Shotgun-Only Rationale for Deer Hunting Laws, Debunked

In the course of doing research for my forthcoming book on deer hunting for locavores, I have been reviewing a fair bit of data on hunting accidents. North Carolina has a ton of data available on their website so I've been focusing on NC data mostly over the past week.

I stumbled across some unexpected things in the course of this that I would like to share. This is all based on reports that anyone else can check right here.

Some states and some counties even within Virginia have laws that ban the use of modern rifles for deerhunting, insisting that hunters use shotguns for this purpose. The rationale is that a rifle bullet can theoretically travel much farther than a shotgun slug or buckshot and these governments wish to prevent high accident rates caused by over-travel of projectiles. Most slug guns have a practical range, in terms of both retained energy and accuracy, of about 100 yards.

The natural question is two-fold: is over-travel of projectiles a common cause of death or injury in places that allow deer to be hunted with rifles? And are shotguns actually safer than rifles? North Carolina allows the use of modern rifles, has liberal bag limits and deer hunting is the most popular type of hunting in the state. So it should be a perfect place to start looking for answers.

During the 2007-2008 season over 460,000 people bought hunting licenses and presumably went hunting at least once and in many cases more. The number of people injured or killed in hunting accidents by firearms while standing more than 101 yards from the muzzle was a grand total of 1.

One. One single accident.

During the 2006-2007 season it was 2. The year before that it was 5 people injured, which includes data from both rifles and shotguns (I can't see how many for each weapon). The total numbers of licensed hunters for those years were 440,000 and 427,000, respectively.

Then I started looking at total numbers of accidents involving shotguns versus rifles. Over those 3 years that I have full data at hand to review, there were 60% more accidents involving shotguns than there were involving rifles.

In terms of the raw number, shotguns are injuring more people in hunting accidents than rifles are, but local governments (including Buckingham County, which borders my own county of Albemarle) want to force deer hunters to use this less-suitable weapon? This makes absolutely no sense.

I do not doubt the good intentions of state and local lawmakers who have passed such laws. But these laws appear to have been made on the basis of feeling rather than a systematic examination of the real risks. Over-travel of a bullet is, in the real world, only a very infrequent factor in hunting accidents. People are not getting hit by bullets from a mile away in areas that allow rifle hunting.

This only makes sense, since hunters are trained never to fire a rifle unless they can see a solid backstop that will stop the bullet (usually the ground relative to the muzzle of the rifle) even if they miss their shot by a few degrees. No hunter goes shooting a rifle up into the air at the elevated angle necessary to actually make a rifle bullet travel the distances that are theoretically possible. Deer do not hide in tree tops.

A 150 grain bullet from a 30-30 (one of America's most popular deer cartridges, especially in eastern states) drops 62.4 inches by the time it has traveled 400 yards. Even if an adult was firing from a standing position straight at the horizon in a level field, the bullet would plow into the ground within about 350 yards. Note that a slug from a shotgun can also travel that far -- it just isn't accurate enough to deliberately shoot at something at that range. In the real world, even if someone did shoot straight for the horizon in this wooded part of the country the bullet would probably hit a tree long before it went 350 yards.

The bottom line is that I am not seeing any evidence supporting these laws requiring the use of shotguns. Such laws are also actively harmful and discriminatory in the sense that the enormous recoil produced by firing a 12 gauge or even a 20 gauge solid slug is too much for many smaller women and men, handicapped people or the elderly to physically take.

If someone else has data from other states suggesting the contrary, I would love to see it.

Write-Up in The Hook

Yesterday Dave McNair of The Hook (one of Charlottesville's local weekly papers) was good enough to write up a short piece about the classes I'm teaching on deer hunting for locavores.

Dave gets extra points for his all-too-rare proper punctuation in his reference to the .30-'06 cartridge. Caliber of a nominal .30 inch in diameter, introduced in the year 1906. It is so refreshing to see that written out properly in a main-stream news publication.

My book, 'Deer Hunting for Locavores' is still in progress but I now have more than enough sample chapters to begin presenting it to prospective publishers soon. At this point the classes have gone so well that I plan on teaching the course again. Hearing the questions and observations from students has been very valuable in considering what needs to be included in the book.

The great difficulty with repeating the class regularly would be that once we get out of the deer season I'm not quite sure how I'd go about doing live demonstrations of field dressing, quartering and butchering. There seems to be enough demand out there that I could probably do this class 4 times a year in Charlottesville with a full roster each time, if only I can manage to legally obtain newly dead deer that haven't been smashed to pieces by the side of the road. Perhaps there is someone in the area with a depredation permit who could help out?

Why Obama Won the Nobel Peace Prize

When I heard the President Obama had been named the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, I just shook my head. It didn't make any sense -- what has he done to effect peace anywhere in the world? I actually felt bad for the guy. He had only a few hours notice that he was being given this thing before the whole world would be told. What exactly was he supposed to do?

Don't get me wrong. I think Obama is doing a pretty good job as President. He's already done a lot of the things he promised to do and he's not even through his first full year in office. He abolished torture and has made a good faith effort to close Guantanamo up to the limits of the power of his office. He has pulled back American soldiers and Marines from most patrol duties in Iraqi cities and has started the arduous process of bringing most of them home. Military assets are being re-directed into Afghanistan (although we still don't know to what extent). He made a whole series of difficult and often bold decisions to rescue the American economy and we are finally seeing real signs of spring on that front. On the whole, the man is doing a pretty good job.

In spite of all of that, I still did not see what he was supposed to have done to earn a Nobel peace prize. Until this morning when it finally sunk into my thick skull that the Nobel prize committee consists of Europeans. I had been thinking about this whole thing from, naturally, an American perspective.

It is difficult for someone who has not traveled outside of the United States in the past year to understand how profoundly the world's view of America has just changed. They hated us. And by 'they' I mean pretty much the entire world. And then suddenly Obama came along and he made a point of traveling to Europe and to the Middle East and talking to people in other countries and conducting real diplomacy and making speeches in which he convinced them that we truly do want to get along with them.

America is the world's only superpower at the moment. This will probably change over the next decade as China's investments begin to pay off and Russia is nursed back to strength by little Caesar. But for the moment, its us. So when the rest of the world thinks about the basic concept of wielding power internationally, they are usually thinking about the United States. In the minds of many Europeans, the prospects for international peace are synonymous with whatever attitude is projected by the US. Frequently they seem to hate us for this. In fact, many of them tend to hate us for this even at the times when they like our attitude and policies.

The whole damn world was tensed up for 8 years under George W. Bush, like a beaten child waiting for his alcoholic step-father's fist to come down. After war with Iraq and Afghanistan, threats against Iran and North Korea, our tacit support for Israel's brief war against Lebanon and the outrageous war crimes against women and children that they committed during the fighting in Gaza, there seemed to be absolutely no hope for peace through America. And with America being the only superpower, that meant no hope for peace at all.

Obama is like the social worker who shows up to get a restraining order against the step-father and arranges for the beaten step-child to get counseling. Nothing really amazing there - the guy is just doing his job. But to that beaten step child, the social worker is a hero.

So now the abused step-child of the alcoholic is basically the one handing out the Nobel Prizes. I think that they watched Obama go to Cairo and Berlin and they have been breathing a long sigh of relief all year. Meanwhile, they've seen how he is following through with pulling out of Iraq and they have seen that he is willing to engage in real diplomacy even with Iran. To them, Obama is peace.

Have there been past Nobel peace laureates who did more to earn their prizes? Absolutely. What about in the past year? I have to say that there are no names springing to mind as people who got totally screwed out of their due by the selection of Barack Obama.

So yeah, from an American perspective it does seem premature at best to give the President a Nobel prize. But I think that accusations of this being tokenism or political in a partisan way are unfounded. From the perspective of those handing out the award, they truly are enormously grateful to President Obama for wielding American power in a generally peaceful way.

Chuck Rangel Eerily Repeats History

Can anyone tell me why we, the Democratic Party, should shield Rep. Charles Rangel from the obvious political consequences of his unethical actions? Because if a Republican committee chair had been guilty of half the things that Rangel is clearly guilty of, we would be demanding his immediate resignation as chairman of the most powerful committee in the Congress.

The irony in Rangel's case is the repetition of history. Rangel won his seat by ousting the previous Representative from his seat during the 1970 Democratic primary. That Representative was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Powell was first elected to Congress in 1944, becoming the first black person to be elected to Congress from the state of New York. Powell became a tremendously capable and successful member of Congress, establishing a solid record of leadership on social issues. Powell was arguably a key to the success of President Kennedy's 'New Frontier' legislative agenda. He stood up against Tamany Hall, still a powerful force in New York politics in the 1950's, refusing to obey them and winning his primary even after they turned on him. Powell also authored and championed important civil rights legislation, helping to force the desegregation of public schools.

The man had a brilliant career fighting for exactly the things that his constituents had sent him to do. Yet over time he developed a sense of entitlement. He took Committee funds for his own personal use. Various charges of corruption were leveled at him and investigation by the ethics committee found that those charges were founded.

Eventually Powell was expelled from the House mid-term, a-la James Traficant. The vote was 307-116. He ran in the special election to get his seat back, was refused his seat by the House, sued and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor and ordered the House to re-admit him for the new term.

But the political damage finally took its toll on Adam Clayton Powell. He lost his seniority and rarely showed up at the Capitol. Meanwhile, Chuck Rangel was an up-and-coming Harlem politician who had been making all the right friends and establishing a good record in the New York State Assembly. Powell had become every bit as much of a charismatic political icon as Rangel has since become, but in the end Rangel narrowly edged him out in the primary before going on to win in the general election with about 88%.

As most of those reading this know, Rangel's career since that time has been one distinguished by both his flamboyant and charismatic style and a strong record of successful legislation. Like Powell, he has been a consistent leader on civil rights issues. Long after marching in Selma he was arrested for protesting aparthaid in front of the South African embassy.

And yet. In spite of all of his success and good will from his constituents, or perhaps because of it, Rangel has succumbed to the same temptations and ethical lapses that his predecessor did.

How far he chooses to take this repetition of history is up to him. Perhaps he will be forced out of the House following the report of the ethics investigation. Meanwhile, in spite of Rangel's personal charm and solid resume, it is time that the Democratic Party carved this bit of rot out from among our ranks.

'The Hidden Life of Deer' is Sophomoric Junk

There is so much very good literature about deer which is full of good science and proper citations that the idea of spotlighting a very bad book on the topic in a positive light in a national publication seems pointless and foolish. Such is the case with the NY Times' review today of a book by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas entitled 'The Hidden Life of Deer.'

In the first place, Ms. Thomas unashamedly admits to putting out as much as 75 pounds of corn per day in her backyard for deer to eat during the winter. I suppose that a little bit on the scale of spillage from a bird feeder wouldn't be the worst thing to do, but anyone who knows even a little bit about deer biology knows what a terrible idea this. Deer do not normally congregate in a large group around a single, concentrated food source. When they do, saliva-borne diseases such as chronic wasting disease (a prion disease similar to mad cow disease) are easily transmitted. What would have been one sick animal becomes an epidemic. This becomes a threat not only to deer but also potentially to other animals, domestic and wild.

She utterly fails to understand even the most basic concepts of ecology or adaption. I'm just going to grab the very first thing in the book which betrays her lack of knowledge, and I'm going to probe her statement with ruthless detail in order to demonstrate the level of sophmorism at work.

Dig this bit she wrote on the second page in defense of encouraging high populations of pigeons, which are a non-native and invasive species that does not belong in North America:

Today, of course, they number in the billions, as did their close relatives, the now-extinct passenger pigeons, before we exterminated them. Do we begrudge passenger pigeons their former large numbers? Far from it. How sublime, we think, to see a migration of passenger pigeons filling the sky from horizon to horizon! If only they had not gone extinct!

We have no such admiration for the birds we once called rock doves. They're here in real life, not just in Audubon's drawings, so to us they are pests. We are offended by animals who are too plentiful, and we rename them pejoratively, usually for rats, who also are considered to be too plentiful. Hence pigeons are called flying rats.

An honorable lament for the passenger pigeon. But Ms. Thomas is apparently unaware of the natural history of North America prior to European arrival. The passenger pigeon probably only formed those massive flocks in the billions for a few centuries. Our idea of the pre-Columbian era is shaped by reports from early European explorers telling of a vast wilderness full of wildlife that teemed beyond anything imaginable. But what those explorers were really encountering was the wake of a massive series of plagues that killed off the great majority of native Americans. North America had been under intensive agricultural use for over a thousand years. The American human population, prior to the voyage of Columbus, has been estimated by credible scientists to be as high as 112,000,000 people.

The Aztec empire alone, in what is now Mexico, had about 25,000,000 souls in 1492. By 1600 there were only about 1,000,000 in all of Mexico. The cause was mostly diseases introduced by white explorers, conquerors and settlers. Diseases that Europeans had developed relative immunity to during past plagues, but which native Americans had no natural resistance to.

These diseases swept across North America in multiple waves from various directions. They came both from the Spanish presence in the south and along the Atlantic coast following visits from mostly English, West Country fishermen, who were fishing the Grand Banks for years before colonization, but needed to stop on land to salt their fish in order to prevent the catch from rotting before they got home. When the pilgrims met the famous Squanto on their arrival in Massachusetts in 1620, he already spoke English. His own tribe had already been wiped out by European diseases before the Pilgrims even landed. In fact, most of the native peoples of New England had already suffered the same fate.

The reports from early colonists and explorers of an unspoiled wilderness are probably akin to walking through a vacant lot city lot a year after a building had been torn down and declaring the crab grass, roaches and rats to be a paradise of nature. If you'd never seen crab grass or cockroaches before, I suppose that it would look pretty cool. That doesn't make it a stable ecosystem.

This was the state of affairs that soon unfolded all over the continent. With entire civilizations collapsing, huge areas of land reverted to a wild state. Only it wasn't even remotely the wild state that had existed before the Indians had arrived, on account of most of the megafauna and the vast majority of the native predators having died out for unexplained reasons roughly 15,000 years earlier.

The passenger pigeon, in flocks of teeming billions, was a momentary phenomenon that would not have been sustained even if every human being, Europeans included, had vanished from the face of the Earth. Massive areas of habitat opened up with the deaths of so many humans and competition with humans for food briefly dropped to near zero. The population ballooned, creating a totally unstable situation. It is very much plausible that the birds quickly got lazy in their behavior as a species, depending on predator satiation to allow their sloppy nesting habits to succeed. Then even more suddenly their numbers dropped too low for those sloppy habits of group colonies of nests close to the ground to continue to be viable.

You can be lazy about defending your young when there are 5,000,000 other nests in the area with eggs only a few feet from the ground. The odds of the local predators getting around to your chicks before they are fledged are pretty low. That doesn't work when you are in a nesting colony of only a few dozen birds.

So sorry, Mrs. Thomas. You are quite wrong -- we should begrudge the passenger pigeon its flocks of billions of birds that blacked out the sky. Nothing can be that numerous in a sustainable way, and it only happened for the blink of an eye because of human diseases accidentally spread by Europeans. In such numbers, the passenger pigeon was every bit a product of environmental disruption as the rock dove, or common pigeon, is today. Not to say that either bird deserves to go extinct, but in both cases one finds a situation begging for a reduction in numbers.

Its fun to seize on one thing like this and shake it to death, but I think you could honestly do this with almost the entire book. Her science is utter crap and it is horrifying to think that people are going to buy this book and read it and then think that they have actually learned useful information about nature.

Ms. Thomas is also very rude to deer hunters, which would be fine if she had any idea what she was talking about. But clearly she does not [this, I quote from the NYT review, rather than directly quoted out of her book]:

She isn’t opposed to deer hunting, although she deplores the doltish spectacle it has become. She writes, caustically: “We fill the woods with invasive primates camouflaged to look like piles of leaves who sneak around, sprinkling estrus doe urine and manipulating gadgets that sound like antlers clashing.” She likens using these kinds of gizmos to “something like fishing with dynamite” and describes it as “not a measure of skill.”

Gadgets that sound like antlers clashing? Yes, those 'gadgets' are most typically a pair of antlers from a buck previously killed. If you don't have a pair of antlers, you might buy a pair of plastic ones from a store until you manage to get your own buck or find some sheds. Rattling a pair of old antlers together, or using urine from a doe that was killed while in estrus, or camouflaging ones self are all tactics that could have been and probably were used by neolithic hunters thousands of years ago.

I must wonder whether she finds the same tactics as 'doltish' when used by other predators. Like the Australian death adder, which wiggles the tip of its tail to attract prey in a tactic similar to rattling antlers. Or the bolas spider, known for its ability to attract prey by producing pheromones that mimic mating signals used by moths. And those damned doltish Bengal tigers with their unfair stripes to camouflage them while hunting! Fishing with dynamite, those tigers are. Such buffoons. We could spend all day talking about the legions of predators that use precisely the hunting tactics which Thomas alleges are "not a measure of skill."

Ms. Thomas appears to suffer from the all-too-common malady of believing that hunting by any means other than biting the animal to death is both a form of cheating and an entirely modern development. I believe that I pretty thoroughly eviscerated this idiocy in a previous blog entry last June which reviewed some of the common neolithic North American hunting techniques which have been proven by bones and artifacts at the sites of large kills. Our ancient ancestors killed dozens or even hundreds of animals at a time by driving them off of cliffs or into corrals where they were slaughtered by spears and arrows from behind a fence.

If she wants to talk about 'fishing with dynamite,' she should take it up with every every single primitive hunting culture in the world. Techniques of camouflage and subterfuge have always been used and will always be used by humans for ambush predation. Hunting is not a game. The point is not to earn touchdowns and shake hands on the field before heading off to the showers. The point is to obtain food from the wild. Humans do not have claws and our canines are no longer large enough to break a windpipe in a single crunch. We hunt mostly with our brains, not with our bodies. That is our nature.

I do not begrudge the author the sentimentalism of her approach to her subject. Only the stubborn ignorance.

People who know next to nothing about deer, or ecology, or hunting, would do best to abstain from publishing books on those topics. For their part, the New York Times should kindly have reviews of books on such topics be assigned to people with expertise in the field and an ability to judge the merit of the content.

5 Year Old Gator Hunter

A few days ago a 5 year old kid in Texas managed to kill an 800 pound alligator during a legal hunt on his family's ranch.

I am sure that we will hear the usual chorus of people who know nothing about hunting or firearms making a big fuss about how awful this is, or irresponsible, or unremarkable. But based on the few reports I have seen thus far, it is in fact a remarkable accomplishment.

No news outlets have reported on the specifics of his shot placement yet, but if it is true that he killed the gator with a single shot then I want to point out the great skill required to do this. I have never personally hunted alligators, since the closest wild population is about 16 miles south of the Virginia/North Carolina border (even NC does not have anything near a huntable population and I generally support the protection of alligators there). But I have read a good bit about crocodile hunting and because I am a huge dork I have also spent too much time looking at the anatomy of the larger crocodilians.

There is only one spot where you can shoot a large alligator or crocodile and kill it instantly with that single shot. That would be a bullet directly to the brain, which is literally about the size of a walnut with a funny sort of protrusion (link appears to show a scan of an immature example). Only by having carefully studying the animal's anatomy in advance and being able to remain very much calm and collected during what was certainly an adrenaline-charged moment could this boy have pulled off such a shot during the hunt.

Kids are capable of this. My 5 year old daughter has a fair notion of deer anatomy, having helped me field-dress and butcher deer last season. She has also looked at skeletal diagrams in books and knows pretty much how they are put together. I would imagine that Simon Hughes' parents had similarly prepared him for the hunt by teaching him the requisite biology.

Sure, the shot was from a distance of only 5 feet so it was no fantastic feat of marksmanship. But imagine yourself only 5 feet away from a furious 800 pound alligator thrashing around in the water, having just slipped its hook. Exactly how certain are you that you could keep yourself together enough to remember where exactly in that 104 pound head a walnut of a brain lies, and then manage to make the shot without your hands shaking so much that you wind up busting it in the tail?

Oh yeah, and do that when you're 5 years old.

For those concerned about the continued existence of alligators, please note that there were about 40 of them living in the wild on this one ranch. Alligators were previously an endangered species, but were removed from the Endangered Species List in 1987 after having made an enormous recovery. Today there are over a million American alligators in the wild in the United States. This particular one was so huge that it was pushing out smaller alligators from the habitat, so if anything killing it will probably result in higher total numbers of alligators in the area. Let us bear in mind that this is a phenomenally unintelligent animal with, again, a brain the size of a walnut. The killing of one particular alligator in an area where they are common is ethically about on par with eating a piece of fried chicken.

[Photo by Michael Paulson, Copyright 2009 by the Houston Chronicle]