120 HOURS?

A common companion this year...

Well if I did the math right, I spent roughly 120 hours trying to put some venison in the freezer this year.  The season ended last night with the kickoff of the Superbowl... whatever that means... I didn't watch it and if you read my blog much, I'd be willing to bed maybe you didn't either!

Thought: this post will probably get me the most comments... angry ones!

Well that picture up there summarizes how things went.  I got skunked...  every Friday night (till the time changed) and every Saturday morning and evening since the beginning of October, with a few exceptions, has been spent trying to put meat in the freezer. 

But why do you have to hunt, why not buy your food from the store?

A valid question... I could buy it from the store, but did you know that chickens, cows and pigs are animals just like deer, and before you eat them, somebody kills them?  Further more, do you know what kind of living conditions those animals live in that are a sold (in nice little packages with happy pictures on them of red barns and wind mills to make you feel warm and fuzzy about your purchase) at the store grow up in?  Look up the term CAFO... better yet, here's a pic for you!

A modern poultry raising operation...

There is nowhere for the chicken to go where they are not sitting in their own poop for their miserable 7weeks of life...  compare that to the following picture from my back yard...

Just introduced into the chicken tractor...

Almost full grown!

 Now those chickens are limited in what they can eat... mostly whatever is growing in my lawn (some people would disagree with me calling it a lawn) and whatever feed I put in the feeder.  But deer on the other hand are browsers... they eat a little bit of this, a little bit of that.  If there become too many of them, a bunch die of starvation as their isn't enough food!  Sure, they eat some of those EVIL GMO crops that I prefer not to eat, but they also eat a lot of grasses, leaf buds on tree's, a little of this, a little of that...

I'd much rather eat wild venison than some cow that spent that last 3 months of it's life standing up to it's arm pits in it's own manure eating nothing but GMO corn.  By the way, I'm told that you can't pasture pigs because they don't have the stomach's to digest the grass... why then do we feed the cow and the pig THE SAME STINK'N CORN?

Well this year it looks like I'll be forced to get some of that standing it's own poop meat from the store, but it wasn't for a lack of effort...

As I said, I hadn't seen a deer since December 1st... this was a rough year...

Also... please don't write me asking if I washed my clothes in the right detergent or used this cover scent... I put out a camera and I know the deer had moved into different areas.  Besides, I didn't do anything different this year from the past couple years when I got 2-3 deer each year...

And just for the note... you people that like to tell stories about how many does you had under your stand last week make me sick!  I'd be ecstatic if somebody put me in a stand where I could shoot a doe...  and yet they won't let anybody hunt their property because they want a bigger trophy.  I get it... but it you people still make me sick!  (It's illegal to sell wild game... but it's not illegal to give it away or to buy the broken arrow and broad head used to kill the deer from the person that shot it...