We can make this all we want, but deep down, we envy the joy this man felt in that moment.

Even With A Chainsaw: This system makes no sense. If there are too many applicants than why not simply give them out on a rotating basis, so that people don't go 14+ years without having the opportunity?

Because the overflow is much larger than 14. If they went to a rotating system, most applicants would die of old age long before their number ever came up.

Same as now, except now everyone has a chance of having their number come up, so they figure it's worth $15 to enter the game. If you knew your number wouldn't come up for 300 years, it probably wouldn't be worth buying in, and you wouldn't buy in again each year.

Unless you planned to kill everyone who had a lower number. But then it would be a people-hunting contest. They'd probably charge more than $15.

macadamnut: Fat, illiterate douchebags blasting the shiat out of defenceless, beautiful animals is what America is all about.

Trolling, I realize, but I've always felt that a hunting preserve, where the hunting is specifically for sport, should limit the weapon used according to the realistic danger the animal presents to the hunter. If it's a sport, make it more sporting. If the animals never win, it's not much of a sport. And getting away isn't a sport. That doesn't count.

I realize there are places where you can hunt razorback with just a knife, etc. That's going too far in the other direction, but if someone wants to pay a thousand bucks to fight a hog in a swamp, OK.

I think the most amazing thing is that somebody's wife was actually listening to the results of the moose lottery on the radio.

Maine Game Warden Reggie Hammond said it had proved to be the biggest festival in the region.

"It's more (people) than the strawberry festival. Nobody knew what to expect," Hammond said.

Holy dogshiat, get CNN on the phone!

macadamnut: Hunting is either a viable economic activity, or a personality disorder.

Look, there are arguments for and against hunting, but that is simply not a logical dichotomy you've got there. Moreover, just because someone has purchased food at a store before does not mean hunting is not economically sound.

The fact that you can shoot a deer and then make a profit selling the venison proves that, in fact.

I'm not in favor of killing anything unnecessarily, and of course human overpopulation (even, proportionally, in many areas of Maine, yes) is an ecological monster. As a species, we constantly crap where we eat, in many different ways. But that's an issue that affects specific acts of hunting, not hunting as a general concept.

more moose = the lyrics to the Pink Panther theme.

Now here's the big question about the moose lottery: do you take the lump-sum payment of ten thousand moose, or do you go for the annuity of eight hundred moose every year for twenty years?

They always say take the up-front moose, but I wonder about the tax implications.

I read the article half-expecting a Shirley Jackson-esque ending. Was looking for a mention of schoolkids gathering smooth stones.

macadamnut: RandomAxe: Trolling, I realize

Not a bit. Fark hunters, they should hunt each other if it's sport they want.

Hunting is either a viable economic activity, or a personality disorder. When engaged in by someone who has ever bought food in a store, it's the latter.

And yes, I've won several popularity contests sharing this opinion with acquaintances who hunt. Once years ago I went to a breakfast place on the first day of the season and expounded in a loud voice about how men hunt animals for exactly the same reason that men molest children. Mainers are pretty easy going.

bwahahaha. sure thing troll. get biatch slapped much? there are a lot of people living in rural/farm country that have hunt & fished game all their lives, as have their dads & grand-dads before them. it's simply putting supper on the table.

i'm not a hunter and i'm not allowed to have firearms. but just as i understand why i go to the supermarket for mine, i can see why a fellow in TN may spend time in the woods to get his.

molest children. you are a peach, lulz

I never apply. I always get moose meat though. Usually someone pegs one almost exactly at the end of my driveway every year.

Why yes, yes it IS a good idea to stop and give the warden some coffee.

KrispyKritter: macadamnut: RandomAxe: Trolling, I realize

Not a bit. Fark hunters, they should hunt each other if it's sport they want.

Hunting is either a viable economic activity, or a personality disorder. When engaged in by someone who has ever bought food in a store, it's the latter.

And yes, I've won several popularity contests sharing this opinion with acquaintances who hunt. Once years ago I went to a breakfast place on the first day of the season and expounded in a loud voice about how men hunt animals for exactly the same reason that men molest children. Mainers are pretty easy going.

bwahahaha. sure thing troll. get biatch slapped much? there are a lot of people living in rural/farm country that have hunt & fished game all their lives, as have their dads & grand-dads before them. it's simply putting supper on the table.

i'm not a hunter and i'm not allowed to have firearms. but just as i understand why i go to the supermarket for mine, i can see why a fellow in TN may spend time in the woods to get his.

molest children. you are a peach, lulz

Oh, heh... I'm not a native Mainer but I can tell you that every last person there would shake their head and laugh. There might be a couple of imports or folks from away who'd get antsy but that would be half the fun.

macadamnut: RandomAxe: Trolling, I realize

Not a bit. Fark hunters, they should hunt each other if it's sport they want.

Hunting is either a viable economic activity, or a personality disorder. When engaged in by someone who has ever bought food in a store, it's the latter.

And yes, I've won several popularity contests sharing this opinion with acquaintances who hunt. Once years ago I went to a breakfast place on the first day of the season and expounded in a loud voice about how men hunt animals for exactly the same reason that men molest children. Mainers are pretty easy going.

So, you're an expert on child molestation? My guess is that you're also not a native. There's no guess that you're a douchebag.

DancingElkCondor: Easier to get a big truck, wait on a rural highway, and run 'em over. All the moose you want

Yes, much more practical to a wreck or total a truck than actually go out and hunt.

macadamnut: RandomAxe: Trolling, I realize

Not a bit. Fark hunters, they should hunt each other if it's sport they want.

Hunting is either a viable economic activity, or a personality disorder. When engaged in by someone who has ever bought food in a store, it's the latter.

And yes, I've won several popularity contests sharing this opinion with acquaintances who hunt. Once years ago I went to a breakfast place on the first day of the season and expounded in a loud voice about how men hunt animals for exactly the same reason that men molest children. Mainers are pretty easy going.

Some people do hunt to feed their family. When I grew up, there was a stretch of really tight living, and my father hunted deer. A full freezer in the winter is what it's about.

My dad used to call me 'moose'.

Not because I was a big burly guy, but because of the noise I made as a baby when I didn't get my way.

I like the way the first photo shows typical fat gap-toothed yokels, while the second photo, a broader shot of the audience, normalizes the moose-hunting public by showing a younger, better-looking and more feminine audience.

The media deconstructing itself. Huzzah!

Mmmmm ... moose-burgers. The secret is 50% beef.

As I was born in New Brunswick, a small, largely rural province of Canada to the North of Maine and with half it's population, hunting and fishing were as normal and natural in my childhood and youth as chopping wood, mowing grass, picking potatoes, and all those other things I dispised.

I never really enjoyed fishing and I never hunted. I did, however, enjoy food, and that includes salmon, trout, venison, etc.

Which is better? For an animal to live a natural lifespan of three to six years and then be shot by a hunter or for it to live one to three years and be semi-stunned in an abattoir and slaughtered while half alive?

Hunting and fishing are natural activities for humans, who have lived off of the land for a million years, in fact, who were making fires and cooking meat or fish long before they were totally human. They are environmentally very friendly if population doesn't press upon the avaiable resources, and they give men time away from stressful situations and activities in the fresh air. You work very hard to kill any bird, animal or fish. It takes a lot of time. You could buy a freezer full of fish or fowl or meat for the money expended by one sports fisherman. The American tourists who catch a salmon in New Brunswick streams are spending about a thousand dollars or more each, which is a high price per pound even for salmon, which can sell at over $70 a pound for smoked fish retail.

If all of the meat and fish eaten by humans could be got by hunting and fishing, the world would be a much healthier, happier, and more prosperous place, and I say that as some one who loathes the discomforts of hunting and fishing.

But they are near and dear to the hearts not only of conservatives but anybody who is living close to nature in something like a natural human lifestyle. More power to them.

True, there are ignorant, stupid and even sociopathic hunters, but that is true of any human endeavour.

Call me super-liberal but I don't mind decent, sane, responsible hunters. It's the idjits who give hunting and fishing a bad name, along with the bourgeois sentimentality and hubris of those who never have to think of where food really comes from or what it entails in the way of work or environmental harm.

Agriculture is far worse than hunting and fishing and gathering. To produce strawberries, for example, on an industrial scale takes massive amounts of water and fertilizer and pesticides, while picking wild strawberries, as we did when we were children, is a lazy summer afternoon in a hot but slightly breezy abandoned cow pasture. We used to pick a wash basin full of tiny super-flavourful berries in an hour and half to three hours. We ate almost as many as we picked it seemed (not literally, but we ate as many as we pleased). The commercial strawberry is nothing to the wild berry--there's as much or more flavour in a berry the size of your pinky nail as in one the size of a child's fist.

Only country people and the very rich get to savour the best meat, fish, fowl, and produce of the land--berries, nuts, really fresh vegetables and fruits, etc. But I can tell you that hunting is no crime. Not compared to the stuff that goes on so that people can pick up everything they want from a convenient store or super-store.

The real tragedy is the super-store parking lot, which is turning the earth into dead, unproductive land that absorbs as much solar energy as a desert (the Moon has almost the same albedo, or reflectivity, as asphalt) and turns it into heat, which is then trapped by the CO2 and water exhaust from the cars that park there.

I believe in environmentalism (sound) and global warming (a well-established theory that has been proven time and again over nearly two hundred years, in fact, since we started fiddling with the Earth's thermostat) but a lot of environmentalists are indeed very silly and misinformed.

Some of our ancestors had laws that keep hunters from over-hunting. They took the form of religious taboos and customs, or were written into sumptuary laws that allowed only a privileged few to hunt in certain places, or for certain species, or at certain times. We have some such laws of our own, although they might not be as comprehensive as traditional practices in the few more or less sustainable cultures that have existed on Earth in the last few thousand years.

But I have no a priori problem with hunters, fishermen, berry-pickers, or other people who exploit the land's resources in a controlled and sustainable manner. Even seemingly unjust power and rules sometimes have a salutary effect. For example, the Irvings own millions of acres of land in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, and Maine. They sometimes do terrible things to the land in the name of forestry, but they also were among the pioneers of replanting, and some of their foresters, like my uncle, for example, took their own initiative and did things that were years ahead of the environmentalists, such as leaving trees with nesting birds, and not cutting along stream and brook banks. They also fenced in the land legally, by controlling who could hunt and fish on private property, and thus, like the great landlords of the UK, protected the environment from over-exploitation by preserving it for themselves and their friends and protégés.

Aristocracy is unjust, it is true, but it is not always inefficient, imprudent, or unwise. It's better to have people who care and protect the land for their own benefit and the benefit of future generations than those who only think to get what they can get now.

When it comes to such things, I am a liberal-conservative like Adam Smith, or to a lesser extent, Edmund Burke. The past is a foreing country, and they do things differently there, but they do not always do things wrong. Sometimes they get things right. The same is true of the future and the present, and also literal foreign countries. There is much to learn even from fools, as Montagne knew well, and more to learn from those who have specialized knowledge if you ask them good questions.

It's good that Maine has a moose hunt lottery. It has restored the moose population to levels where hunting is possible and sustainable. You wouldn't perhaps, want the moose population all that much higher if you could ban all hunting. The moose would destroy their environment without some predators and wolves and coyotés are only just making their way back into areas where wolves were exterminated generations ago. We are the top predators for now, and that's ok, because predators are a key element in the eco-system, which is just the economy of the whole world, rather than the micro-economy of Man.

The population of moose has to be kept down for its own good, for our good, and for the good of all the plants and animals affected by moose. The same is true of any species, including us. Imbalance is the enemy, not hunting. Canada has been over-run by beaver since the fashion for beaver felt hats died, and the result is massive flooding which destroys some habitats and creates others, while costing human farmers, householders, governments, etc., a fortune in roads, land, and damages.

The environment we love is not natural. It has been modified by humans for thousands of years. You can succumb to the Whig Fallacy of thinking progress inevitably leads to us and to Whigs, or the Conservative Fallacy of thinking something old but temporary is natural and good simply because it is familiar. Environmentalists and conservatives alike do both. The good old days were terrible, says the title of a book I have, which proves it with dozens of examples of how bad things were before the FDA and the EPA existed, among other things that have made these times better than past times.

But they were sometimes better as well.

I don't love hunting and fishing any more than I love mowing grass, cutting wood or getting my water in a bucket from the neighbour's tap (which many people did in the village where I lived as a child because they were too poor to have plumbing--we were the neighbours, so were my grandparents, who provided drinking, cooking and bathing water to the poor for free).

But I understand that they have a role in the ecology and the economy that is not to be despised. As long as we have poor, it is good that some people remember how to live off of the land and can do it. I think we need to keep the experience and the wisdom of "aboriginal" peoples and the frugality of our ancestors even as we become rich.

If I am going to be a Whig, I want to be a rich Whig. If I must be a Tory, I want to be a generous, progessive and giving Tory, a Red Tory. I always liked Red Tories much better than conservative Liberals, even as a child and youth. Better to be Lord and Lady Bountiful than Lord and Lady Biotch. Best of all to be a liberal and philosophical gentleman or lady, prudent enough to get a bit richer, and wise enough to get a bit more liberal and kindly, with each passing year and generation.

what the cat dragged in: Nakito: Next time you meet a Russian woman, ask her to say "moose and squirrel." They love that.

No, she'll have no idea what you're on about and look at you like you're some kind of moron.

It's ok, she'll say it anyway, and if you don't burst out laughing, she's the moron for not knowing.

/have pulled this trick a few times
//works best if you word a statement to have them quizzically ask "moose und squirrel?"

brantgoose: Mmmmm ... moose-burgers. The secret is 50% beef.

So the secret to mooseburgers is... less moose. Gotcha.

/does the moose/beef blend with lasagna bolognese