Long story short > Out hunting muledeer me and a buddy. See a big mulie in the trees but rack difficult to see due to shadows. Hill in the backdrop. Not sure if legal. Buudy has binoculars. says definetly legal( 4 minimum on one side). I ask again, are you sure? he says yes. I double check>looks good.>bang!one dead deer. Problem > 3 on one side and possibly 4 on the other. Crap. Go home with deer, call C.O. head office in Victoria BC. They say they will be in contact with me. 1/2 hour later, C.O, wants to come see me and the deer. Bob(CO) arrives and looks over my deer, says hmmm. I think"hmmm?" >crap. He asks me what happened and I tell full story. He looks at me as if I had three heads and says "So you called on yourself?" I said ya. He says Hmmm.  Asks me a bunch of usual questions to get to the motive of me ratting on myself. I said" I have two future hunters as my daughters and I want to provide a positive example for them and if I did wrong, should take the punishment" he says "hmmm" So he says he will take the antlers to the biologist and get them to verify if legal or illegal and will call back. Next day, Bob calls me and says that the biologist declared these legal. I said "bob, if Per chance you had caught me on the road with this deer in the back of my truck, would they have been legal?" He said "nope"  I said "hmmm"

Pays to be honest.

I was cruising for some hunting videos on U-tube and found quite a few good ones. I then came upon a video titled "Bearhunt,animal cruelty, bear shot in the face".

I nearly threw up after watching it. Since when is it funny to watch an animal suffer? If there is anything in this world that gives the antis fodder it's videos like this. I would love nothing more than 5 minutes in a locked room with both these "dudes"

"Bearhunt,animal cruelty, bear shot in the face".

Hi Everyone,

I was just galancing around the siteand reading some past blogs and I came across one or two of Ziller's posts and It sure made me reflect on the frustrating areas of hunting that we sometimes encounter. When I took my driving course at 16, I enrolled in a defensive driving course which was awesome because we got to go do skids and brake stands etc. My instructor told me something that always stuck with me. He said  "it's not your driving you worry about, it's the idiot in the next car".  In essence what he was saying is that if you always maintain a responsible and safe level of driving, you will almost always assure yourself of getting where you are going safely. But we must weigh in the factor of the next guy who does not live up to those standards.

The same goes with hunting. The only thing we can do is raise our standards and be a beacon for those who don't. Ziller gave us a look at some of those lower standard people. For example, the people/person who stole out of his truck. Why? So you steal a thousand or more dollars worth of tools and hunting gear , you risk jailtime, not to mention risk having an irrate gun owner pissed at you. It will catch up with you eventually, guaranteed.

The other situation he mentioned was that an individual(s) using his blind and gutting a deer beside it. I don't know about you but that would really p___ me off. Those people are not hunters, they are what I call "crooked" hunters that will not follow the "straight" path.

A couple of years back I was hunting for moose in a hard access area(my favorite) and it was the year that the regulations here changed on moose harvest. For the first two weeks(August 15 to 30) you can harvest any bull(must have antler). Afetr that you were allowed three plus points on the brow tine or better(tripalm) or ten points on total all on one side. the other option was a spike bull having two points or less totat on one side.  My hunting partner radioed me that he found something dispicable(his word) and to come join him. He gave me his GPS co-ordinates and I joined him in about 25 minutes of a walk. So here he found a huge 51 inch spread moose dead fully intact about a day old  kill and shot through the lungs.( he did have some scavenger damage) the problem was he had two huge points on both the brow tines and we legally could only count 7 tines total on one side.And at that size he was illegal. So somebody took the shot not knowing for sure it was legal and counted after the fact. Sorry folks but that is BS on so many accounts. What a waste. It made me feel kind of queezy. But do we say to ourselves "why should I not do the same" Hell no, We must always be that guiding light for others.

I’ve always said that picking a good hunting partner is as important as picking a wife; choose the wrong one and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.( For the ladies on this site please insert husband in place of wife)  Most of you most likely have encountered bad hunting partners, I have chosen to write about certain ones and will post them every now and then. Today, I would like to write about one of my most memorable. His name is Blob( minus the L). When I first moved out to BC in ’95, I was approached by a local business manager, Blob( nickel & dime) to go hunting for a day trip in an area he said was very productive. I agreed and went and bought my license and Non-resident tags ( I was too new for resident tags). The day before we were to leave, he said his truck was in the garage and we asked to use my 4x4. I agreed, as well as I had no reason not to believe him. He said he would pay for ½ the fuel and as such we headed out of town at 4am the next morning. Upon arriving at said hunting area, he said that road hunting in the AM was best and this is true as moose are moving around quite a bit in cooler temps. About 20 minutes down the road Blob yells out “Stop, wolf ,wolf”. As he is yelling, he bails out of the truck with what I now see is a loaded gun and proceeds to rapid fire at a bear 300 yrds away on a cutline. His shooting abilities or his equipment maintenance abilities showed quite well as the bear never even moves. I said to him “that’s a bear, not a wolf”, and he says it’s OK anyway as he has a licence for bear too. ( this is where I should have sent him to check out a phantom moose sighting and left for town). We continued on our way and an hour or so later, we see this beautiful 3x3 muley on a knoll in a cutblock 150 yrds away. Once again, Blob bails and lets go a flurry of bullets. This time I was convinced a bullet found it’s mark or came damn close as the deer kicked at his hind quarter. I said very sarcastically “ Let me guess, you have a muley tag too?’ We started to trail/track/wonder aimlessly looking for him but there was no blood trail. While doing this sophisticated CSI work, we ended up having some BS luck and a 2 point moose gets out of his bed to see what the commotion is. Blob shoots him down with much better accuracy this time as it took only 4 shots at 50 yrds. He then of course wants me to help gut, quarter etc but I told him I wanted to exhaust the search for the muley for a while yet. No luck. Hope he was not wounded. So we get back to town, and he gets me to drop off the meat at a local butcher and says we can split the meat and the cost. Sure why not?!  A week and a half later he said a friend has brought the meat home to his house and we can split up the cost and meat. I took my half of the meat (tenderloin was missing) and he gave me a bill which seemed very high and I nievely payed him. I asked him about the gas money and he said he deducted it from my half of the bill and I had no proof of course as he had “lost” the original bill.  Time passes on, he leaves town and one day we are talking with an ex-girlfriend of his and she informs me of some interesting facts.

It turns out he had no truck, no license at all, I had paid the full amount for butchering the moose. Having been bent over that bad at least he could have supplied the vasoline.

This whole scenario would never happen now. I learned, but it goes to show what some people will do to get their way.

As in most of my life, I try to hold a higher standard of myself when it comes to fairness and ethics and this of course encompasses hunting and fishing. I adhere to the law even if I may at times not agree with it,. I refuse to take "hail mary" shots at my quarry and try as possible for a one shot /one kill scenario. But life is not perfect and neither am I. For example.

I was bowhunting muley does one winter. I had a custom made recurve at my side in which I practised constantly and was very confident in my shot. I had been observing the area where these deer were exiting the woods and had a good ambush site picked out.  On the day in question, I set up in ambush and waited. Lo and behold, out comes a nice big fat dry doe. I draw, aim and release down this pre determined shooting lane and the arrow left and as soon as it did, I knew the trajectory was perfect. However as the arrow began it's descent toward a beautiful double lung shot, it glanced off a tiny branch I could not see. The arrow went underneath her belly and she darted off. In all honesty, I was happy that It seemed a clean miss. As I approached the arrow, however, I noticed blood on the snow. It was bright red and was constantly trailing her back into the woods. I waited a couple of hours and then started to track. It took me 5 more hours to finally decide to give up for the night as it was black out by now. I did not sleep that night. I prayed to find her in the morning. First light I head out and find the answer to my prayers. There she was in the first field in which I park my truck. She saw me coming and had a hell of a time getting up. I put a bullet into her, game over. My original arrow shot had severed her Achilles tendon. I felt bad for her, but relieved.

As I was reading chaulka123's dilema of his unethical dilema, I am reminded of all the farmers and property owners who no longer give permission to hunters for access on their land because of injured animals, garbage, property damage etc. In his case I am convinced that his neighbour is a prime example of the "one who ruins it for the rest of us". Where is the respect for the animal?where is the ethics at all? I sincerely sympathize with you chaulka123 and Trully feel for you. The best thing we can do is stand up for what's right. The Anti-hunters do not need more fodder and if his actions made it to PETA or the media, they would cruxify the name hunter. We must make sure that we teach the next generation properly. Case in point, instead of tracking that doe, I could have hunted for another 5 hours and I could have worked the next morning and made some money instead. But I took the high road and took the morning off.  If I had to explain that to my budding hunter daughters, how would I have been able to look them in the eye and say" Such is life, let her go and we will kill another" No Way. I'd rather give up hunting.

Well for the third time now, the Conservatives are trying to rid us Canadians of the long-suffering long gun registry. Originally, it was brought to John/Jane Q Taxpayer as a great way to fight crime by the LIberals and would only cost us in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars. Well Mr.Allan Rock who is no longer on our Radar, 1 BILLION DOLLARS later the registry could have been put to much better use than it's intended effect. The argument was that it would make a much safer country as Law enforcement would have an easier time tracking guns that were committed in crimes. It also would allow Police agencies the information necessary to know if they were walking into say a domestic dispute and there were long guns in the house. This I will admit is the one benefit. Having weighed that, would not the Billion dollars have been better spent on creating new police jobs or creating task forces to deal with the real issues such as big city gangs or the real problem, gun smuggling across the border?(No insult to our American brothers/sisters intended) News flash to Liberals throughout: Most gun crimes will be committed by people who do not register their guns. It is time we banded together and stood tall. Write your MP and tell him your position. We need to do this not only for us now but for our future hunters and Law-abiding gun owners. God bless every one of us!!