Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 17, 2018

Fluorescent orange, red and white striped running gear may be useful in the woods! Not so much on the roads…

Which is worse, people hunting for deers or people hunting for Pokemons?

I lived for 4-1/2 years in Central Wisconsin. From the weekend before Thanksgiving to the weekend after, I never had to use my alarm clock, the guns in the woods woke me up.

The Michigan DNR shows not one but seven deer seasons, from Sept 21-22 (“youth and hunters with disabilities”) to “late anterless firearm” from Dec 17 to Jan 1. There doesn’t seem to be any season for firearms with antlers. Obviously some of them overlap.

So you basically have to choose between being shot and overrun?

“I’m going to run if it kills me!”

@ Kim: So right! I live in Wisconsin on a river, and across the river is Michigan, so we get to hear gunshots a lot right now. Sometime you hear so many in succession, you wonder if there is any part of the deer left.

But hunting seasons last only a part of each year. Cell phone hunting has become a 24/7 mis-occupation and the killed/injured score increases weekly.

Distracted drivers are much scarier

Dang girl! do you want to have a life!

You might also want to carry music player of some sort that has a loud speaker so as to make a lot of noise that would scare away the game and let the hunters know you are in the area. Play something that can’t be confused with any of nature’s sounds. I would recommend bagpipe music.

I’ll take my chances with hunters in the woods. They are paying attention to what they are doing. Cell phone drivers are far more deadly.

Ask Stephen King about distracted drivers.

Wait, do I understand from this dialog that she normally runs thru the woods? The very same woods where she could trip and fall and nobody would find her for hours if not days? And this woman is teaching our kids!?

Human stupidity — gets ya comin’ and goin’ . . . . . shakes head . . .

This one was very cute, funny… and respectful of the hunting tradition. Excellent!!!

Mom always insisted we wear blaze orange when she took us trout fishing during deer season. It made us visible to hunters, but wasn’t so effective with the deer. I nearly got knocked into a deep mountain reservoir when a frightened buck came crashing down the steep slope behind me.

I once heard of a man who went hunting in the northern woods wearing a bright red, white and blue jacket. He was shot by someone who thought he was a zebra.

Way to go MALLET you’re really got Them going today

Hunters used to go to the woods next to the farm belonging to some relatives, though they were not supposed to. One day a bullet hit a tree trunk slightly behind me and to the side of my head. I was young and till then had no idea I had picked up such a colorful vocabulary as I spewed it out at top volume toward whoever was hunting there. My cousin was shot twice by careless hunters on their farm, once when she was standing at the school bus stop in a red jacket. Luckily, neither was a serious injury.

Deer and elk hunters do help authorities keep track of where CWD is. Of course, given how long the time can be between exposure to a spongiform encephalopathy and symptoms it can ONLY be said that so far definite transmission to people has not been seen for CWD (unless that changed very recently), but either time or variations could alter that (most recent variation of which I am aware is in a few northern European moose — yes, it made it to Europe a few years ago, first in reindeer). When in doubt, use caution and do notify…

16 hrs · Frazz

I don’t know how you grow up in rural Northern Michigan, on the edge of a national forest, in the 1970s, without ever hunting for deer, but I managed to resist. Although “resist” isn’t really the right word. I didn’t have a thing against hunting. It looked kind of fun. Most of my friends and their families hunted, and they seemed like pretty upstanding people. Decent enough, in fact, to have their season during the crappiest two weeks of the year for camping or hiking or anything else I might want to use the woods for, so I really couldn’t begrudge them.

I knew plenty of people who didn’t like hunting, too, and they seemed more intent that I stuck with their way of thinking than the hunters were that I switch over to theirs. And one of their big concerns was how dangerous hunting was. Crazy people with guns, they said, who’d shoot at anything that moved. (A quaint argument, now that we get all too regular a look at what REAL crazy people with guns look like.) And to be fair, it seemed like every deer season would start with a few more living, breathing hunters than it ended with, but most of those casualties had to do with going deep into the woods with a heart condition. Anyone who WAS shot had most likely ended up on the wrong end of his own rifle. So I never really bought into the you’ll-get-shot story.

I also wonder how many hunters were lost driving home from the hunt, simultaneously tired and amped up on adrenaline while far less securely attached to their seat than their trophy buck was to the roof of the station wagon. It’s a risky picture. But they were probably safer than we all are on the highways today, with everyone distracted by a good deal more than a 5-button Delco AM radio. I suspect even the deer were safer.