Archive for the 'Animals' Category

It turned out okay for him, but there’s an even chance it would not have in my book.

In Cherokee, N.C., Elk saunter down and across the road, oblivious to traffic, and with no known enemies.

A Mink in the Florida Everglades drags a snake across the road, apparently its meal for the day.

An Eagle eating a carcass gets replaced by a bigger Eagle.  Apparently, they don’t believe in sharing.

We talk about dogs a lot here in these parts.  Maybe it’s because it’s the greatest animal God ever created.  Here’s another example.

A dog saved a hiker injured in the Croatian mountains by lying on top of him for 13 hours until they were rescued, according to local media.

The dog, called North, kept Grga Brkic warm after he fell while out hiking and was unable to move. The other two hikers with him were unable to reach them, so they raised the alarm.

First responders credited the eight-month-old Alaskan Malamute with having helped keep Brkic safe.

The incident happened when the group went for a weekend hike in the Velebit mountain range along the country’s Adriatic coastline.

“Friendship and love between man and dog have no boundaries,” Croatia’s mountain rescue service said in a Facebook post, which included a photo of the dog lying on top of Brkic as he lay in a stretcher.

The dog “curled around him and warmed him” during the high-altitude rescue mission, the post added.

Nearly 30 first responders eventually reached the injured hiker where he was stranded, nearly 1,800 metres above sea level.

“The minutes and seconds before they arrived were so slow,” Brkic told Croatian media.

“This little dog is a real miracle,” his owner told the Jutarnji List daily paper. The dog itself emerged none the worse from the experience, he added.

Croatia’s mountain rescue service has nevertheless warned against taking dogs for hikes in difficult conditions, especially during harsh winter weather when specialised climbing equipment is required.

Get you one to experience unconditional love and affection.

Dean Weingarten.

Tyler had a 10 mm Glock model 20 loaded with Buffalo Bore 190-grain hard cast bullets. The son had a .45ACP with a red dot sight, 15 round magazines, and hollowpoint +P self-defense ammunition. The father had bear spray, with “assault” in the name.

[ … ]

The father had deployed his bear spray. The bear blasted through the cloud with no visible effect.

[ … ]

No shots had hit the spine. The bear had a thick layer of fat, which acted as an armor of a sort. Two of the +P .45 hollow-point bullets were recovered under the hide, in the fat. Several hits were in the top and side of the neck going down toward the shoulders. Tyler believes the .45 bullets had not penetrated into the chest cavity, but most of the bullet paths were not followed to see which came from which caliber. They knew the side shots had been from Tyler’s 10mm. The frontal shots could have been from either shooter. The shot above the eyes had to be from the .45, because the angle would have been different as the bear closed and Tyler joined the son, shooting at the advancing bear.

The bear had been hit so many times, the investigator gave up after counting 16 holes. All of the shots were in the front half of the bear. The bear had a number tattooed on its lip. It had been handled before. It was a grizzly bear, about 500 – 600 lbs, according to the investigator and biologist.

Tyler believes his shots with the Buffalo Bore bullets were the only effective shots. I am not so certain. If the son had not shot, it seems unlikely Tyler would have been able to put shots into the bear before it reached the hunters. Both parties played critical parts. The incident shows the advantage of deep penetrating bullets.

We do not know the dynamics of each shot, because a complete necropsy was not necessary. Some of the son’s shots might have penetrated to the chest cavity. We do not know. Penetration of 11-13 inches is common with aggressive, self-defense hollow-points in a .45. A bullet into the side of the neck, from the front, angling down toward the chest, could have to travel through many inches of fat to reach the chest cavity.

And of course, an argument ensued in the comments.  10 mm is best.  No, .44 magnum is best.

I don’t take this instance as justifying any conclusion of the sort.  I take it as “shoot hard ball rounds when in bear country.”  The father should have forced his son to carry ball ammunition rather than carrying personal defense ammunition.  Penetration is king with large animals.

.45 ACP (or especially 450 SMC) should do the trick as long as it’s hard ball.  10 mm should do the trick as well, and .44 magnum should do the trick better than either of the two.

YMMV.  Shot placement is important too.

The New Yorker.

As far as radical interventions go, getting mauled by a bear is about as extreme as it gets. Few events are so undeniable, so borderline cheesy; the metaphors, embarrassed by a lack of subtlety, keep their distance. For the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin, this difficulty in meaning-making heaps insult on (devastating) injury. In August of 2015, Martin was hiking down a glacier in the Siberian mountains when she ran—almost literally—into a beast that would crush her head in his mouth, rip off a piece of her jaw, and flee only after she jabbed him with an ice axe. The encounter left her with a mutilated face and a ruptured sense of reality. “For me,” Martin writes in her new book, “In the Eye of the Wild,” translated by Sophie R. Lewis, “a bear and a woman is too big an event. It’s too big not to be instantly assimilated into one system of thought or another; too big not to be . . . consumed and then digested in order to make sense.” But what the book actually suggests is that such an event can never be assimilated; it can only be accepted. Martin’s narrative, with the bones of a personal essay and the lift of a prose poem, reciprocates the creature’s failed act of incorporation, and hunts for beauty in what remains occluded and apart.

The result is heady and obsessive, as Martin smashes again and again against the limits of what anyone can know: What is a self? What is “the other”? She considers her scars, her jaw now fitted with metal. “The figure,” Martin writes, meaning her body, “is reconstituted following its own unique pattern, but out of elements that are completely exogenous.” As a narrator, Martin can be humorless (understandably), and is often frustrated, angry, lost. While studying animist beliefs in Alaska, she’d theorized an “unlivable frontier,” implied by “the encounter between two beings from different worlds.” She now exists in that frontier, which she believes triggers a “cycle of metamorphoses” that usually ends with death. (She offers the example of a hunter who wears his prey’s scent, dons its pelt, and returns to himself and his people once he’s killed the animal—or been killed, “swallowed up by the other.”) But both bear and Martin have survived. The metamorphic dance continues, and with it the loneliness.

Drawn to the bear, Martin makes a list of what he might represent: “Strength. Courage. Abstinence. Cosmic and terrestrial cycles.”

[ … ]

Yet Martin’s rage speaks to a poignant anxiety: Just how precious or sacred are you, really, if a bear can suddenly rip off part of your head? Her crisis acquires new dimensions in an era of ecological precarity. “All you have known will disintegrate and be reshuffled,” she writes; reality “will metamorphose and become an ungraspable thing.” Martin, who worries about heat waves and melting ice caps, sees the entire planet as a desperately fragile treasure. An alarm inside her “is ringing in response” to climate change. “The misery my body is expressing,” she realizes, “comes from the world.”

I don’t know.  I think the bear screwed up her head, and the writer at The New Yorker sounds like she’s never left the confines of the city.

I’m left wondering whether reader The Alaskan thinks about things like this when he encounters a bear in the bush?  I think I’d just rather have a large bore handgun.

Epoch Times.

A dog in South Africa adopted from the SPCA into a loving forever home has repaid her owners a thousandfold after two armed robbers broke into their house and opened fire. The mixed breed, Kei, was shot in the face while ferociously protecting the family’s young lady.

Those armed intruders on Oct. 3 broke into the family’s Lakefield Benoni home; one gunman entered the master bedroom, where a terrifying firefight ensued, and was shot dead; the other man entered the eldest daughter’s room where Kei was poised on her bed ready to defend her owner.

Kei sprang at the gunman with a forcefulness that surprised him. He turned and fled, leaving a trail of blood as he ran down the stairs, and encountered the family’s Biewer Yorkie Holly and shot her dead.

Hot on his tail, Kei faced the man in the kitchen where he shot her in the face, shattering her jaw, and then escaped the house and leapt over the wall.

Kei, in a desperate bid to seek help, yet unable to bark with her terrible mouth injury, ran outside to the gate to alert the neighbors but found no one. She then bounded down to the nearby lake, where she often goes on walks, in search of help, but to no avail.

The family, desperately searching for Kei, drove the streets and after 40 minutes found her laying in the grass by the water.

They called the Boksburg SPCA and Kei was taken for treatment. She was lucky to be alive. The bullet had severely injured her tongue, blasted through two molars, and broken her jaw.

She had to be put on an IV and could not eat for many weeks to come. Eventually, though, once the doctors were sure there was no infection and an X-ray showed that all the bullet fragments had been extracted, she was taken to have surgery and have a titanium plate prosthesis put in to restore her shattered mandible.

Get you one of them.  If you don’t have a dog, you’re missing out on one of the greatest opportunities for love and protection.  You’re life will change.

If you like this sort of thing, Hilton Head has a nest of Bald Eagles under camera watch.

Source.

Here is the source.

Questions: (1) Why did her husband let her go solo backpacking? (2) Why didn’t she carry a large bore handgun? (3) Why did she decide that hiking ten miles in the dark was safer than staying?

I’ve discussed the nature of the need to understand animals before, as well as my experiences with them.

Check.  All of the above.  I have fallen off, been thrown off, bitten, run over, kicked, and just about anything that can happen on or around a horse.  I have ridden horses all day long, and I do mean all … day … long, and gotten on to do it again the next day.  And the next day.  And the next day.  I have fed them, herded them, doctored them, and assisted them to mate.  If you’ve never witnessed horses mating first hand (and I’m not talking about watching the Discovery Channel), it can be a violent affair.  I’ve ridden with saddles and then also (in my much younger years) bareback over mountain tops along narrow trails while running the herd).  The hardest ride was bareback and (on a dare) without a bridle, only the halter.

From the age of fourteen and beyond into my early twenties, I worked weekends and summers at a Christian camp above Marietta, South Carolina named Awanita Valley (and Awanita Ranch in Traveler’s Rest).  We trained and trail rode horses, fed them and cared for them, hiked the trails and cleared them of snakes and yellow jacket nests (have you ever been on a horse when it came up on a yellow jacket nest?).

When we weren’t doing that, we were cutting wood, hauling supplies, digging ditches, and baling hay.  My boys did the same thing, and Daniel later (before the Marine Corps) worked for Joey Macrae in Anderson, South Carolina, an extraordinary professional horseman, breaking and training horses.  I have ridden in the rain, blazing sun, and snow.  I have seen my son Joshua and his horse buried up to his thighs in snow, and watched him ride the horse up from sinking in the drift and stay on him while keeping the horse and him safe.

I was preaching at that point to LEOs, and explaining that you need to understand the affects of voice volume, timbre, pitch, etc., the calmness of your voice and demeaner, nature of eye contact and body movements, etc., on the behavior of the animal.  The animal must trust you and agree to a relationship.  If that doesn’t happen, in most cases, the animal will kill you.  So you learn from someone who knows how to do it, or you learn from the school of hard knocks.

Here is a related instance of failing to understand animals (or simply not caring).

Medina Spirit, the horse that finished first in this year’s Kentucky Derby but failed a drug test after the race, died after suffering a heart attack Monday at a Southern California racetrack, trainer Bob Baffert said. The trainer said Medina Spirit died following a workout at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California.

Baffert attorney Craig Robertson initially confirmed the death to CBS News. The California Horse Racing Board said in a statement a necropsy would be performed at a lab run by the University of California, Davis, and a cause of death can’t be determined until the examination and toxicology tests have been completed.

The 3-year-old colt died immediately after collapsing near the finish line on Santa Anita’s main track Monday morning, the board said.

“My entire barn is devastated by this news,” Baffert said in a statement. “Medina Spirit was a great champion, a member of our family who was loved by all, and we are deeply mourning his loss.”

Medina Spirit is the 10th horse to die while training at the track this year, according to the California Horse Racing Board. Nine other horses died while racing at the track in 2021, according to the board. In 2019, racing at the track was temporarily suspended twice amid a spike in horse fatalities.

Before you go there, I know what you’re going to say.  The animal perished because it was fed PEDs.

No … that’s not right.  No it didn’t.

I’ve tried to point this out before in previous posts.  The notion you are constantly exposed to in American western movies about horses running at a full gallop for miles and miles and miles is just false.  Horses cannot do that.  Their hearts will explode if you try to force a horse to do that.  American westerns perpetrate a lie.

Horse racing is immoral.  Greyhound racing is immoral.  They should both be illegal because they inflict suffering for man’s pleasure.  There isn’t an iota of difference between horse racing and dog fighting, which is also immoral.  You are forcing the animal to do something that runs contrary to its nature and is dangerous to its health.

Man was designed to run a long ways over long distances, and man’s body has internal triggers, clocks, and gages to tell him when to stop, when to hydrate, when to replenish, when this is “fast enough for me,” and so forth.  Animals do what they are told to do when they trust us.

The horse shouldn’t have trusted the trainer or rider.  The horse cannot tell otherwise.  The trainer and rider should be ashamed.  They killed the horse.

The good man cares for the life of his beast.  Because God says so (Psalm 50:10, Proverbs 12:10, Genesis 1:25, Proverbs 27:23, Matthew 10:29).