Gourmet Mom - alternative to hunting deer, or not
#6
  Re: (...)
Actual Letter from someone who writes, and farms. Hey, I thought it sounded like a good idea! btw, I'm from a family of hunters.

I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a
stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it.
The first step in this adventure was getting a deer.

I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not 4 feet
away), it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a
bag over it's head (to calm it down) then hog tie it and transport it
home.

I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back.
They were not having any of it.

After about 20 minutes, my deer showed up -- 3 of them. I picked
out a likely looking one, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and
threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me. I wrapped the
rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold.

The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it
was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step towards
it...it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and then
received an education. The first thing that I learned is that, while a
deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, they
are spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope. That deer EXPLODED.

The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a
LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight
range I could fight down with a rope and with some dignity. A deer-- no
chance.

That thing ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined.

The only upside is that they do not have as much stamina as many
other animals. A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick
to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me
a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood
flowing out of the big gash in my head. At that point, I had lost my
taste for corn-fed venison. I just wanted to get that devil creature off
the end of that rope.

I figured if I just let it go with the rope hanging around its
neck, it would likely die slow and painfully somewhere. At the time,
there was no love at all between me and that deer. At that moment, I hated
the thing, and I would venture a guess that the feeling was mutual. Despite
the gash in my head and the several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer's momentum by bracing my head against various
large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think
clearly enough to recognize that there was a small chance that I shared
some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in, so I
didn't want the deer to have it suffer a slow death, so I managed to
get it lined back up in between my truck and the feeder - a little trap
I had set before hand...kind of like a squeeze chute. I got it to back
in there and I started moving up so I could get my rope back.

Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years
would have thought that a deer would bite somebody, so I was very
surprised when I reached up there to grab that rope and the deer grabbed
hold of my wrist.

Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse
where they just bite you and then let go. A deer bites you and shakes
its head --almost like a pit bull. They bite HARD and it hurts. The
proper thing to do when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back
slowly.

I tried screaming and shaking instead. My method was ineffective. It seems like the deer was biting and shaking for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds.

I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that
claim by now) tricked it.

While I kept it busy tearing the bejesus out of my right arm, I
reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose. That was when I
got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.

Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right
up on their back feet and strike right about head and shoulder level,
and their hooves are surprisingly sharp. I learned a long time ago that, when an animal -- like a horse --strikes at you with their hooves and you can't get away easily, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and make an aggressive move towards the animal. This will usually cause them to back down a bit so you can escape.

This was not a horse. This was a deer, so obviously, such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy.

I screamed like a woman and tried to turn and run. The reason I
had always been told NOT to try to turn and run from a horse that
paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the
back of the head.

Deer may not be so different from horses after all, besides
being twice as strong and 3 times as evil, because the second I turned to
run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down. Now,
when a deer paws at you and knocks you down, it does not immediately
leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What
they do instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you while you
are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head.

I finally managed to crawl under the truck and the deer went away. So now
I know why when people go deer hunting they bring a rifle with a scope
so that they can be somewhat equal to the Prey.
Cory

I am not the model.
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#7
  Re: Gourmet Mom - alternative to hunting deer, or not by Corinne (Actual Letter from s...)
Here is an article written by a good friend of my Dad's and the Dantos family is more family than friends to us...

Yankee Notebook: This Dr. Doolittle no longer makes house calls

January 24, 2004

By Willem Lange


One of the main problems of writing for public consumption is that a great many people come to feel that you don't know anything at all, and a lot of others think you must know a great deal more than you do. You wouldn't believe, for example, the vehemence with which some readers disagree with my opinion of Howard Dean, who I thought was a pretty nice guy. On the other hand, I wrote an article a number of years ago for Yankee Magazine, about termites and carpenter ants. It was all the result of library research and interviews with entomologists, but after the article appeared, I started getting phone calls from all over the place - even one from Hawaii - asking my advice on the detection, control and eradication of formic pests.

Then there was the professor who called one morning. He'd been chased into the house from his own lawn and wanted to know how to get rid of ground hornets. "You have skunks around your neighborhood?" I asked. I knew he did; they're epidemic in Hanover.

"This evening after dark, when the hornets have quieted down," I told him, "sprinkle a little ripe garbage near their holes." It worked like a charm. The skunks, attracted by the garbage, smelled or heard the hornets in their holes. There's almost nothing they like better than hornet larvae. The holes were empty in the morning. All of a sudden I was a genius.

I wouldn't suggest that technique nowadays. With the recent explosion of wildlife in the suburbs, the professor would be visited by bears instead of skunks. But I still get the calls - red squirrels or feral cats in the attic, bears in the bird feeder, deer in the tulips, geese making a mess of the lawn, and wild turkeys that think they're roosters on a Sunday morning.

Our village of Etna, N.H., used to be populated by men and women who hunted for sport and meat, and the animals knew it. Now, with farmers disappearing, ever fewer young people taking up hunting, and new housing spreading into what used to be field and forests, the wild animals and birds are returning, accommodating, and even proliferating. I get quite a few calls.

But the one the other week was a beauty. My friend Phidias Dantos called me after dark. "Will!" he said, "I've got a deer in my garage. What should I do with it?"

"How'd it get in there?"

"Alice and I put him in." You can imagine the rest of my questions.

It turned out that Phid's wife, Alice, had headed for town that morning - one of the coldest mornings of that whole frigid week - and seen a couple of guys gazing down into the woods across from her house. She stopped. They were looking at a deer just standing there at the bottom of a little gully, in plain sight. She went on downtown. When she came back, three hours later, it was still there. So she called Phid to come home and do something.

Now, any wildlife biologist will tell you the best thing to do in such a case is nothing, and any conservation officer will tell you that to do anything else is illegal. But all of us were raised on the Little Red Hen, weren't we? - and Peter Rabbit and Winnie the Pooh and Puss in Boots. Animals to us are people, innocent, and with almost human feelings. We're programmed to help.

The Dantoses slid down the snowy slope with water and grain and held it up to the deer's muzzle - a full-sized deer, by the way, a buck who'd recently lost his antlers. Nothing. Phid pushed him gently to see if he could move. He moved one foot about six inches. The night ahead was forecast to be far below zero. So, with Alice pushing from behind and Phid before, steering the head, they worked him up to the road, opened the back door of the car, and pushed him in.

As Phid drove toward his house, the deer hooked his front hooves over the back of the passenger seat and put his head almost to the windshield. At the house, they walked him into the garage, closed the door, spread drop cloths on the floor, and tried again to feed him. Phid cooked up some gruel, pried the buck's teeth apart, and spooned some into him. Then he called me.

"Geez!" I said. "That's illegal! But nobody's gonna prosecute you for it. You better call Tom Dakai, the game warden. Here's the number for Fish and Game in Concord, if you can't get him." All Phid got were answering machines. He covered the deer with a blanket and went to bed.

Fish and Game called back in the morning. The buck was probably suffering from trauma, they said - chased by dogs, bumped by a car - and he's in shock. Handling him can make it worse. Put him in a shed with an open door, where he can see other deer (they're everywhere around the Dantoses' house), and let him be.

They put the deer into the tool shed and left the door open. An hour later he was still there. Three hours later he was gone, and, happily, nowhere to be found. But Phidias thinks he saw him again, a day or so later, with some others, standing on the far side of the yard. "He says they made eye contact, " Alice reports, "and it must have been the same one. It looked grateful."

Don't call me. I'll call you!



Willem Lange is a writer, storyteller and contractor who lives in Etna, N.H. His column appears each week in the Living section of the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus

Those of you familiar with the "back hills" of NH know exactly how Willem sounds and some might remember him from his NH Public Television shows? As for Mr. Dantos...he owns several Au Bon Pain franchises in New Hampshire from Hanover and Lebanon down to Salem and Manchester. A nicer family you will never meet. Picture a little Greek man in his early 70's at the time of the story...hard not to chuckle...or even laugh.
"Ponder well on this point: the pleasant hours of our life are all connected, by a more or less tangible link, with some memory of the table."-Charles Pierre Monselet, French author(1825-1888)
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#8
  Re: Re: Gourmet Mom - alternative to hunting deer, or by firechef (Here is an article w...)
OMG! I have not laughed so hard in a long time! DH also appreciated it! We are still laughing! He too had a story.

A friend he knows was out hunting one day and a doe trots out into a fire lane. Sid is hiding in the bushes and waits for a buck to follow. Well, after a few minutes a fawn walks out...real close to Sid. He gets the bright idea to grab the fawn.....such a sweet little thing. Sid jumps out of the bushes to tackle the little fawn...Well that fawn beat the "$hit" outta Sid!
Daphne
Keep your mind wide open.
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#9
  Re: Re: Gourmet Mom - alternative to hunting deer, or by Gourmet_Mom (OMG! I have not lau...)
Quote:

So, with Alice pushing from behind and Phid before, steering the head, they worked him up to the road, opened the back door of the car, and pushed him in.




Quote:

the bright idea to grab the fawn.....such a sweet little thing.




roflmao!
Cory

I am not the model.
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#10
  Re: Gourmet Mom - alternative to hunting deer, or not by Corinne (Actual Letter from s...)
Great story, Cory. Thanks for sharing this! I hit a deer last fall going to work, I don't know what happened to her/him, but I hope her/his outcome was as good as this!

PJ
PJ
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