Adventures in Sporting Euphemism
So, there I was - sitting in my home office, taking care of a few things that need to be taken care of, and listening to the radio broadcast of the Sunday night NFL game between Dallas & Washington.
Having given the 7 point spread and chosen Dallas in the pool I've joined, and with Dallas in control, but not running away with it, I've been paying a bit more attention to the action than I otherwise would.
Including, apparently, the commercials. I just heard one for a company/product called "See More Bucks". I'm guessing it was a locally broadcast commercial, though with AM radio shows, it's hard to predict what sort of marketing you'll be exposed to. Anyhow, hearing the word "Bucks" must have piqued my interest, thinking they were talking about the Ohio State Buckeyes. And as I listened, I found it had nothing to do with OSU football.
Seems they were offering a product that, if sprinkled on the foliage near one's "deer blind" (whatever - I'm not a deer hunter, so if I fuck up the special verbiage of the brotherhood, please forgive me), causes the bucks to just hang out and gnosh until you get a chance to put a slug between their eyes.
Again, I'm forced to say "whatever...". Perhaps that's normal in deer hunting, but it brought a memory of a friend from my youth, Jimmy, who fished in Southern Ohio and regularly took his houseboat out on one of the large man-made lakes of the area. His first action was to ensure the beer was cold. Next, he took a bushel basket of ears of corn and scattered it in the water around the boat. Several beers later, he'd drop a line in the water, and pull out fish as fast as he could cast.
I wonder how that's different than using "foliage perfume" from a company called See More Bucks. Oh, and Jimmy used to call it "chumming".
Doesn't seem very sporting, but I'm not that type of sportsman, so I could be wrong.
[wik] Oh, and when Jimmy got into the second six pack, he might occasionally stop casting, and just grab his net before dropping a few lit M-80s into the water. Even I know that's not sporting.
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I don't hunt, but I grew up
I don't hunt, but I grew up around it. Lots of friends and family did. I have an opinion about the application of scent in this regard.
I feel that your use of scent, such as dabbing the urine of a doe in heat behind each ear, your wrists, and neck- or whatever you do with it- should be done in proportion to how challenging a hunt you've made for yourself.
If you're on a preserve, where you sit in a treestand 8' above your wily quarry's feeding trough, and you plug him when he comes in for dinner, well...that's alot of names for that but "sporting" ain't one. So you should not be allowed any use of scent.
Similarly, if you hunt with serious hunting rifle, you really shouldn't have any either. If you can drop your prey at a mile, you already have a huge advantage.
Now, bow hunters I feel have rights to use whatever guile they can dream up. You have to use all your fieldcraft to get close enough for a killing shot, with total awareness of wind, weather, and terrain on your arrow once you let fly- a fucking blade of hardy grass can be enough to inch your arrow off course. To those guys, I say, have at all the deer pee or other scents you can manage.
Interesting distinctions,
Interesting distinctions, there.
I'd know of, but forgotten about the deer pee/fox pee part of the overall ambience, but if I hadn't, it would have occurred to me that it was no different than perfuming the foliage.
Your delineation of what's allowed and when, while still being "sporting" makes good sense to me.