Wannabe’s Musings: The Kudu.

Of all African game animals, the one which turns me on most is Kudu.

I’m not usually enthusiastic about the heads, antlers and skins. My Grandpa, who taught me all I know about hunting, started out as a pot hunter, then when he didn’t have to rely on wild meat any more discovered the joy of hunting for the sake of hunting (hunting for sport, as some call it) but he never got to dig the ‘trophy’ part of the thing. The antlers of the moose he shot were all around his place – serving as coat hangers, mostly – and ridiculously poor coat-hangers they were – and usually, the sight of any mounted antlered head reminds me of those coat-hangers and makes me think “I wouldn’t want this gather dust in my apartment”.

New Technologies Afield.

An English version of my article published in Sports Afield Russian Edition 1-2014.

Reproduced with permission from the publication.

New technologies often cause concerns among hunters. The new possibilities that the new fangled stuff gives to the user breed fears that the hunting will cease to be sporting, that the novelty will lead to extermination of the game, and even that the guy with the new stuff will get an unfair advantage over yourself. It gets to where new hunters who are after high-tech stuff begin to feel a little guilty about that. However, in the last 200 years hunting has seen many innovations. Did they all, or any of them, fulfill the doomsday omens uttered by the conservatives at the time of their appearance?

In the history of hunting, there wasn’t an innovation which was universally acclaimed and never met with resistance. Even the Forsyth’s ‘detonating gun’ faced some serious opposition. An “English Gentleman” from the pages of “The Gentleman’s Magazine” hoped that all “men of conscience and with a reflective turn will militate most venomously for the suppression of this new invention“, which, in spite of its “many vulgar advantages“, if applied to the military, “would threaten within a few years to destroy not only armies but civilization itself“. The same can be said about any innovation introduced in the almost two centuries which passed since the “English Gentleman’s” 1818 article.