The Seasons Wrapped up on February 14. . .

Valentine's Day.  And who doesn't take a break from singing the praises of their sweetie in order to go out one last time?

I can't say that this was a great hunting season.

For one thing, I can say that its gotten difficult to draw antelope and deer tags, something I used to do routinely.  I was going to start a post on this way back when, and didn't.  Commenting on it now, what I'll note is that I used to expect to draw my first choice on antelope and that I had a relatively good chance of drawing a limited area deer tag every few years.  Elk tags were the ones that were difficult to regularly get.  Not anymore.

Starting a few years ago, for some reason, it started getting hard to draw antelope tags, and not just in the area that I put in for.  Lots of locals I know have shared this same experience.  I don't know what's up with this, as there are as many antelope as ever.  I've heard it claimed that this is because tags are going to out of staters, but I don't know if that's true or simply claimed.

This year the Coronavirus Pandemic may have influenced this as we're now a year into it and its undoubtedly the case that more people are out and about than normally, and I do regard that as a good thing . . . but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The 2020 season started in spring for me with turkey, if we discount that the 2019 waterfowl season ran into 2020, just as the 2020 waterfowl season ran into 2021.  I got a general turkey license, as did my son.  He got the turkey this year rather than me, so that season was as success.  After he returned to school I went out quite a few more times, but without any luck.  That's basically what I expect with turkey, however, so no big deal.

Turkey season was followed by "fishing season", which isn't an established season of any kind, but which is that time of the year that runs between the close of turkey season and the start of bird season.  I tend to only fish in the mountains, for whatever reason, and this year the fishing was good.  I even got in some fishing in streams I'd never fished before, and saw some areas I intend to go back to.

Fishing season closes with the opening of the early grouse seasons.  I went up for blue grouse as I usually do, and ran into the same problem I've run into the base few years.

The area that I go blue grouse hunting is in an area that has been dedicated to an elk hunting hunter's management area.  I support that program.  However, what it means is that the rancher whose land is in the area doesn't feel that he can let anyone cross it now for other hunting purposes.  

I have no desire to hunt on his land, and indeed, blue grouse aren't in it.  I only require transit.

Anyhow, once access across topped I realized that it wasn't a problem, as I have a Jeep, and I know the back roads in.  The first time I did this I received a call from the game warden and he was super enthusiastic about it probably as he's a hunter himself and he was excited to find somebody willing to dedicate such an effort to this.  

That warden was transferred and the year before last I ran into a new one, who flat out refused to believe that it was possible that I hadn't crossed private land to get where I was.  I invited him to follow me out, and he did.  At one point I had to warn him that I thought he had a risk of rolling his pickup in one area, but he followed me anywhere.  He basically called me a liar just prior to that, but when he had followed me all the way out he sheepishly admitted that he'd been wrong and that he just didn't think anyone would devote so much effort to bird hunting.

This past year, yet another new warden.  This one was hyper aggressive and when he what roads I'd taken in to get where I was, he informed they weren't roads.  They were there, but they weren't "official roads".  

It's difficult to tell somebody who is a native to this place that a road isn't official when I've been driving them longer than he's been alive, but he was insistent.  Eventually he calmed down.

Next year I'm thinking of riding in with a horse or mule.  I'm just one of those people. 

This takes me, however, to my next topic.

Both of these wardens were new when I encountered them and the last one was from urban California.  Neither are native to the state.

At one time game wardens here were a lot like lawyers.  They tended to come from ranching families and there was no place for them on the ranch, or they were local outdoorsmen who wanted to work outdoors. That's really changed.

It started to change when the state brought in a test system to qualify people to be game wardens. At some point, it really tightened this up in keeping our our certification culture, which basically holds that if you have a certification, you are qualified to do a job.  Now game wardens are almost all out of state imports.

This has tended, in my view, to convert them from game wardens into cops.  The last friendly warden this area has visited with me a lot about the shotgun he used for hunting.  The one prior to that had helped me drag an antelope in over a very long distance, just as he saw me doing it.  Now, getting stopped by some of them is like being a black man getting stopped in a big city. . . you're going to get grilled.

Indeed, the last one was hostile right off the bat.  Not only that, he didn't know that shotguns have to be plugged back in the state to be legal for hunting.  I know this, as I asked him if he wanted to check mine and he told me they didn't have to be plugged.  He was a lot more interested in harassing me, which is what he was doing, and telling me what amounts to a fiction about roads, than being a game warden.

Indeed, I'll note that this cop attitude has really caused the state a problem now, and one that has spread into the neighboring state to the north as well.  Back a few years ago a game warden up north found a pile of cartridge cases on the ground and realized that some elk had been taken out of season, and that the tracks lead back to the Crow Reservation in Montana.  This was evidence of poaching, but a sensible warden, and for that matter a sensible policeman, knows that there are times you pass on following up on something, and this was one of them.  He didn't, and zealously tracked it to the end, ending up in a United States Supreme Court case the successor of which is being litigated out here now, by necessity.

Well, anyway. . . 

We did get some blue grouse.

Then came sage chicken season.  We did okay, but not great.

Following that came the license draw disappointment, or rather its impact as the failure to draw anything was known well before that.  I, of course, obtained a general deer permit, but I do feel that something needs to be done about the difficulty to draw, and what I feel that is would be to consider subsistence hunting permits for subsistence hunters, of which I'm one.

I'll get into this some other time, but there are quite a few of us around in the state who are "pot hunters" or "meat hunters".  When I was a kid, most of us from here fit that category.  Being a "head hunter" was somewhat of a slam against you.  I don't think I met a real head hunter until I was in university, actually, in the 1980s.

Anyhow, I think some consideration needs to be given to a subsistence hunter category of license.  It'd still have to be controlled in some fashion but for those of us who are dedicated hunters, but in the killetarian category, something should be considered.  Indeed, I know that head hunters fear guys like me as we'll take a buck in an area that they feel we should let go for a couple of additional years until it has a more prominent display.  So let us have a sort of reserved doe permit then.  Anyhow, as noted, more on that later.

This also gets to the fact that since the game and fish's site has become computerized and has new categories, I'm not as good at putting in for things as I used to be.  I still put in for the main things I want to hunt, but I'm a failure at building points and Super Tags and the like.  Nobody to blame for that but myself.

So, anyhow, I didn't draw an antelope tag.  

I did purchase a general deer tag and my son and I went out in the short season in an area that we go into and did get up on some nice deer, including legal bucks for the area we were in. But we only saw them the one time and we didn't do the approach correctly.  Again, nobody to blame but myself, but getting them out would have been an epic, and probably nighttime, endeavor.

I completed the season in a completely different area and I did get a small buck, by myself  I didn't think that remarkable but when I later went to the game biologist to have it checked for CWD he was stunned how far I'd gone.  Says something about me, I suppose.

By that time, waterfowl season had started, which starts the saga of the chukars.  I recently posted on that on another site, so I'll just copy and repeat my comments here, from there:

I’ve been a bird hunter since I was five years old, which now means that I’ve occupied that vocation longer than any other. Indeed, over half a century now. But in that time, I’ve taken chukars once.

That occasion was some time in the very late 1970s or the very early 1980s. It was very late in the season and I was goose hunting. I saw some chukars, knew that it was open and got one or two, I don’t quite recall. What I do recall is that I was with my father and I crossed the frozen North Platte to retrieve my birds.

That says something, whether we are to admit it or not, as there’s no way on earth I’d cross the North Platte if it had ice on it now and there’s no earthly way I’d let my kids do it. But my father did, and I didn’t worry about doing it. I knew it was frozen solid.

Last weekend I was out by the Platte and it was completely open.

Anyhow, I’ve seen chukars from time to time since then but I didn’t go out and make a dedicated effort to hunt them. . . until this season.

And that intent formed the season before last.

The season before last I was hunting deer late in the season, in a snowstorm, and ran into a big bunch of chukars in the mountains in territory much like that you have recently depicted in another post. I had a shotgun with me, but I was carrying a rifle. I didn’t see any deer, and I didn’t try for the chukars, but it stayed on my mind.

This year I ran into chukars again while deer hunting, but out in a sage brush covered area where I’ve never encountered them before in my life. And it was a lot of them. Again, as I was deer hunting, I passed on.

I didn’t get a deer, however, I went back into the aforementioned mountainous area and encountered them walking down a road. I got a deer later in the day, and looked for the chukars on the way back, but I didn’t run into them again. Opportunity lost.

About a week later I was out duck hunting and walked for a couple of miles across the plains to get to a water hole with ducks on it. Walking down a draw I ran into a big bunch of chukars. I was completely unprepared to shoot, or even encounter, chukars. On my way back out, I looked for them again to no avail.

I mentioned to a game biologist at that point that I’d run into chukars three times that year. He was checking my deer for CWD. I noted how surprised I was by the last encounter I just noted. “Big hatch this year” was his reply.

Later, hunting ducks on the river, I paused on a bluff just to observe the river. I then noticed the dog was nowhere to be found. Looking around, I saw him working the area behind me, nose to the ground. He was on to. . .chukars.

I figured they were gone but sent him down a draw to work it. He found them again, and I got a long shot. Missed.

Of course steel shot waterfowl ammo isn’t ideal for chukars either.

About a week later, I was hunting the same area and crossing from one spot to another, not seeing any ducks, and not prepared for anything else, when the dog got them up again. Another long shot and another miss.

The next week, walking to the river from a different spot, yep, once again. I wasn’t prepared to shoot at all, and when I did, I missed. I saw where they’d gone and we worked them again, and one more long shot, with the same results.

After this, it was game on. I went back three more times just looking for them. We walked for miles.

Never saw them.

All of which is probably some sort of a lesson. . . but I’m not sure what it is.

This takes us back to waterfowl.

I didn't have a great waterfowl season, success wise.  I went out a lot, but without much success.  I only took a couple of ducks the entire season and didn't get a single goose for the freezer or dinner.  Not one.  I did get some shots, but nothing really worked out well, in spite of being out a lot.

I did hike for miles and miles, mostly by myself, or rather just with the dog.  So all in all, it was good that way.  I can't complain.

My last trip out was yesterday.  It's been absolutely artic here, but it warmed up enough to go out, and I figured that the general conditions would mean that it was likely nobody else would be out, which was at least partially true. As per the general nature of the year, I got up on a lot of geese, but I didn't get any.  I didn't even get a shot.

I'll have to see if rabbit is still on. . . .

Friday Farming. Blog Mirror. Blog Mirror with commentary*: NFU Series: Why I farm: Reflections on my absurd career choice.

 

Blog Mirror with commentary*: NFU Series: Why I farm: Reflections on my absurd career choice.

February 11, 2021

Is her career choice absurd?

NFU SERIES: WHY I FARM: REFLECTIONS ON MY ABSURD CAREER CHOICE

Just the other day, I ran a post from Lex Anteinternet that is highly related to this topic here.  It was:

Lex Anteinternet: A Mid Week At Work

 Conversation. Why you became wh...

I'd already started typing out this post when I did that.  This makes this one slightly disrupted in some ways, and I've refocused it a bit.

Any, regarding the NFU writer and the question posted above, I don't think it is, but when you review it, you'll see that the young writer in question chose farming as she has very high ideals.

I wanted to be a farmer, but I didn't have high ideals.**

Well, I probably had some high ideals, and in many things they've become higher over time, which isn't to say that I'm close to obtaining sainthood by any means.  But my career choice as not based on high ideals.  Indeed, whenever I hear a practicing lawyer say they became a lawyer because they "wanted to help people", I automatically think, "oh bullshit".

I don't talk much on these blogs*** about my own early life or frankly my life in general.  I keep that stuff to myself, pretty much.  But I'll make a slight exception here.

I've wanted to be in the outdoors since I was small.  I never imagined a career in anything else really.  That's because I'm a nearly feral human, as odd as that may seem.  That tracks a lot into my post about being from and of Wyoming, which was linked in above.

My only real vocation, in the deeper sense, is that of hunter.  Well, frankly, that may not be true.  At least that's not how outsiders view me.  Indeed, a conservation of a year ago or so lead one of my legal colleagues to opine that a person such as me could have only two possible vocations, lawyer or priest. That was it.

That's was an interesting comment from a very highly educated person.  He's a lawyer too, as noted, but he's also an industrial psychologist.  I'm not sure exactly what industrial psychologist do, but they're some sort of psychologist.  Obviously he has some insights that I may lack. I've pondered that statement since then and I don't know that he wasn't right.

He's also, I'd note, a German by birth, having come to the United States as a young adult.  That makes a difference too, as culture heavily impacts your world view.

Be that as it may, when I was younger, I only wanted to hunt and fish.  Frankly, if I could do nothing else but hunt and fish now, that's what I'd do.  I'd be some sort of subsistence type character, hunt, fish, and garden.  And probably read.  What does that make me?

I've wondered if it make me lazy, actually, but I don't think so.  I certainly didn't end up in a career for the lazy and as other people think I'm a workaholic, I guess I'm not.  And somebody who eschews ATVs and who will go out in all weather and hike, often alone, for miles, isn't lazy.

Anyhow, with that sort of mindset, when I was young, I hoped for an outdoor career.  Early on I thought about becoming a soldier as, in my mind, they were outdoors.  As I aged into mid teens, however, I wanted to be a Game Warden, as they're outdoors.  

Around about the time I was a high school senior I looked at trying to homestead in the Yukon, which still had land available to do it.  It didn't seem quite feasible, and soon thereafter the Canadian government shut the door on that, probably correctly, but that option thereby seemingly closed with that door.  Queen Elizabeth II apparently had other things in mind for her distant ex pats.

Queen Elizabeth visiting war wounded in Canada when she was much younger, obviously.

My father was a dentist. Whatever you are thinking that means, it doesn't mean that.

My grandfather on my father's side had owned, in his final years, a packing plant in our small city.  He'd been in the packing industry most of his adult life, if you measure adult years the way they are measured today.  If you measure them the way he must have, he spent a few years in the oceanic shipping industry in the office, starting when he was 13.  But from his early 20s, he worked in the packing industry, which well suited his Iowa origins.

His later years were his 40s, and he died in his 40s.

I don't know what my father's early career goals were.  He never said.  As the oldest boy, chances were good that he was originally headed down to the packing plant.  He did work there in every aspect of it, as my grandfather "wanted him to see what real work was like".  The packing plant was sold, however, shortly after my grandfather's death, by necessity.  He was still a teen.

Given that, he went to work, while still going to college.  He worked at the post office and decided to make that his career, until my grandmother decided that wouldn't be his career.  He started off in engineering but one of my uncles was becoming a dentist and he followed that path as well.

By all accounts he was an excellent dentist, but I never thought of him in that way.

Nowadays, dentistry is somewhat associated with wealth, but it wasn't then.  Kids of dentists and doctors today will often flaunt it a bit, as it means they have vicarious money.  We didn't.  Rather, being the son of a dentist at the time meant that 1) people would tell you "I hate dentist", which they really didn't, but which you still hear today, and 2) they'd ask you dental questions, as if dental knowledge is genetic.

Dentists top the charts in professional suicides which says something.  My father never commented on what it was like to be a dentist but once, which was to note how people complained about going to the dentist all the time.  Anyhow, while conversations he had with other dentist and doctors were really illuminating and educational, outside of the office he didn't discuss dentistry.  He brought it home, however, as dentist made dentures at the time, and that was done in his evening hours.

In our home, table talk was on history, nature and science.  My father as an outdoorsman, preferring fishing over hunting but doing both.  He also was a heavy duty gardener in the subsistence farmer category, really.  It's from him that I received my love of the outdoors.

Me and my father at the fish hatchery in 1966 or 1967.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, I was leaving high school.

Well, farming in the Yukon was out and we didn't have a farm or ranch ourselves, so it was off to become a game warden.  And then my father mentioned that there were a lot of people around here who have wildlife management degrees that didn't have jobs.

That was enough, from a person who rarely gave career advice, to send me off in another direction, and that direction was geology.  Geology is all outdoors, right?

Well, ironically, it also lead to what my father had feared, unemployment.  There were no jobs as I graduated into an oilfield depression.  I tried to find a job for a year, and then back to school I went, as a law student.

Law student?

Yeah, a law student.

Being a lawyer, you might note, has nothing to do with being outdoors.

It was first suggested to me that I might consider the law as a career when I was a college student in community college.

The reason that it first appealed to me is related to the point linked in above, once again.  It wasn't that it sounded like "an exciting career" or that it afforded an opportunity to save mankind.  Indeed, when I hear people wo hare law students or contemplating becoming law students express really high ideals regarding being a lawyer, I know that they are in for a monster sized disappointment.  "I'm going to become an International Law Lawyer and save the whales!".  BS, you're going to litigate in small claims court in Dayton, Ohio, spanky.

What was the case, however, is that, like dentists, you could be a lawyer and be here.  

Now, the reason that the law was suggested to me had nothing to do with that. Rather, my community college history professor thought I had an analytical mind and that suited me to become a lawyer.

The professor in question was one Jon E. Brady, and he was a great community college history professor.  I think he would have been a great history professor in any institution.  In fact both of the history profs I had at Casper College, Jon Brady and Dr. David Cherry, were great teachers.

Anyhow, it was Jon Brady's comment that started the wheels in motion.  I didn't actually know that he was a lawyer himself at the time, and only learned that well after I was a lawyer.  At least one other lawyer has told me that he made a similar comment to him, which is what caused him to become a lawyer, but that lawyer's on line career story tells a considerably different tale, so who knows.  The truth is probably in the middle there somewhere.

Anyhow, while was only due to the recent conversation that I had noted on another one of our blogs that I recalled it, my thinking was pretty similar to my father's.  The law would bring me back here and as close to my feral state as an adult as I was in my youth. Or so I thought.

And as a student, I was pretty feral.  Living in my hometown while attending community college, I went hunting several times throughout the week as a college student.  When I moved to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming, I went hunting less, but still quite a bit.  And I lived on wild game at the time. When I was first a lawyer I hunted and fished a great deal, and my father and I came close to buying a small ranch together, before he died.  After that, I lived once again pretty much on wild game until I got married.

To make a long story short, my wife and I have livestock so in some ways I came back around to my original career goals, sort of.  So is this a success story?  I suppose it at least partially is.  I'm still as feral mentally as I was when I was 16.  I'm not outdoors in recent years, however, anywhere near as much as I'd like to be, and that's due to my work.  It's also my own fault, to an extent, and at least according to my wife, it's a matter of perception, as she claims I'm hunting all the time.

My first day on the job, the office manager, who had worked for the firm for decades, and who had probably wearied of young lawyers by that time, made the comment that she hoped I would like being a lawyer and that I might end up "wishing I'd been a farmer".  I recall thinking that if being a farmer was an option right then, that's what I'd become.  It isn't an option for everyone, not anymore.  The NFU writer's article doesn't really explain where she is now and what's she doing, but she is a climate activist and it sounds like she's worked at experimental farms. That makes a person a type of farmer, to be sure, but my guess is that it doesn't make a person a long term one.

Breaking into real agriculture today is really tough.  In my senior year as an undergrad in geology I told one of my friends that what I really wanted to do was to be a rancher, and that I guess that I must just not be ambitious.  He commented that he thought that a fine ambition.  I've actually worked at it now for decades and I am that, but I don't support my family doing it, and I'm now getting old.  I've done something else career wise, and I have to be honest about it.  I'm never going to be a full time rancher or farmer.  Never.  When I die, and I find myself in that odd dream retrospective state represented in the final scene of No Country For Old Men now quite a bit, even if that day is a decade or two off (and we never know), people who didn't really know me as a person will simply categorize me as a lawyer, and the state bar journal, in whatever form it is in then, will run an obit like it does for every passing lawyer that hails your achievements, if there were any, in the profession.  Lots of people think of me that way pretty much exclusively now, and one of my close friends in the law recently told me that "if I had your practice I'd be proud", which was an odd off hand remark to make (I'm not really sure what brought that up, and I didn't ask).  

I'm not really a proud fellow, about anything, I guess, so it was an odd observation to hear.  Of course, as Garrison Keillor says, "we always have a backdoor view of ourselves", which makes it hard, I think, for anyone but a narcissist to really be existentially proud of themselves.

Anyhow, is her career choice absurd?  No, definitely not.  Is the idealism behind it misplaced?  Probably so.  Idealism behind most careers of that type is misplaced, including the expressed idealism I sometimes hear about entering the legal field, which I tend to discount as self serving propaganda or words for other ears, not your internal ones.  

Life is packed with endless compromises. What ultimately governs the success or failure of them isn't based on economics too much, but economics is a big influencer in them, to be sure.  A lot of that has to do with your internal values, and if that value is money, you're not going to be a success no matter what.  A lot of success can be measured in just how close we can get to what we'd do if we wanted, in a world where we really don't get to do whatever we want.  Not too many people anymore can "choose to be a farmer" in the old time sense, i.e., buy a farm and farm it, or buy a ranch and run it, unless they're very rich.  There are other ways to do it, but frankly it almost always involves family ties, which is just fine, or it involves working at something else which probably amounts to your main job.  We'll take that topic up, the economics of land ownership, absentee landowners, and the wealthy in some other post.

Anyhow, farmers can help save the world.  Lawyers can too.  Youthful idealism is vital to all human endeavors.  But in wanting to be a farmer, and in being a farmer, I tend to think that its something that is practically in your DNA if you have it.  Hard to explain, but deep down.  

Which I guess is pretty close to the concept of youthful idealism.

Footnotes:

*This is the first original content post on this blog, fwiw.  It was originally going to be on Lex Anteinternet, and it actually will be, but here first.

**By farmer here, I meant farmer, or rancher.  I frankly have always preferred animals over plants, so ranching would be my first choice.

***We run a whole platoon of blogs, the most active of which as a rule is Lex Anteinternet where this was originally going to be posted.

The Introvert Subsistence Hunter Meets the Extrovert Midwestern Gregarian

"Lonesome Charley" Reynolds.  Son of a  physician, Reynolds was such a loner that he ended up with a solitary name in an occupation that involved solitude, that of U.S. Army scout  His days ended at Little Big Horn.  Prior to being a scout, he'd occupied a variety of occupations, including that of buffalo hunter.

I've been a Wyoming hunter my entire life. And in the context of being a native Wyomingite, what that really means is I'm a subsistence hunter.

The Subsistence Hunter

Elk hunter in Wyoming, early 20th Century.  In a lot of ways, for some, it hasn't changed much.

There's a lot more to that last sentence than immediately meets the eye as it implies an ethos and a very extensive one.  It also implies one to almost anyone who can state the first sentence as well.  Indeed, it tends to apply to people who grew up in what geographers would define as rural areas, but which those who have experienced it would define as natural areas.

Subsistence hunters hunt for food. But more than that, they believe, and believe strongly, that securing your own food in nature, the way that human beings have done since before humans had language and ever since.  It expresses, at least to an extent, a longing for a more natural condition, and a questioning of the history that lead us away from agrarianism, with which it is closely linked.

As a child, I was first introduced to bird hunting.

My father hunted birds and the thing he hunted more than anything else was waterfowl.  I started hunting birds at about age 5.  We also hunted sage chickens during the short sage chicken season, and when Wyoming reopened a dove season, we hunted that as well.  As a early teen we started hunting blue grouse when a friend of my father's, who loved eating blue grouse, started taking us.  For my father, all of these game bird species had been ones he'd hunted when he was young and to the extent that some had dropped off that reflected the pressures of work.*  Work disrupted his hunting of game birds that had to take him far afield, which did not mean that he wasn't outdoors generally on a weekly basis. He was also a dedicated and successful fisherman in a way that far surpasses my comparatively meager efforts.  Indeed, I'm a fair weather spring and summer subsistence fisherman where as he fished far into the fall.  He didn't ice fish, however, which I've taken up, with my daughter, a little.

Me and my father when I was a little kid.  This is at the Dan Speas Fish Hatchery.

Shortly after I started hunting waterfowl, I started hunting rabbits too, and it was a byproduct of it at first.  Rabbits are everywhere in Wyoming and if there were no ducks to hunt, where we hunted them, I sometimes hunted rabbits.  When I was grade school, however, I had a couple of friends, one a native Wyomingite who was the child of native Wyomingites, and a native Utahan who was the child of native Uthans, whose primary hunting activities, as a kid, were focused on rabbits, so stand alone rabbit hunting came into the picture.

Native hunter with rabbit, 1890.

Big game hunting didn't come in until just about the time I was ready to leave grade school.  My father had hunted deer and antelope when he was young, and at a time at which antelope populations had just recovered enough to allow for antelope hunting, but he had also quit doing that when I was born for the same reasons noted above.  He took it back up when I was a little older.  Some of my friend's fathers, however, were dedicated Wyoming subsistence big game hunters all along.  As soon as we were old enough to big game hunt ourselves, which was an older age than Wyoming provides for now, we all became deer and antelope hunters. Some of my junior high friends were also elk hunters, something that some of my father's friends were as well, but which required a much more extensive time allowance for big game hunting than my father had.  I didn't start hunting elk until I was in junior college, when I had a lot of time, and could drive.

By that time my mother had fallen extremely ill and my father and I were basically on our own, or more properly on our own with an invalid to care for.  As hunters, our table was shiting over from heavily game to more and more exclusively game.  When I left for university, I was on exclusively game.  When I got back out, and my father passed away, that continued until I was married.  All in all, I lived on game almost alone for a period of over a decade.  As my father put in a huge garden, and I kept it up after he died until the first few years of our marriage, we were not only on a sustenance hunting diet, but a sustenance produce diet as well.

I'd still live that way, if I could.

Which I probably could, but my ranch raised wife insists on beef as well, so we pack a volunteer cow annually.  We supplement that, however, with a lot of wild game.  Having said that, the last couple of years, due to the percentage of licenses that go to out of state hunters, we've had bad luck in drawing big game licenses. But that's another story.

Springer

Pheasants are an Asian game bird, long hunted in China and Mongolia.  China once had huge pheasant populations until Chairman Mao ordered them wiped out, because he was a Communist doofus. 

The Springer/Bump Sullivan Wildlife Management Habitat Area is an area in Wyoming's farm belt owned and operated by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.  It's use and size, as related by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, are as follows:

Public Access Area Open: Foot and horse access open year-round
Exceptions: Closure is limited to vehicles only. Foot and horse access open year-round
Recreation Opportunities: Fishing, Hunting, Camping, Hiking, Wildlife Viewing
Amenities: Comfort Stations, Boat Ramp
Restrictions: Oct. 1 - Memorial Day Weekend
Additional Restrictions: ORV travel is not allowed
Total Acres: 3071.4

One of the hunting opportunities afford by Springer is pheasant hunting, and the WGFD raises the pheasants.  I.e, its a wild bird farm run by the State.  It isn't the only one. At least one more (and there's probably more than one more) is located near Glendo Wyoming.

I don't know how long Springer has been around.  I really only became aware of it as an adult and only then when one of my uncles, who had hunted in his youth but not much as an adult, started to hunt there with his coworkers.  When he first started to do that he lacked a shotgun, so he borrowed one from me for a couple of years until he bought his own.  

I wasn't tempted to go to Springer at the time and it was for a long time thereafter that I wasn't.  This was partially, indeed mostly, for a philosophical reason.  Pheasants are a wild bird, but to my mind, pheasants raised on a bird farm aren't wild, so it didn't match with my ethos as described above.

Indeed, pheasants aren't native to Wyoming. . . or North America, at all.  Not that this particularly bothered me.  There are a lot of bird species that have been introduced into North America, although pheasants are the only game species I can think of offhand.  At least one other game bird species, however, has been introduced into Wyoming, and that very successfully.  Indeed, almost too successfully.  That other species are turkeys, which are now everywhere, including all over town.

Introducing wild species into an area they are not native to is a dangerous thing to do and with at least mammals, I'm really opposed to it.  Indeed a couple of domestic species that have been introduced into North America and then escaped to go feral have been real nuisances, those being feral (i.e., "wild") horses and feral cats.  Chronic Wasting Disease, the disease related to scabies and mad cow disease that's been ravaging deer and elk populations in the West came out of Colorado game farms, something that shouldn't be legal. And feral pigs are wreaking havoc from Colorado on down.

But generally introduced game birds haven't been a problem and are even a benefit where they've been introduced, so I have not problem with them.  Indeed, pheasants have been so successfully introduced in the Midwest that they're practically a native species now.  And they do a lot of good, actually, in terms of pest eradication.  More pheasants, fewer grasshoppers.

So that wasn't my problem.  It was the farm aspect of it that was my problem.

Well, once I started practicing law I was introduced to a set of hunting practices that were more social in nature than the sort of hunting that I was used to.  And right about the same time, or actually while still a law student, I was strongly introduced to big game trophy hunting.

I've never accommodated myself to trophy hunting, although I don't begrudge those who hunt for trophies as long as they eat the meat, which you are required to do by law, and which they generally all do.  I do have a problem with managing big game horn populations for horns.  I feel that they should be managed for populate, and generally in Wyoming, they are.  I hear trophy hunters complain about that, but I"m sure not one of the ones complaining.  I will complain on another thread about the number of licenses going to out of state hunters, but that's for some future thread.

I have accommodated myself, however, to the game bird farms.

Perhaps it just hypocritical, but I think it's okay largely for the same reason that I'm okay with stocking fish, something that I've been familiar with my whole life.  Birds are frankly a lower form of animal, and while I'd rather catch wild fish (and usually do, as I fish in the mountains most often), I want fish in all the streams and rivers and that means stocking. Same with birds. That gets birds out there.  Indeed, pheasants exist in a couple of places locally where I know that they were introduced eons ago, and they wouldn't be there otherwise. Down in the farm belt some of the pheasants make it out into the farms and take up life there, having been established in this fashion. Where we farm now there are pheasants that got there that way. And in much of the farm belt the fields would be devoid of a year around bird but for pheasants.  Waterfowl would be present seasonally, but not all year long.  

And game farm birds to serve to get hunters out into the field and introduce some to a more natural way of living than would otherwise be the case.  With me, even in my now ever advancing years, I engage in  even bird hunting in really rough terrain, part of the reason that I'm in good shape for my age.  But I know that a lot of desk bound workers aren't going to hike a couple of miles into the hills just to have a chance at native birds, hunt miles while doing that, and hike miles back out.  I'd do that every day if I could, but a lot of people can't. And they can't, because they physically can't.  Stocked birds helps reverse that a bit.

And it helps keep wild grounds wild.

So, I've acclimated myself to it.

The Midwestern Gregarain

Construction workers drinking beer at the entrance of a bar, December 1940.

People who don't think various cultures are different even within the United States just haven't met very many people from elsewhere.

The West seems to favor people like me in a way.  I.e, in a lot of settings it's pretty easy to be an introvert here.  

Indian scout, Mexican Revolution, 1911.

Being an introvert isn't the same thing as being a misanthrope.  It just is a different mental make up.  As part of that makeup we find social settings, frankly, draining, except when they're people we're highly familiar with. Extraverts are just the opposite, and extreme extroverts highly different.

I think a lot of that is genetic.  My father was certainly an introvert.  But some of it may be learned or environmental as well.  I grew up as an only child and when I was 13, my mother became extremely ill which left the family as basically me and my father, as previously noted here.  In that setting, you learn to do things for yourself, entertain yourself and you learn not to ever be lonely, as you always have yourself. At some point, you not only learn that, but you need it.  Too much interaction is too much, and you need a mental break.**

Extraverts, on the other hand, aren't that way at all.

Enter my coworkers.  My coworkers is from the Midwest where it seems to me the urban culture favors extraverts.  The same is true of the East.  They always has.  If you read about working men in the Midwest and East prior to the onset of the day, you learn how they worked closely together, and the hit the bars, after work, and on weekends they all went to the same ballgames and the like.  Good depictions of this are given in the film The Deer Hunter and Good Will Hunting, and pretty accurately.

This makes for an interesting dynamic if you aren't in that group, as they way they view the world is so very different.  My coworker, for example, always eats lunch at work except when he eats lunch out with other people.  When he eats out, he invites people to eat with him that he finds interesting and chats them up.  I'm sure they are interesting, but I find eating lunch with people I don't know well extremely stressful (and I often don't eat lunch).  If he eats in the office, when I come back in I often find him engaged in conversations, as entertainment, that he finds interesting in ways that make me feel very awkward.  We're co-religious and I'll answer questions and provide explanations, or defenses, regarding our Faith when called to do so, but I don't intentionally spark religious debates or just interject religious topics into the middle of casual conversations.***  He does all the time.  I'll write about such topics here, but I don't routinely interject and discuss them with people unless I know them extremely well.

At the end of the day he often socializes with coworkers.  "Let's have a drink!" is a common plea from him.  I nearly always decline these invitations as after a day of interacting with people all day long, I want to go home.  He and his family have people over for dinner or activities constantly.  We only do so for really significant occasion or occasionally for holidays.  I'd find a weekend in which I had invited a group of people over for discussions on religion or whatever to be taxing, and no break from human interaction for me is taxing.  Indeed, I always cringe in horror when I have work to do that takes me into the office during the weekend and some helpful assistant starts asking to come in and help me.  Help, for me, in that situation is not coming in to help me.

And hence my confusion.

The Trip

As soon as we got our reserve date, my excited co-worker starting asking; "We're going down the night before, right?"

I was baffled and simply answered that we were going down.

It's only 90 miles away and some people, maybe me, will be bringing their hunting dogs.  Staying in a hotel with a hunting dog is a pain and, frankly, in my line of work I've stayed in a pile of hotels and really have no desire to stay in more except when I can't avoid it.  For years I've had the 300 mile rule which is that if something I need to do is 300 miles from here or less, it's a day trip  That way, I avoid the hotel.  I'm a super early riser anymore so I can make 300 miles from here easily before 9:00 a.m.  Making some place 90 miles away by sunup is no problem.  Indeed, getting somewhere by sunup is something that is easy for me to do anyway as I have a lifetime of experience at it, first as a kid, then as a soldier, then as a geology student.  No problem.

Unless the weather is bad, of course.

So, we always having our own view of things, I didn't take this question seriously, until it became obvious to me that it was seriously posed.

"Um. . . why would we do that?"

"Because we can eat out and drink beers!"

I"m not a teetotaler by any means, but like most subsistence hunters I don't mix alcohol with hunting.  I.e., staying up late the night prior and drinking beer isn't something I"m inclined to do.  Having a beer with dinner, if I'm camping, is something I will do, or having a beer or wine with dinner if I get something and cook it that night at  home, which I'll often do, is also something I'll routinely do. But traveling someplace, putting my dog in my hotel room, and then drinking beer. . . I'm not going to do that.

For that matter, we all work together anyway.  And we all have to stay in hotels all the time.  Why would we want to do that.

Well, if you are an extravert and dig lots of socializing, you'll no doubt understand why.

If you are an introvert subsistence hunter like me, you won't get it.  Shoot, you won't even do it.  

I'll just drive down early that morning.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I was well into my adult years before I'd been to all of the places in the state my father had hunted and fished as a young man.  I'm only now making it to some of them.

** People would find it odd, but statistically, a lot of lawyers are introverts. This probably has to do with the study of law being bookish, something that introverts are naturally drawn to.  Ironically, the practice of law tends not to be bookish.

This gets to another point.  Introverts aren't hostile to human interaction, they can just get too darned much. When they do, they seek to withdraw.  As another blog notes, introverts often want an invitation, except when they don't (and you won't know when that is or isn't), even if they shy away from gatherings.  They often do very well in gatherings, which causes people not to realize that introverts are introverts.  

As an example, public speaking doesn't bother me at all, and I frequently get "I don't know how you do that" from people who otherwise are constantly talking.  That's easy to answer, around people, save for people who an introvert is highly familiar and comfortable with, introverts are "on".  That is, they're minds are focused and they're running at high speed. That's the very reason that they crave breaks from the same sort of settings. For introverts, again save for people they're very comfortable with, there's absolutely no such thing as a "casual conversation".

***It's obvious from this blog, but I'm Catholic.

It is now completely impossible to view the shift away from an agrarian society. . .

Experimental farm, Willson North Dakota.  1914.

as anything other than a tragic mistake, at best.

We've exchanged a life outdoors and close to nature for one indoors that's artificial.  We've lost our connection with nature in its real, and often not always kind, but always existentially beneficial, sense.  We've lost our connection with other animals in the same way.  In the process, we've made ourselves increasingly physically and mentally ill.  We know that, and in struggling to deal with it, we're moving in the opposite direction.

We've forgotten who are neighbors are.  We don't found real bonds of love with anyone.  We've forgotten what a community really is, as we don't live in them.  We have no connection with the place or the land.  We don't understand ourselves as creatures.  We're obsessed with money even when we claim we aren't.

The past was certainly not perfect by any measure.  And the present certainly isn't.  This year, 2020, has been a disaster.  A horrible pandemic that originated in the densely packed cities of China spread rapidly through the densely packed cities of the rest of the globe, and while we struggle to deal with it, the best we can come up with is to hide indoors.

Perhaps it's time to really reconsider what "progress" is, and where we're progressing to.

I think I'll have a steak, rare.

Bar har har!

A  note, this is one of those threads (well actually now two combined threads) I started along time ago (in October, to be exact), and I'm just getting back around to it.

Anyhow. . . it's back on my radar, and for some amusing and not so amusing reasons.

Almost every single aspect of dietary advice that's existed in the course of my lifetime has turned out to be flat out wrong, so why would this be surprising?

A lot of health advice has to be taken with a grain, or even a bucket, of salt.  And I've tended to do that with the constant "don't eat meat" which is the deceptive morphed view of "don't eat red meat".

I've also tended to take the real advice, which I've ignored, to be don't eat fatty red meat, which is different advice actually, and as stockmen have responded to the demand, fat red meat is harder to get than it used to be anyhow.  A steak, even a prime cut, can be fat or lean.  If you order one now, unless you are specially ordering a steak in some place that's really old timey, is not going to be anywhere near as fatty as one you might have ordered in the 1970s.

Now, I'm not a dietitian, and nobody should take eating advice from me, but frankly, if your spouse would let you get by, and some will, on deer, elk, moose, antelope (particularly that) I think you could skip this entire topic.

But assuming not, you are now left with this:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

Hee hee hee.

Well, of course everyone who has a vested interest in the existing state of things is countering it. "What?  That can't be true!  I've been saying the opposite."

Well, consider this, from the NYT:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings “erode public trust,” critics said.

Of course, by this point the public's trust in dietary advice is pretty eroded anyway, which may explain why so many Americans are practitioners of the Diet Of The Week, no matter what it may be, combined with a lot of non scientific baloney about eating this or that substance not approved by the FDA for anything.  

And as I've long stated, a lot of American's dietary habits de jour are based not on science, but on our national cultural history and the sad state of our society.

Puritans, they didn't have any food hang ups, but were pretty much opposed to almost everything fun.  Modern Americans have largely dumped their theology as they prefer to believe that God personally approves of anything they do, but they've oddly kept the strong instinct to suffer.

The best dietary advice a person could give would be to grow your own food, and hunt for your own meat, to the extent you can.  That dovetails with the best health advice a person can give, which is get regular exercise. We basically ignore all of that as we want to rationalize the modern urban lifestyle we largely detest, find an explanation for the reasons we're unhappy that don't involve making any really tough or disciplined decisions, and also, oddly enough, punish ourselves in some ritual manner that makes  us miserable but also makes us feel morally superior. It's a combination of the effects of our Fourth Law of Behavior, modern conditions, and our cultures ongoing Puritanism.

This would explain the change over the years from diet to a sort of secular Jainism.  Contrary to widespread belief, Hindus can and do eat meat, but the related Jain's do not and claim not to eat anything that lives (which they do, as almost everything in a real human diet was alive at one time and you can't live on the few things, like salt, which are not).  The Jain diet is a religiously imposed one and a very odd one at that, the underlying roots of which we'll not go into, but as odd as it is, the American vegan diet that's come up in recent years is stranger yet.  It's deeply, deeply unnatural, not good for its practitioners, and bad for the environment in spades, but it allows its adulterants to suffer with a sense of misplaced moral superiority while not having to observe any of the strict moral codes such disciplines require.  By way of a more familiar example, some Christian monastic orders or individual monks also ate strict vegetarian diets or nearly vegetarian diets, as a form of fasting, but they also pray without ceasing and completely abstain from sex, something most emaciated vegans none the less would recoil from following even though its a lot more likely to bestow real virtue upon them. But then, that requires real concentration and sacrifice, not just ordering the vegan special at dinner and then lording it over your friends.

More recently yet, now armed with a scene of benighted superiority, the followers of such diets in the west have been on a full blown Cromwellian campaign to compel it on everyone else, the most recent example of which was the really absurd example of the Golden Globes serving a vegan dinner in the name of the environment.  Well, dear vegans, your diet is arguably  the most destructive one on the planet ever imagined.

Let's be blunt.  If you really want to pour the greenhouse gases into the environment, go vegan.

Let's start with some basic facts, something Americans in particular do not like interjected into their public discourse.  Beef cattle are responsible for only 2% of US greenhouse gas emissions.  That means 98% are from something else, and farming (i.e., plant farming) contributes its share to that.  And of that 2%, a fair amount of it would be there anyway.

Eh?

Yes.  A fair amount would be there anyway.

Cattle get picked on as the cattle industry has been the whipping boy of ill informed environmentalist going back at least until the 1970s.  Themes have varied, but generally a lot of urbancentrntric or relocated urbanites took up picking on the cattle industry in the west under the strange assumption that it was responsible for the decline of everything that they loved, and if it wasn't there, things would be 100% Granola Perfect.  The basic gist of the argument was, if you boiled it down, cattlemen came in and shoved out the Indians (which is not the way that happened) and put their dirty dirty cows on the range which displaced the super clean and nifty buffalo.  If the cattle were removed, all the good old days would return.

Navajo horsemen, 1904. They weren't vegans.

The big fallacy to that, of course, is that the Indians tribes who fought so hard to retain their lands (quite a few of whom now raise cattle) would require these same lily white Granolas to also remove themselves from the range in order to achieve that natural status.  That's not part of the proposal. 

Navajo sheep.

Indeed, it doesn't even begin to grasp that the wide open spaces in the West are here today as they're livestock ranges.  The degree to which people are deluded on a topic such as this is perhaps best symbolized by an article once written by a University of Wyoming professor decrying seeing cattle out of her house windows in Laramie, when in fact the reason such a person can see that is that they must in one of the newer houses on the edge of Laramie.  Building houses destroys wild lands like nothing else.

High altitude prairie.  Ranching keeps it as such.

Next to it, ironically, is farming.

I love farming, but a farmed field is not a natural field. We'll get back to that in a moment.

That's because we're not done discussing gassy cows.

As noted, only 2% of U.S. greenhouse gases derive from cattle, and much of that is due to the way they're fed out on corn.  If you don't don that, and simply eat grass fed beef, the figure drops.

It'd never drop to 0% as ungulates fart. . . including wild ungulates.

Buffalo, in this case ones that are being raised as livestock.

One of the cherished tales of the Granola set is to recount how before the millions of cows, there were millions of buffalo.  Millions.  And those millions of buffalo. . . well. . . they farted too.

It could be pointed out that there are no doubt more cattle today than there were buffalo, but there were a lot of buffalo and they were gassy. That's the way ungulates are, to a small extent.  So, even in the Granola dream, those millions of domestic ungulates, were they gone, would be replaced, in a pure state of nature, by millions of wild ungulates.

Indeed, it might be noted, cattle themselves were a wild species originally, although not in North America. They certainly were all over Europe, Asia and Africa, however.  Indeed, they still are in Africa.

Environmentalist Ernest Hemingway with a gas contributor in Africa.

This brings us around to farming.

One of the things that's become really obvious about modern Americans is that very few of them have any concept whatsoever of how food gets on their tables.  Not even remotely.  It just appears there. 

Vegans and other vegetarians seem to have the concept that agriculture exists in the Neolithic, or even the Paleolithic era.  That is, a farmer goes out of his stone hut and roots in the ground with a sharp stick (note, such sticks were often sharpened and then hardened with fire, so we'll presume our super environmental neolithic farmer doesn't use flame. . . just more sticks).  Having done that, he plants his seeds by hand and waters them with a clay jug throughout the growing season.  Once that's completed, he carriers his food to market by hand, where it's sold in Free Trade Farmers' Markets.

No, that's not even close to how that happens.

Even this would be an advanced state of agriculture compared to the one that vegans and vegetarians seem to imagine exists.

Modern farming is petroleum dependent in a major way in reality.  Much more so than livestock production.  Every farm of any substantial size uses really heavy rolling equipment that consume buckets of diesel fuel and expel CO2 exhaust, among other things.  In addition to that, even watering systems simply to water crops depend quite often on gasoline or diesel engines, or electricity supplied by a power plant that may well be fossil fuel using. From planting to harvest there isn't a day that doesn't go buy that uses a lot of fuel.

And that crop doesn't get to wherever its going, either to be processed or to market, with out more fuel.  It's trucked to one place, and then shipped to another, and in the U.S. that's by truck.  When Jimmy Hoffa declared back in the 60s and 70s:

If you have it, a truck brought it

he was right.

And this assumes that you are restricting yourself to crops grown in North America.  If you are enjoying feasting on third world plantains or nuts or whatever, that came by a diesel powered ship and was grown in a place where the concern for fuel consumption was likely low and the environment even lower.

Indeed, the beauty of animal consumption is that animals feed themselves on what they eat, and you usually can't eat it.  Cattle live on grass, and you can't eat grass. Even cattle fed out on corn are eating something that humans are extremely inefficient at digesting (and frankly cattle aren't great at digesting, but which are better than  we are).   They water themselves and while cattlemen do use fuel to be sure, in much of hte US cattle are left to themselves to a surprising degree much of the year and another ungulate, horses, remain used for transportation much more than a person might imagine.

And to add to that, agriculture is a great killer.

Vegans and vegetarians like to imagine that by having that bowl of rice they've avoided hurting animals, but they're simply fooling themselves.  For one thing, every farm field has displaced natural habitat.  But for another, agriculture itself results in the death of a lot of animals simply by accident and occasionally by design.

All of which leads to this.  Veganism and vegetarianism aren't supported by your evolutionary biology.  That doesn't mean your current diet does either.  Ideally, you'd plant a garden and hunt for meat, or buy local lean meat if you can't hunt for it all.  That's what you'd do if you really were concerned about your diet.  If you aren't, chances are you are concerned about something else. With some, that's a frightened knowledge that they'll die combined with a primitive belief that day can be pushed back endlessly through ritual.  For many others, it's a lack of knowledge combined with, or even simply dominated by, a retained Puritanism that's become secular in nature and which demands that you must suffer, for which you may regard yourself as superior to others.

Really health or healthy environment?  Not so much.

Indeed this topic has been well explored by some other blogs, which were once going to be the topic of a separate blog entry here but now have been combined with this one.  One really interesting one is this one below, by the self styled "Buzzard", a young woman rancher in Kansas:

Changing Your Diet Won't Help the Environment but these 5 Changes Sure Will.

A big part of Buzzards point here has to do with greenhouse gases, which I'm only addressing here because of the claim that switching to vegan burgers or something is going to address that in any meaningful way.  This isn't a post on the climate, it's a post on diet, or more specifically meat.

Anyhow, the "5 Changes" the blogger discusses in detail are these:  1) Reduce your food waste; 2) Reduce your reliance on single use plastics; 3) Park the car and walk (or take public transportation; 4) Turn off your faucets and lights; and 5) Stop buying so much stuff.

The same blogger is pretty blunt with an additional administration of a dope slap with this one:

A Burger Won't Negate an Airplane.

I won't comment on all of those, and I think you ought to read the blog entry if you are interested.  But I'd note that the really interesting one of those is "Stop buying so much stuff".

Buying stuff is the modern American thing.  Even people who claim not to buy stuff, buy a lot of stuff.  The entire modern American economy is based on buying stuff.  Americans buy stuff just for something to do.  I  know more than one person who is cognizant of this that they'll choose working over an idle day as if they have an idle day, they'll buy stuff.  Indeed buying stuff is now so vital to the American economy that after the U.S. was hit by terrorist on September 11, 2001, politicians urged the American public to spend, so as to keep the economy rolling.  Americans themselves are routinely referred to by their leaders by the insulting term "consumers".

An economy based on stuff purchasing is sort of odd in a way.  I'm not arguing against buying stuff and indeed shopkeepers and manufacturers are depending upon the sale of things for their living, and always have. But the level of stuff consumption is something I haven't ever addressed on the blog and probably ought to just as an interesting societal matter.

The reason I haven't addressed it is that I don't have a good command on the consumer culture.  I've read widely that it started to come about in t he early 20th Century, but simply reviewing old ads and newspapers I suspect it came about at least as early as the post Civil War period.  Already by the turn of the prior century there were a lot of advertisements aimed at consumer spending during the Christmas period, for example, and Christmas Season advertising of a century ago is very familiar to what we see today.  Economists worry like crazy if people stop buying stuff, even while encouraging people to save, as if everyone quits buying stuff, the result is an economic depression.

Anyhow, the consumer culture in the U.S. is so deep that people really can't grasp the extent the extent to which they participate in it.  Even people who are the greenest of the greens usually are pretty deeply into it, they just don't realize it.  Indeed, they often express their greenism by things they bought to show you how green they are.

The point there is that even while we can disagree with Buzzard on items on her list, your diet probably isn't contributing that much to greenhouse gases unless, ironically, you are a vegan or vegetarian, as the amount of fuel needed to produce what you are eating in the modern farm economy is enormous.  

So, what to do if you really want to be a dietary steward of the environment?  Well we could add to her list with 6) plant a garden and 7) go hunting and fishing.  Or you could just make that your list and maybe add being careful about what you buy and how much of it you buy. Stop participating in a throw away society in other words, if you are.  Buy local if you can, including local foods.

I'd add a bit, before going on, that if Buzzard's blog hits a little too hard, you can find a lot of the same type of content on the twitter feed of one Sarah Mcnaughton in a very well presented and scientific way.  Mcnaughton, a young woman agriculturalist in North Dakota also has a blog, Sarah's NoDak Living, which is worth checking out.

Indeed, both of these blogs are connected into our blog feed under the agricultural heading on this site.

Anyhow, go hunting or fishing, preferably both, and plant a garden.  If you can't do those, you might, or might not, be able to get a fair amount of your meat and vegetables locally.  But don't go vegan, your DNA will hate you and it doesn't achieve anything other than to make you weak, crabby and make everyone view you like Oliver Cromwell dropping into a Christmas Party.

Oliver Cromwell.  Don't be Oliver Cromwell.