[Mishmash] FYI: Fwd: ACT/ Protest Australia's Mass Kangaroo Kill

[Fred Atkinson]

> I don't understand why it's unacceptable to eat something that's been
killed by
> a car (assuming it's freshly killed, and not something that's been
sitting out
> there all day) but perfectly OK to eat something you've shot.  At
least with
> road kill you don't risk your choppers biting into a piece of
buckshot.

Dick,

    The reason is that it would be a way to skirt the law.

    I worked for the Wildlife Department in SC when I was in technical
college in the mid-seventies.  I was a part time law enforcement radio
dispatcher.

    When exceptions like that are in the law, people exploit them.

    For example, the shining of deer.  When you shine a bright spotlight
in a deer's face, it almost hypnotizes them.  They stand there
mesmerized and it makes them easy prey.  When someone shoots a deer that
is being shined, it is not hunting.  It is slaughter.  You can shine a
whole herd of them and pick them off one at a time and they won't move
while the other deer were being shot.  I once photographed some deer
that were in the yard of an old ham friend and the flash made the deer
completely freeze up.

    At one time in SC, it was legal to shine deer as long as you didn't
have a weapon in your vehicle or your possesion (people liked to look at
them and/or photograph them this way).  I remember at that time being
out with a friend who shined them so we could look at them.  So what
would happen was that one truck would shine the deer (without a weapon
in that truck) and someone from the other truck (which did have a
weapon) would shoot the deer.  Technically, it was legal.  But it
clearly violated the intent of the law.

    So they rewrote the laws and made shining deer completely illegal.
It no longer matter whether or not you had a weapon.

    Things may have changed since the seventies but at that time if you
ran over a deer, you had to call the Wildlife Department and let them
come and get the deer.  Usually, the game warden would take it to an
ophan's home to be used to feed the venison to the children there.  One
game warden told me that you had to have them grind the deer meat and
make it look like hamburger because the children wouldn't eat it if they
knew it was deer.  They'd think of it as eating Bambi.

    If you could keep the deer, people would find ways to kill them and
make it look like it was roadkill.  That's clearly skirting the law.

    Sad, but true.




Fred

> As a side note, there's this T-shirt I saw on a friend of mine a few
weeks ago.
>  From Benny's Road Kill Cafe, somewhere in Texas:  "You kill 'em, we
> grill 'em."
>
> >   I have tasted it and it has a little bit of a wild taste that I
> >don't personally enjoy, but some like it.  There are ways to prepare
it so
> >that the wild taste is not no prevalent I have been told.
>
> I had venison once when I was a kid.  My father had some friends who
were
> hunters and gave him samples.  I can't recollect from that long ago
what it
> tasted like, but like you've I've read that preparation can tame the
> gamey taste.
>
> Dick
>
> Richard Barth *** W3HWN(at)ARRL.NET *** Silver Spring, MD
>
>
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