What people don’t understand is that they aren’t going to slow the hogs down enough to matter unless they hunt every single night, and for hours on end. And even then you better be using thermal and NV. You showing up two weekends a month to come kill 6-8 hogs isn’t going to amount to shit unfortunately. We hunt some places hard. 3-4 nights a week with thermals. It doesn’t make a bit of difference in the damage they do. They just change up their tactics and come out at different times trying to be less predictable, which makes out hunting less effective.

What you call a rancher being greedy is him trying to salavage what little bit of money he can out of the hundreds of thousands he’s going to lose to them regardless of how useful you think you’ll be. We’ve lost over a quarter million dollars to hogs in less than 2 weeks. Think about that! Your $200-300 is the least of our worries. It does give you some financial commitment to at least pretend to care about our place. We’ve had gates left open with cattle getting out, cattle shot, roads tore up, fences driven through, and poaching. When you have a little investment you’ll treat things better than if it’s free.

The FEDs are the law enforcement for dove hunting in MS???

In the US.

https://www.fws.gov/le/dove-hunting-and-baiting.html

Attached File

Beaver fever, aka giardia.
Probably.

Never had it (thank God), but probably should have.  Thankfully those mountain streams in MT were clean.

If you absolutely have to drink unprocessed water, make sure it's not taken from a still pool. Smart people use the swiftest running water. Not perfect, but makes it a better chance.
My mom got it once, but from a Chinese restaurant. Go figure.

That's exactly what I did.  We were invited for a 4 day black bear hunt by a family friend who had a vacation home there.  We were going to ride pack horses up to a higher elevation that had a mountain lake.  Never knew the family friend as much of an outdoorsman but i was young and dumb so my dad and I figured he knew what he was doing.  Terrible assumption.  Was told there would be enough horses to lug gear up the mountain so we could pack heavy.  Get to the trailhead to meet the horse guy...
Short 3 horses.  I carried an ungodly heavy pack 15 miles up a mountain.  Thankfully I was a youngster that played, and was in football shape so I was able to handle the climb fairly well.  On the way up one of the horses stepped on a ground hive of wasps unleashing lots of pissed off flying assholes that stung the shit out of the horses and me.  Horses went everywhere and I ended up getting popped a dozen times in the face and neck.  Oh well, kept going.  Was told to expect Michigan type early October weather.  Nope.  Rain and snow the ENTIRE time.  Temps well below freezing at night.  All gear soaked.  Threw a few Kmart type tents (read as cheap garbage) that we brought and tried to make the best of it.  Family friend starts trying to make a fire with a waterlogged green log with his nifty new fire starting paste...in a downpour.  That's when it really set home to 16 year old me that we're kind of screwed and hypothermia is a very real possibility.  My Dad and I took over fire duty and got a reasonable fire going, considering the conditions.

Not one guy out all six of us really knew what the hell we were doing in regards to camping in those conditions, let alone bear hunting.  Needless to say, not one of us even saw a bear.  Spent more time tending to the fire than hunting.

I learned a lot from that trip.

Ouch. Yeah, that's one way to learn a lesson you'll never forget.

it's been a couple days... what happened?

one more bumparoo.