Camera mugger — caught in the act!

[David Petersen]

#3631

All summer a bear has been pulling down a game cam I keep at a spring in summer. This time I got her on film and in the act. It’s Bigfoot, whom some of you may know from previous cam threads as having a huge deformed left front paw. She’s a regular around here for years and a real cub factory. In both pics in the upper left you can barely see (just left of the down log that angles toward 10 o’clock) the skeleton of the “Gift” bull I killed there two years ago. That’s all the farther it got from the water … a typical “unnecessary overkill” result using an Ashby inspired arrows set-up.

[Cameron Unruh]

#22155

Awesome pics Dave – My wife is not always that interested in my bow hunting conversations and info but when I said pictures of bear cubs she was all over it. I think the idea that you are sneaking a peek into their private lives is what she likes the most. She also thought is was funny that the mama bear was taking down your trail cam. She said she would do the same if it were her…Ha! Thanks for sharing.

[Ptaylor]

#22628

Dave I have been having similar problems with bears. I’ve been setting the cameras up to video bear rub trees. And this one tree the bears would keep biting and clawing and moving the camera so it would face the opposite direction from the tree. I ended up climbing a tree and putting the camera 12 feet in the air. You’d think this wouldn’t work cause black bears can climb, but it put the camera out of their direct smell range when walking by on their trail. I haven’t had a single camera messed with after moving them up higher.

As a side note, “Ashby overkill” is better than some of the new gadgets. Ran into a compound hunter this week, and before he realized I was carrying a longbow he started into all the new things on his bow. And when he got to the mechanical broadhead, I finally had to chime in with,”You know those things are liable to break and are terrible at penetrating bone.” So then he showed me how the blades swivel when open so they can “bounce” off the bone. I left it at that, not wanting to push the issue further. But then he told me how he had drawn back on a buck that day at 70 yards…! I told him, “That’s not the point of bowhunting” and he told me about how much skill it takes to shoot that far. The real unfortunate thing, is this was the guys first year of bowhunting, and this mentality and stuff is what he had cause that is what was sold at the shop. He could have been any kind of bowhunter, but instead has been sold down the path of speed, distance, and techno gadgets. Unfortunate, cause it wasn’t his fault, but our general hunting culture.

preston

[David Petersen]

#22676

Preston, you’ve nicely summarized the very heart of the devil that’s poisoning bowhunting today–the industry is making all this garbage NOT to enhance lethality, but to sell more stuff to innocent people who don’t know the difference. And the media, basically every last mainstream commercial bowhunting publication except TBM, plus almost all the hunting videos on TV and off, jump on the profit bandwagon and flog the same junk. A person, let’s say a young man, starting in archery today simply is overwhelmed by the hi-tech media barrage and is lucky to even know that trad exists. As they mature as bowhunters some catch on that 70-yard shots with toothpick arrows and switchblade heads isn’t a very effective way to put meat the in freezer and convert. I really don’t care what sort of “bow” a person shoots, so long as he keeps his shots close and uses a heavy arrow with the right broadhead … I try to view hunting from the animals’ point of view. If it’s really fast and humanely lethal and a very high chance that every arrow we shoot at animals will kill fast, then it’s OK by me. But it’s nearly impossible, it seems, to live in the compound world and hunt with traditional values, though a few manage it.

That’s precisely what I’m going to do with the cam when I put it back out — take some strap-on tree steps and put it up high and out of sight of bears and out of reach of humans.

[Ptaylor]

#22683

I agree, it doesn’t matter what kind of weapon someone uses, but what matters is how they hunt. I know some excellent rifle/compound hunters that are very ethical people when it comes to being in the woods.

[WyoStillhunter]

#24632

I agree with David. Well said. Marketing is the culprit. Marketing science has become extremely efficient at creating a sense of need and offering a product to satisfy it. The creation of needs must go on from year to year because most products do not wear out for a long time. To sell more product a new sense of need must be created.

For a huge per cent of so-called hunters the attraction is not the hunting experience, it is the consumption experience that is the driving force. That’s the world we live in.

[Author]

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