>>>Humor, Alan, humor! I forgot my smiley!
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>>>Seriously, I don't like hunting PERIOD as a sport. You kill it to eat it, fine by me, but not for fun. I know that puts me in the minority of libertarian/conservatives but so be it. Heck, I don't even own a gun.
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>>You're not alone. I own lots of guns but I'd never use them to shoot an animal that didn't have a gun. I figure if one is out to prove he's a great woodsman, go out with a pocket camera with no zoom and let's see how big the grizzly is in the frame. Picking off an elk at 600 yards with a Weatherby 308 and bushnell optics isn't more than marksmanship and you can do that on targets.
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>Hitting an elk at 600 yards, in the wind and thermals of the Rocky Mtns is almost entirely luck. A 300 yard shot is hard enough! Now, as to eating what you kill - if you ever eat an elk steak, you'll probably start hunting.
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>As to hunting unarmed animals, animals get better rules than we get, none. We can only hunt during certain hours, in certain seasons, using certain arms. I only kill deer because they kill a lot of people every year, particularly in suicide missions on the highways....

Asymetric warfare, man.

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>I am a longstanding member of PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals)<g>

You'd like my office. Feltman wants to use it as a blind, since I have half a dozen deer outside my window at any given time.

Granted a 600 yard shot is impressive, but it also means you don't have to really sneak up on something to shoot it. I'd be more impressed if somebody took it out with a black powder pistol. (Remember when Elmer Keith used to hunt Kodiaks with a 44 mag pistol?)

A rifle and a scope means marksmanship over backwoodsmanship. Sniper stuff. I am pretty impressed with bow-hunting though (even Feltman's wussy crossbow stuff <g> )