attacked at dawn."

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Pump Jacks and Plastic Houses

As we enter election season, it's worth remembering what the REAL threat to hunting is in America, and it's not a loss of guns. As Tom Reed put it back in 2004, writing in High Country News:

A ranch where I once killed a dandy mule deer buck in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin was roaded and tapped for coalbed methane two years ago. It will not recover in my lifetime.

When Bill Clinton was elected to the White House, the pro-gun folks said the government was coming to our doors to take away our rifles, shotguns and pistols. No agent showed up at my place.

But I have seen the place where I used to hunt for pronghorn. There’s a pump jack there now. And there’s a sign that warns me of possible poison gas. And there’s not a pronghorn in sight.

Not everyone is losing their hunting lands to oil rigs.

Some of the land I have hunted on in the past has been lost to church construction, subdivision, and cattle grazing.

One thing is for sure: God is not making more hunting lands. This is a resource we only lose, and once lost, it is lost forever.

• Related Posts:
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  ** Crying Wolf in Dog and Hunting Debates
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Newt Gingrich: Gun Grabber and Global Warmer?

The video, above, speaks for itself.

So too does Georgia Gun Owners, a grassroots gun rights group from Newt Gingrich's home state of Georgia that is blasting Gingrich for "his more than two-decade history of supporting gun control." The group has asked its 6,000 (a massive membership for a state organization) to call Gingrich's new Iowa headquarters and make their complaints known.

In their press release, which they sent out yesterday morning, the group blasted with a few simple facts:

While Newt used the institutional gun lobby as a mouthpiece to convince millions of gun owners nationwide that "as long as he is Speaker, no gun-control legislation is going to move in committee or on the House floor," he was working behind the scenes to pass gun control.

In 1996, Newt Gingrich turned his back on gun owners and voted for the anti-gun Brady Campaign's Lautenberg Gun Ban, which strips the Second Amendment rights of citizens involved in misdemeanor domestic violence charges or temporary protection orders -- in some cases for actions as minor as spanking a child.

Gingrich also stood shoulder to shoulder with Nancy Pelosi to pass the "Criminal Safezones Act" which prevents armed citizens from defending themselves in certain arbitrary locations. Virtually all Americans know that Criminal Safezones don't protect law-abiding citizens, but actually protect the criminals who ignore them.

Yep.

And for the record Newt doesn't hunt and he doesn't fish, and so far as I can tell he doesn't even own a dog, much less a hunting dog.

What he DOES do is cheat on his wives and dump them when they are sick (he has done that TWICE already), cheat on taxes, take payola, and lie to fellow members of Congress (he was censured for all of that and had to pay a $300,000 fine imposed by his fellow Republican members of Congress who tried to dump him as Speaker).

Obama fishing the East Gallatin, Montana.

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Some part of me says maybe we should keep the Kenyan in the White House.

At least he doesn't cheat on his wife (Michelle would cut it off and toss it to the dog).

He pays his taxes.

He fishes (likes it so much, in fact, that the White House staff gave him a fly rod for his birthday).

He even has a dog that maybe could retrieve a duck if it had a little field training.

Plus the Kenyan fellow has really supported the Second Amendment -- he even filed a Supreme Court brief in support of it.

It may turn out that the Democrat Kenyan is the only good American conservative in this race.

How ironic is that?

And lest, you think I am alone in this take, read what they have to say over at the arch-conservative Hot Air blog where they say it's better to put up Ron Paul and lose with principles than field the likes of Gingrich and Romney which would leave the GOP a tattered wreck (and a joke) for a generation to come.
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• Related Links:
  ** The Liberal Case for Gun Ownership
  ** Al Gore's Got a Very Personal "Inconvenient Truth"
  ** Barack Obama Salutes Hunting and Fishing
  ** Crying Wolf in Dog and Hunting Debates
  ** GOP Mayor Blasts Obama on Gun Control
  ** Support Mental Health or I'll Kill You
  ** Bed Wetters and the Second Amendment
  ** Libya and the Second Amendment

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I Support the 1st Amendment... and the 2nd

THIS IS THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

THIS IS A POLICE STATE:

Unless there is prosecution... in which case, it's simple assault.

Police pepper spray peaceful demonstrators with linked arms.

• Related Post:
  ** Why More Liberals Need to Own Shotguns 

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Shotgun Shells, Puppy Mills, and Wal-Mart

Puppy miller operators, American Kennel Club show-dog breeders, right-wing ideologues, and folks who have embraced non-working and defective-by-design dogs, like to spend time inflating the power and influence of HSUS and PeTA.

As Border Collie man Donald McCaig has noted, this has largely been done as an organizing tool and as a way of deflecting away any sensible conversation about breeding for intentional defect, inbreeding, and ruination of working dog breeds.

Of course, HSUS and PeTA are actually very weak organizations that operate as little more than direct mail mills. 

In fact, these organizations are so weak, that puppy mills operate without much oversight and commercial dog kennels have only the most minimal of legislated standards (and almost no on-the-ground inspections).

You want to know who has real power in America? 

It's the NRA -- and I do not mean the National Rifle Association.  I mean the National Restaurant Association -- the folks who want to pump you full of Taco Bell buritos, McDonald's quarter pounders, and all-you-can-eat pizza.

Drive down any strip mall and count the fast food outlets.  There's not a sign of HSUS or PeTA is there?

HSUS and PeTA as a political force?  Gimme a break!  These folks are nearly invisible on Capitol Hill. 

If you want REAL political power, go to the beef, poultry, dairy, hog, corn, soy and wheat producers in any state.  That's power!

You want more power?  Go to the Congressional Sportsman's Caucus (the largest caucus in Washington) which makes sure that we continue to have wild lands where hunting and fishing are preserved as core American activities.

The truth is that the headquarters of both HSUS and PeTA are surrounded by Pittman-Robertson hunting lands, national forest hunting lands, and state forest hunting lands.

There is no place in America that is more than 10 miles from a vendor of guns, fishing rods, and ammunition -- or more than 30 miles from public lands on which to use them.

And, sadly, there is probably no place in America that is more than 30 miles from a kennel of horror where dogs are shoved into feces- and urine-soaked cages without mental stimulation of any kind. 

But we're supposed to be scared because HSUS and PeTA have all this power?  Power to do what?  To ask us to eat a salad every once in a while?

It's laughable.

So what's the latest? 

The latest is that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is now putting more hunting rifles, shotguns, and ammunition in its stores. 

About a third of Wal-Mart's more than 3,600 U.S. locations sell guns and ammo right now, but that figure will rise to about half as Wal-Mart decides to restore "heritage categories" of merchandise.

Heritage.  

Hunting and fishing is part of America's heritage. 

I'm not sure right-wing paranoia, breeding diseased, deformed and defective dogs, or direct mail mills quite rise to that level... At least not yet.

• Related Links:
  ** Crying Wolf in Dog and Hunting Debates
  ** The Internet Fuels Extremists and Fools
  ** Humane Society: Continuing to Rip off the Rubes
  ** The Tribe of the Dog
  ** Who Speaks for the Dogs
  ** AKC To Go Out of Business By 2025?
  ** Bed Wetters and the Second Amendment

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Keeping Us Safe from Pointy Objects?

I get as exhausted from the pro-gun nuts as I do from the anti-gun nuts.

I'm pro-Second Amendment (and pro-First Amendment too it should be said), but I've never seen any reason to gin up contrived crisis or demonize folks who have a different point of view about guns because they happen to be a little confused about the nature of violence in America.

I look upon guns a bit like religion -- if you are a Christian or a Muslim, an Atheist or an Agnostic, a North American Reformed Druid or a Buddhist, good on ya. Have fun, but keep your spiritual enlightenment on the other side of the table. No harm no foul, God bless, and Peace Out.

Ditto for guns.

If you have a gun fetish, please feel free do whatever it is you think is right on the issue, but please don't wave your guns or your gun control nonsense around in public eh?

There's a time, place and manner for all things, but I'm pretty sure it's not when I'm in the room!

One reason Second Amendment defenders skeptics whiners on both sides of the aisle are so exhausting to me is that I see preious little evidence either side has read the Constitution, much less looked up the law or the data.

Here's a hint -- the Second Amendment does not mention guns.

This amendment is broader than that, and it's not even limited to citizens.

In fact, based purely on what is written in the Second Amendment, there's no reason a bearded Jihadi, fresh off the plane from Yemen, could not walk through Boston's Logan International Airport with a fully loaded rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder, the safety off, chanting the first sura of the Koran, while his travel companion screams "death to American running dogs and especially their children!"

Of course, no one actually reads the Second Amendment in that kind of unrestrained way. 

No one.  Not even the National Rifle Association.

It turns out that everyone agrees that whatever the Founding Fathers (and their mothers) intended, it was not to allow foreign nationals fresh off the boat from another country (or domestic terrorists fresh from church sermons and cross-burnings) to walk through our crowded public airports with loaded rocket-propelled grenades on their shoulders.

There's a time, place, and manner for all things, and never mind if that time, place and manner is not spelled out too clearly in the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The Supreme Court has been quite clear that while there is an individual right to own a gun, there is not a right to own any gun, anywhere, under any circumstances. 

Time, place and manner.  The Second Amendment is about an individual but constrained right, and has been since we put limits on machine guns and sawed-off shotguns almost 100 years ago.  There is no honest disagreement on this point, from what I can see.

But even if we agree that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is an individual constrained right, does that mean it needs to be unnecessarily constrained? 

Is it too much to ask that we use common sense and reason at least once in a while? 

For example, should the constraints we put on the Second Amendment include knives?

Knives? 

Yep, knives.

Not only do these laws exist, but they are also quite common. 

For example, last summer Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., launched "a major initiative" to reduce the number of "illegal knives" on the streets of New York. 

And just look at the criminal knife dealers he decided to go after!

District Attorney Vance’s investigation led many of the sellers, including Home Depot, Eastern Mountain Sports, Paragon Sports, and four others, to enter into deferred prosecution agreements. The agreements require the companies to turn over all profits from the sale of such knives during the past 4-year period, totaling nearly $1.9 million to date, and to finance a campaign to educate the public about illegal knives

Home Depot? Eastern Mountain Sports?  Paragon Sports? 

These are the criminal arms traffickers that the District Attorrney in New York is going after?  Gimme a break!

Hey Cyrus, don't you know you can make a perfectly good shotgun out of the stuff you can get at any HomeDepot -- a piece of plumbing pipe, a staple gun, and a barrel-bolt hasp lock? You gonna ban those too?

Sadly, this is one more case of over-zealous legislators and law enforcement personnel checking their brains at the door when it comes to the roots of violence.

But wait.... it gets better.

Guess what originally inspired this national ban on gravity knives and switch blades? 

Wait for it.... wait for it... it was a New York city dance musical based on Romeo and Juliet!

A dance musical? Yep, a freaking ballet in the alley!

It seems that when Westside Story came out, all the over-educated white folks with too much money and not enough common sense got terrified that the knife-wielding Puerto Ricans depicted in the play would charge over from Spanish Halem and rob them as they made their way to their limos late at night.

Unbelievable.

Of course to every stupid action there is an equal and opposite stupid reaction, and so now we have.... wait for it ... wait for it .... a new organization called "Knife Rights Inc."

"Knife Rights" is an advocacy group based in Arizona whose founder was ... wait for it... wait for it ... was once mugged at knife point in New York City!

Yahoo!     God bless America.  You couldn't make this stuff up.

• Related Posts:
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American Hero: Real Hook & Bullet Conservation

This isn't the NRA. This is real hook and bullet conservation.

From Oxford American, the "southern magazine of good writing":

They’re the polluters’ worst nightmare: greens with guns. They hunt, but always eat what they kill. They work within the system, and they’re not afraid to go to court. They punch above their weight in government circles, operating on a budget smaller than your average lobbyist’s bar tab. And despite Florida’s best efforts to drain, pave, and overpopulate itself to death, they are hell-bent on saving it.

The Florida Wildlife Federation is the most effective environmental outfit in the South, maybe in the country. Over the past decade, this eclectic posse of deer hunters and bunny-huggers, backyard Darwins and bird-watchers, dedicated anglers and nouveau Thoreauvians, has become a force to be reckoned with. “We’re agile and we’re lean,” says Manley Kearns Fuller III, president of FWF. “If you’re not selective with what you emphasize, you can get bogged down. You need a plan, win or lose. When you get whipped, you’ve got to have a masterful retreat, like Robert E. Lee after Gettysburg."

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Coffee and Provocation

A Little More Hexane in Your Veggie Burger?
Mother Jones magazine, notes that "In order to meet the demands of health-conscious consumers, manufacturers of soy-based fake meat like to make their products have as little fat as possible. The cheapest way to do this is by submerging soybeans in a bath of hexane to separate the oil from the protein." Hexane, of course, is an EPA-regulated neurotoxin, but despite that fact, the FDA does not test for it. Read the article.

This Is Why You Defend the Second Amendment:
The U.S. Constitution says nothing about guns. Not a thing. What it talks about is the "right to keep and bear arms." If you remove that right, the state can actually march in and take your pocket knife. Think that's crazy talk? It's not if you live in the U.K., where a disabled man who kept a Swiss Army knife in his car's glove box has just gotten a criminal record for possessing an offensive weapon. The knife was not just in his glove box, by the way -- it was in a pouch in his glovebox, along with a small flashlight, a first aid kit, and waterproof matches.

This Is Why You Defend the First Amendment:
The Associated Press reports that: "Sarah Palin spoke to a crowd of about 16,000 attending an evangelical Christian women's conference in Louisville Friday night....She asserted that America needs to get back to its Christian roots and rejected any notion that 'God should be separated from the state.'" Great. Just what we need to be: a theocracy like Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Vatican.

Tasering Sheep on Meth:
In a study of Taser safety, scientists got a bunch of sheep hopped up on meth and then zapped them with tasers to see how they did with that. Read all about it.

Native American Genius:
W.T. Wallington's Forgotten Technology web site shows techniques he has developed to show how the stones for Stonehenge and the Pyramids might have been hauled, rotated, and lifted into place using nothing more than simple physics. Check it out by clicking on the picture on the home page, and clicking through the links at the bottom of each subsequent page. Yes this stuff works! No space ships or Martians needed -- or massive ramps either from what I can gather.

Doug's Expanding Menagerie:
Doug is rehabbing a red-shoulderd hawk and starting an adventure in bees, the animal most likely to kill you. Madness I say!

Dominance in Pigeons:
Who is the alpha pigeon? Researchers are studying it with little GPS backpacks.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation:
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation was created by Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick in Dumfries, Scotland in 1989. It contains bizarre and mind-blowing geometric patterns. Check it out! This is a private garden and open to the public only one day a year, so these pics are probably your only opportunity.

Whatever Happened to Sealyhams?
Sealyham's are a breed that was sucked into the kennel club vortex almost upon creation. For a web site documenting that, see this interesting, if obscure, web site on show sealyham terriers in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, complete with a pictures of what the Westminster show looked like at Madison Square Garden back then, and a little note about the first head of the "professional handler's association." Hat tip to Paul H. for the link!

Nice Blog!
If anyone wants to see what a fun life in Western Colorado looks like (complete with great photos), see the Dirt and Dogs blog and check out "the hunter and the hunted" post for a little amusement. Also a few pictures of Arizona in here. Of course, Jamie O'Neal claims there is no Arizona. I think Trina might disagree!

Vitamin C for Canine Snake Bites?
I am quite happy that we do not have to worry, too much about venomous snakes in my area; we are a little too far north for water moccasins, copperheads are way over-rated, and rattlesnakes are rare all over and generally confine themselves to rocky shelves and outcrops in the mountains. That said, not everyone is so fortunate and Jonathan from South African passes on this tip about Vitamin C shots as a treatment for snake bites in dogs. Does it work? There are reports on the internets that it does, but I have to say I am skeptical. Snakes do not always envenomate when they bite, and there's a lot of mis-identification of snake species as well. Still, when nothing else is there to help, break out the Vitamin C. It cannot hurt!


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Wireless Taser In a Shotgun Shell

This is Taser XREP Wireless Round -- a self-contained shotgun shell that delivers 500 volts of electricity, which is more than enough to knock you off your feet. It weighs 25 grams, fires out at 270 ft. per second, and has a range of 100 ft.

The XREP is for law enforcement only, but I suspect the Chinese will be making bootleg versions within a year or two.

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GOP Mayor Blasts Obama on Gun Control

Michael Bloomberg, the Republican mayor of the largest city in the United States, has come out to blasting Barack Obama for not doing more to support gun control.

Of course, as I have written in the past, gun control in and of itself, does nothing to stem violence; it is a false cure for deeper social problems.

And, as I have noted in the past, Barack Obama did not campaign on gun control; in fact he promised that his Administration would do nothing in that arena.

Of course the NRA bed-wetters cannot be placated by fact and observed history. Fear, after all, is the only thing they have left to sell.

• Related Links:
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Bed Wetters and the Second Amendment

Remember how Barack Obama was going to take away all our dogs and ban all hunting?

Remember how Barack Obama was going to take away all the guns?

Back during the election season, I battled a never-ending tribe of know-nothings, right-wing wackos, wink-and-nod racists, paranoid conspiracy theorists, professional thumb suckers, and amateur bed wetters -- the people who have now coalesced into what is called the "Tea Bagger" arm of the Republican party.

They spewed this kind of stuff like an open sewer, hoping the toxin would catch fire like the Cuyahoga River did back in '69.

At the time I noted that anyone who really believed in the Second Amendment (and who actually knew their ass from their elbow) would "lock and load" in opposition to John McCain and Joe Lieberman, both of whom have long and well-documented histories as gun-controllers.

I noted that Barack Obama believed the Second Amendment was an individual right and that he had no intention of restricting it.

Now The Chicago Tribune has come out with an article noting that Obama is not anti-gun -- he is anti-gun control!

No surprise here, of course, but apparently this is quite a surprise to those on the far right and the far left who intentionally blinkered themselves in order to profit from massive direct mail campaigns designed to separate the American people from their money.

Notes The Chicago Tribune:

Among the many groups that opposed Barack Obama's presidential race, few were more certain or vehement than gun-rights organizations. "Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American history," the National Rifle Association announced. "Obama is a committed anti-gunner," warned Gun Owners of America.

So it's no stunner that after a year in office, the president is getting hammered by people who have no use for his policy on firearms. The surprise is that the people attacking him are those who favor gun control, not those who oppose it.

Obama's record on this issue has been largely overlooked — except by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which recently issued a report card flunking Obama on all seven issues it deems important. Said President Paul Helmke, "If I had been told, in the days before Barack Obama's inauguration, that his record on gun violence prevention would be this poor, I would not have believed it."

Had he listened to the candidate in 2008, he would have believed. At a September campaign rally in rural Virginia, Obama declared unequivocally, "I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people's lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won't take your handgun away. .. There are some common-sense gun safety laws that I believe in. But I am not going to take your guns away."

.... [Obama] has proposed nothing in the way of new federal restrictions on firearms. Even the "assault weapons" ban signed by President Bill Clinton — and allowed to expire in 2004 — has no visible place on Obama's agenda.

Not only that, he's approved changes that should gladden the hearts of gun-rights supporters, a group that includes me. He signed a law permitting guns to be taken into national parks. He signed another allowing guns as checked baggage on Amtrak. He acted to preserve an existing law limiting the use of government information on firearms it has traced.

Still, the NRA is not rushing to recant.

Well, of course the NRA is not rushing to recant.

The National Rifle Association knows its membership is mostly comprised of right-wing gullibles who have responded to "fright factory" direct mail written for only one purpose: to winkle another $20 out of the pockets of those who are easily frightened and who are emotionally volatile.

The good news is that gullible fools represent a small percentage of hunters and an even smaller perentage of total gun owners.

There are more than 12 million hunters in America, and more than 50 million gun owners, but the NRA counts its membership at 2 million, and of those only 1 million are hunters.

To put that another way, 91% of all hunters and 96% percent of all gun owners are not NRA members!

Of course, even a smaller percentage of those who voted for Obama in the last election were members of any type of "gun control" organization.

And, to put a point on it, groups like the Brady Center are also professional "liars for hire," the same as the NRA.

The only real difference is one group seeks to pluck dollars from gullibles on the fringe left, while the other trolls for gullibles on the fringe right.

The Obama Administration is saluting neither fringe. Instead, it is saluting the U.S. Constitution, and it is saluting all of it, not just one Amendment.

How refreshing is that?

• Related Links:
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  ** Hacking at the Roots of Violence
  ** Support Mental Health or I'll Kill You
  ** Cass Sunstein Is OK with Me
  ** Obama Administration to Ban Hunting
  ** Liars, Fear Mongers and Murder
  ** The Internet Fuels Extremists and Fools

From Toothpaste for Dinner

Beer and Guns

Beer and guns. You don't see too many ads like this any more. This gem is from 1957, when the chance of finding a woman in a marsh, with a side-by-side shotgun, drinking Rheingold Extra Dry, was about as likely as finding a herd of free-range zebra in Central Park.

This is a classic example of an advertising man thinking: "Men drink beer, and they like guns and love women, so let's put all that together, and see if anyone will salute it."

Apparently, not enough did, as the company went out of business in the mid-1970s -- a victim of national brewery dominance.

In recent years, the label has come back, however, but instead of wholesome women with shotguns, Rheingold women are now pierced and tattoo'ed. Hmmmm. Let's see if that works for them. And who knows? It might!

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  ** The Liberal Case for Gun Ownership
  .

The Constitutional Right to Shoot Anvils

A little black powder from the local sporting goods or hunting store, and you too can shoot an anvil 100-800 feet in the air. Darwin would approve! Awesome.

Of course this is traditional anvil shooting, not super-modified. Traditional. As it should be.
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Artificial Dens, Big Dogs and Fair Chase

Concrete liners wait to be assembled into an artificial fox earth in Germany. This is an "in and out" design where the barking dog comes down the right section of pipe and bolts the fox into the left section of the pipe. The two sections are connected at the notches seen in the foreground. The left section then feeds back into into the main pipe stem and the fox bolts out.

In an article entitled The Rabbit and the Go to Ground Tunnel, I detailed the 20th-Century rise of artificial fox earths in the UK.

These artificial fox dens have their origin in ancient rabbit "burries" created by the Romans who introduced the rabbit to the UK about 1,000 years ago.

The artificial fox earths of the UK served as the model for the over-large "Go to Ground" tunnels we see at American Kennel Club, Jack Russell Terrier Club of America, and American Working Terrier Association trials.

Go-to-ground trials are not close approximations of field work (a caged rat is the only "quarry," and it only has to be "worked" for a minute or two) but people who do not own a deben collar or a decent shovel often think a 9" by 9" square den liner is approximately the same size as a real fox den. This misperception helps fuel a common belief held by portly matrons at dogs shows that a red fox is as big as a coyote or small wolf. As I have noted:

A large dog is almost always a liability. While a small dog can enter and work a large den, a large dog cannot enter a small earth. If a large dog is able to squeeze itself into the den pipe at all, it will find it has little room to maneuver away from the slashing jaws of the fox, raccoon or groundhog, and that it is nearly impossible to get behind the quarry in order to bolt it out of the den.

Despite this liability, some large terriers in Britain continue to find success bolting fox due to the prevalence of artificial dens or "drains" created by the mounted hunts as a way to keep fox populations stable on hunt lands. These artificial fox dens are typically 9 inches square, brick-lined, and slate-topped with two or three possible entrances.

While the construction of artificial dens or “drains” was sufficiently common at the turn of the century that Sir Jocelyn Lucas provided tips on their construction in his 1931 book, Hunt and Working Terriers, they became even more prevalent after the introduction of the myxoma virus in Great Britain in the early 1950s.

Myxomatosis was purposefully imported from South America as a way of "controlling" the U.K.’s rabbit population, which was considered a major agricultural pest. The myxoma virus was a frightfully efficient killer, wiping out 98 percent of all rabbits in Great Britain within a decade of its introduction. One result of this unhappy turn of events was that the ancient rabbit warrens that had once served as natal dens -- and sources of food -- for breeding fox simply vanished.

In order to help out Mother Nature, and improve the chance that a fox would take up residence on hunt land, many hunts constructed new artificial dens out of bricks or 9-inch drainage pipes.

At about the time that the very first artificial fox dens were being constructed in the 1920s, Kennel Club dog shows began to grow in popularity. New terrier breeds were admitted to Kennel Club rosters with some frequency, and old breeds were regularly "improved" for coat color, the set of the ear, the length of the leg, the shape and size of the head, the set of the tail, and a dozen other characteristics that barely matter in the hunt field.

The rest, as they say, is history.

It is with some interest -- and alarm -- that I note that the use of artificial dens seems to be growing in Germany. Here we find concrete and PVC pipes used in the construction of artificial fox earths. These earths are hunted about once a month in season, with the dog being entered in the pipe, and the fox easily bolted out due to the design of the artificial den.

The bolted fox is then blasted with a shotgun.

This is pretty far from genuine terrier work in my opinion, and is only a little bit better than a canned hunt. Woodcraft does not have to be very high to find a fox in this manner -- just visit the artificial dens you have previously constructed (and perhaps stocked). The dog is then entered, and the fox bolts. The dog is unlikely to face much of a fight since the fox has an easy exit. Nor does the terrier owner have to dig to the dog. These are 5 minutes affairs, not three-hour digs. As for shooting a fox with a shotgun as it exits a pipe -- could there be anything easier?

I am at a loss to understand this permutation of terrier work which is so very different from what we do in the U.S.

If we set aside the ethics of this kind of hunting and ask only what might be happening to the dogs, more alarm bells sound.

Are the Germans turning to artificial dens because their dogs are too large to work tight and twisting natural earths?

That may, in fact, be part of the impetus behind the rise of artificial earths in Germany. While the German standard for a working dachshund (teckel) calls for a dog with a small chest, the Germans insisted on creating their own brand of terrier during the strange period leading up to the rise of Nazi Germany.

I have documented the true history of the German Hunt terrier (the Jagdterrier or Jagd terrier) in previous posts and noted that this "all rounder" is too small to easily retrieve bird, and often too big to easily go to ground on fox. It is a dog that, when bred to the middle of the standard, is "betwixt and between".

You know there are problems with Jagd Terrier size when the problem becomes institutionalized in the form of a cartoon Jagd Terrier struggling to exit an artificial earth. Cartoons require an audience to "get the joke" -- to say out loud that which is widely known, even if seldom stated.

The Germans have always been an engineering and industrious people, and so it is no surprise to find they have put a lot of effort into "improving" the old "three-brick-high with a slate roof" design that characterize so many artificial earths in the UK.

Modern German earths are often made of cast concrete or even plastic pipe assembled in sections and attached to special "bedding kettles". Though there are various designs for these earths, they all feature ready exits so that a barking dog can easily bolt the fox.

Carefully designed earths mean the dog may never come face-to-face with a fox at all -- a good way to keep a dog injury-free, but also a set-up that prevents a dog from ever being in a situation where it has to demonstrate locating abilities in a complicated sette, staying power while it is being dug to over several hours, or the drive and "bottle" needed to hold a fox in a stop-end.

In fact, these German earths are designed so well that I suspect a barking Tea-cup Poodle could bolt a fox!

Artificial dens are simply not used in the United States. One reason for this is that our mounted hunts are not in the business of killing foxes -- once a fox goes to earth, the hounds are praised and the field rides off until another fox is found, and then the chase is on again. This is not drag hunting, but it is not vermin control either. Perhaps it is game management. A fox caught by the hounds above ground is a very rare thing, and such a stupid, slow or sick fox is best weeded from the gene pool.

Another reason we do not have artificial earths in the U.S. is that in the Eastern U.S., where red fox are most common, there are so many groundhog holes that an artificial den is unlikely to be used by a fox, no matter how well it is located.

Perhaps the most important reason we do not have artificial dens in the U.S., however, has to do with our concept of "fair chase".

"Fair chase" is a modern idea and has been framed in response to a fixed amount of wildlife and a rising tide of people and technology.

In pre-historical time you took game any way you could, but with the development of modern weapons, mankind found it could shoot out all the game and "bleed the land white" in just a few years time.

As amazing as it sounds, for example, the people of the United States killed off almost every type of large wildlife in this country between 1850 and 1900 when ethics and common sense failed to keep pace with rapid improvements in gun technology and traps.

Bison, elk, wolf, white tail deer, pronghorn, moose, turkey, eagles, beaver, and many species of ducks, geese and crane were nearly wiped off the American landscape.

In response to this devastation, the U.S. developed the concept of "fair chase". Artificial bird-calling machines were banned, as were live decoys, and the commercial sale of wild game was prohibited. Hunting of most species was limited to clear seasons and defined bag limits, and some types of hunting (such as canons loaded with shrapnel designed to kill whole flocks of geese with a single shot) were banned outright.

Today, thanks to sane wildlife laws, ethical hunters, and the finest game management professionals in the world, most forms of American wildlife can now be found in record abundance.

Other countries have set in place their own laws, regulations and customs governing "fair chase". In the UK, for example, leghold traps are considered a horror, in no small part because the British have no experience with modern off-set-jaw traps, and in part because the mounted hunts have demonized traps and poison which proved to be so efficient during Victorian times that fox were often rare and many mounted hunts were reduced to chasing stag and rabbit.

In fact, the demonization of traps, poison and guns for fox control reached such a frothy state that a legal term was coined for the crime -- Vulpicide -- which means the killing of fox by any method other than horse, hound, and terrier.

Will Germany and other countries develop their own sense of fair chase, and will it include the rejection of artificial dens or -- perversely -- their embrace?

Time will tell, but so far artificial dens seem to be gaining ground in Germany. One "sales point" for these contraptions is that they are safe for the dog, which is unlikely to tangle with the fox in any serious way. In addition, the dog can always be easily located and cave-ins are an impossibility.

It should be noted, of course, that the real reason artificial dens may be finding favor in Germany is that they are a profit center on hunting-club and farm lands in much the same way that pen-raised pheasants are a profit center at other locations.

There is clearly a demand in Germany for simple and easy "sport" among those who want to "test" their dogs and show that their dogs still have what it takes. Never mind that the test is somewhat rigged and the dogs may be a bit too big to do the job in a natural fox earth.

A red fox running free in a concrete pipe, is certainly a better test than a white rat in a welded cage at the end of a wooden tunnel! Who are we -- Americans who invented the white rat "test" -- to disagree?

Of course there are still some of us who like the other option -- the slow slogging hunt for natural dens and the back-breaking labor of digging to the dogs through marl, root and rock. This is fair chase, and it is what terrier work is really all about.

For more pictures of German artificial fox den construction, see
>> http://www.jaeger-wesermarsch.de/sonstiges/kunstbau.html
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Charles (Darwin) In Charge

They have professional gun safety classes for a reason. From St. Louis:

Imperial man shoots himself in the head while teaching firearms safety

KSDK -- An Imperial man is dead after accidentally shooting himself in the head while teaching his girlfriend firearms safety.

Sheriff Glenn Boyer said that on Friday, deputies responded to 4307 Rock Valley Court in Imperial for a shooting. Investigators found 40-year-old James Looney with a gunshot wound to the head.

According to witnesses, Looney was demonstrating how to use the different safety mechanisms on several guns to his girlfriend. The witnesses said Looney would put the guns to his head, and before pulling the trigger, would ask her if she thought the gun would go off. With the first two guns, the safety mechanisms worked. The third gun fired.

Looney was transported to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead the next morning.

According to witnesses, Looney was going to take his girlfriend to the shooting range the next day, but insisted on the lesson on firearm safety the day before.

Deputies believe alcohol was involved.

His name was Looney? Of course it was ...

Remember: The tree of life is self-pruning. Try not to be part of the dead wood.

Staying away from booze and drugs really helps in that regard.

A word to the wise is sufficient. .

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Great Moments in Virginia History

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dista-- "

- The last words of Gen. John Sedgwick, spoken as he looked out over the parapet at enemy lines during the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864.

Supreme Court Says 2nd Amendment is Restricted

The Supreme Court yesterday affirmed federal efforts to bar those convicted of domestic violence from owning guns.

Will the NRA now take to the streets demanding that wife-beaters have an unrestricted right to guns?

After all, you do not lose your First Amendment rights after you beat someone. Why should you lose your Second Amendment rights?

And will civil rights groups now take to the streets to protest the outrageous discrimination which says hitting a spouse in the face is a worse crime than hitting a random stranger in the face?

Aren't all people equal before the law?

Or will (Heaven forbid!) common sense step in?

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  .