6 Hunters Who Are More Jackass Than Bad Ass
Modern society has a weird relationship with hunting. Follow Ricky Gervais on Twitter long enough and you'll see him shred some poor hunter who was dumb enough to post a picture of themselves straddling a dead mermaid with a bullet in its head. Many people have this distaste for the idea of hunting in general -- as though killing an animal is unnatural, despite the fact that it's been part of how humans have survived since the early 1970s. Or since forever. I get those two confused.
Personally, I'm all for hunting if you're hunting a deer that you plan on eating, or a duck that you plan on eating, or really anything, so long as you eat the damn thing. Or if it's a necessary cull because there's, like, a million wolverines and they all live in your backyard. If you kill an elephant because you've never killed an elephant before and you want to kill an elephant, then maybe go fuck yourself. The world will probably get along OK if rich people never get a chance to kill off an endangered species.
That said, whether you support hunting or abhor it, it's always funny to read about people who are just massive fuckups. The Germans knew that, so they made up the word "schadenfreude," and we're just going to ride that German train right into the pain station with a bunch of idiots who ran loose in the woods with guns.
Armadillo Ricochet
There's a scene I love in Alien: Resurrection -- which I know sounds like a gibberish sentence, because no one liked Alien: Resurrection -- in which the character Christie makes an impossible gunshot that ricochets a bullet off, like, three walls before it hits its target dead-on. I liked that scene for the same reason I like watching pool sharks: because I have a boner for geometry, I guess. Or maybe things that ricochet amuse me because I like bouncing. I don't know. In any event, when you start bouncing bullets around, you have my attention.
Replace Winona Ryder with bullets, the alien baby with bullets, and all the dialogue with bullets, and this movie would deserve every Oscar.
Likely, the concept of ricochet is of great interest to 74-year-old Carol Johnson now as well, because she fell victim to one even more ludicrous than the one in Alien. Follow this train of madness and struggle to accept how it apparently actually happened. Carol's son-in-law was outside the house with his 9mm pistol. As is the wont of most people with a 9mm on them, Larry McElroy was in the mood to shoot an armadillo. Or maybe the armadillo just appeared and pissed him off. The context is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Larry shot the armadillo and it died. And yet, somehow, the bullet bounced off the armadillo, hit a fence, proceeded through the door of Johnson's nearby mobile home, into her recliner, and then into her back. The only thing more amazing would have been if it stopped for a latte at Starbucks on the way.
"I want an equal amount of shots in my cup and my clip."
The wound Johnson sustained was not life-threatening -- mostly just your run-of-the-mill "armadillo-blood-soaked bullet hole through a recliner with a bit of fence fragmentation" we hear about all the time these days. And since no mention was made in the story of this being an epic load of shit to cover up McElroy trying to murder his mother-in-law, we'll just have to accept that this is what actually happened.
Bigfoot Shooting
Generally speaking, there aren't a lot of things in life more pathetic than actively, earnestly hunting for Bigfoot. Just think of how someone in the Third World -- who has to walk five miles to find contaminated water to drink and is at risk of being shot by some kind of insane warlord every day -- would react if you told them the biggest problem in your life is trying to find definitive evidence in your local forest that a man-ape creature lives there, and has been hiding its shit from mankind for generations. That's the kind of bullshit that gets grown men slapped in the mouth.
He's eaten just as much meat in the past year as Bigfoot has.
So anyway, people hunt Bigfoot. I don't know why. I probably don't want to know why. I'd probably Xanax my ass into oblivion if I had to share an elevator with one. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that 21-year-old Omar Pineda and friends were in a forest hunting Mr. Squatch, when he heard what he later described to police as "a barking sound."
Now, I made a special quiz up just for this occasion. Feel free to print it out, or to just answer in your head:
What answer did you come up with? Because our friend Omar, upon hearing barking while in a forest with friends, immediately turned 180 and blasted what he assumed was Bigfoot, but was actually just his hunting buddy. Whom I guess was barking. Here's where the "what the fucks" come in. Why would you shoot at barking? Does Bigfoot bark now? Did you really think that was Bigfoot there when you turned around? Because, even if you believe in Bigfoot, you have to acknowledge that he probably doesn't bark and just stand behind you like a dickhead very often, or else every asshole in the woods with a gun would be shooting him, and not just this one particular asshole.
It's probably just a coincidence that Sasquatch sightings died off roughly the same time as Weekly World News did.
The stupidity of this story is compounded by the fact that the parties involved attempted to cover up their crime after the fact. The gun was thrown in a pond, though God knows what their plan was, since a dude was still shot and they had to explain it somehow. Police pointed out that no one probably would have been arrested if they'd just told the truth -- that one idiot accidentally shot another idiot -- instead of making up stories and trying to hide evidence after the fact.
Squirrel Shot To The Head
So you're out in the wilds of Maine, deftly avoiding wild maple and people who suntan, when what should you see? Maine's largest land predator: the squirrel. It sits in its tree, maybe eating a nut, maybe sharpening its talons on the bleached-white skull of its last victim. Whatever the hell squirrels do. You raise your Mosin-Nagant Type 53 bolt-action rifle, take aim at his little squirrel heart -- black as it surely is -- and you fire. And the squirrel, as cool as ranch dressing, turns his little head and stares back down the scope at you. You missed. And he knows it. He knows you're weak. He knows your scent. He knows your face.
"You'll make a fine side dish for my delicious Bullwinkle Head stew."
Now, before the squirrel goes and kills your family, there's just one speed bump in the road, and that's what happened to your bullet. And if you're Bryan Hickey, the answer is that your bullet made its way into the head of a nearby fisherman. That's an oops.
We can take all day to question the logistics of how one man tried to shoot a squirrel in the woods and ended up plugging some poor dude ice-fishing out on a lake right in the melon, but just trust that it happened, and that it was an accident. The victim in this case, 54-year-old Scott Fraley, took it like a champ -- by which I mean he didn't die or anything -- and actually walked himself off the ice with a bullet lodged in his head. So that's a bit of a happy ending for you.
Just one more thing to point at when the grandkids complain about their homework being hard.
As for the squirrel, well ... who knows? Maybe he's reading this right now. Reading and plotting. Or maybe he got eaten by a hawk. Same shit, different pile.
Treed By Bears
There are a variety of ways to go hunting these days, from using traps to rifles to bows, to even paying large sums of money to travel to Africa and shoot an animal that's already dying anyway, because you're kind of psychotic and want the experience of killing at least one of everything. But for the more "pure" hunter -- someone who just wants to go and take what they need from nature -- it's a pretty simple affair. And maybe that's what one hunter in Dryden, Ontario thought when he set out one day with his bow and a plan to stake out a spot in a tree perch and await his prey. The problem for this particular hunter was that he wasn't the only beast in the woods that day, and he wasn't the only one who thought that particular tree would make a great place to relax. In fact, seven black bears had the same damn idea. Seven of them.
One dwarf dinner for each.
Imagine being stuck in some tree branches with a bow and arrows, and a bear comes loping along. And you think "Nah, that's a bit bigger than what I had in mind," so you ignore it as it wanders to the very tree you're in, maybe scratches its ass, and has a sit. Then a friend comes to join him. Then two more. Then another guy. And another. And one last bear. And they all flop under your tree.
We're already 1/100th of the way there to nailing the gritty reboot of the Berenstain Bears no one asked for.
Our friend was either not equipped to actually kill a bear (or seven) or just didn't want to. Regardless, he ended up spending the night in the tree, because the lazy-ass bears didn't move at all. Eventually, authorities were called, who brought emergency picnic baskets with which to distract the bears, and the hunter was saved to be humiliated again another day.
Dead Elk Vengeance
Do you know what, statistically speaking, is the deadliest animal in North America? It's deer. And it's not a result of their fearsome penchant for flitting their lily-white tails just so, or prancing through the periwinkle. Oh no. Deer kill you by being the worst drivers on the road, insofar as they don't drive, they just leap like meat pinatas onto the hood of your car at 70 mph and turn both of you into highway stew.
Why Santa trusts eight of these assholes to not do the same thing to his sleigh, I will never understand.
Fact is, deer and their ruminant buddies are up to no good, and the cost of this nogoodnikery is very likely your life if you run afoul of the beasts. Run away now, kids. Run from Bambi, lest you suffer the same fate as a 51-year-old hunter from Utah, who thought it'd be a fine idea to go elk hunting without wearing full body armor. After taking down a 700-pound elk, the corpse of his prize had no other choice but to gore the ever-loving shit out of that man's head with one of its antlers.
The ASPCA calls it "the feel-good hit of the summer."
The horn entered his noggin behind the jaw and caused breathing difficulty, because an antler in and around your throat area is generally considered a significant obstruction. Eventually, the hunter was airlifted to safety, where he was expected to make a full recovery. As for the elk, it still haunts the lake where it was shot, every few years reappearing in a hockey mask to gore teenagers who drink and have premarital sex.
Burning Ghost Hunters
Since we already shamed some Bigfoot hunters, why not the other kind of low-rent fiction hunter that so pervades reality TV these days -- ghost hunters. Bigfoot hunters at least have the tact to stay in the forest, away from the rest of civilized society, while ghost hunters opt instead to spout their nonsense in any house built before 1990, because they feel a dark presence inside or it's built on a genuine Indian burial ground and/or casino.
In this case, we're dealing with some amateur ghost hunters in New Orleans. Which is funny, because it implies there are professional ghost hunters out there, which is like claiming to be a professional Elven Ranger or a full-time Death Knight.
He moonlights as an undertaker's assistant, drumming up business for when people aren't dying fast enough.
These particular hunters made their way into an abandoned mansion of some historical significance to find the ghost that resided there, because literally every mansion in New Orleans is haunted. You can look that up; I don't even think it's a joke. Whilst in the mansion, the team of paranormal nitwits decided that the best way to find a ghost would be to get on its nerves, so they started by yelling and banging walls. When that didn't work, they set a fire. When that didn't work, they couldn't do anything else, because the fire burned the whole damn place to the ground, ghost and all.
Do you want Ghost Riders? Because this is how you get Ghost Riders.
This is probably the ghost-hunting version of dynamite fishing, and there was no word on whether or not they caught the little Slimer after all that arson, so it seems like the entire operation was a bust. Personally, I recommend hunting ghosts the old-fashioned way -- by eating power pellets and chasing them around a square maze -- but that's just me.
Hunting Bigfoot might be tough (mostly because she doesn't exist) (yes SHE), but we have a feeling that if she did exist, you'd hunt her with these weapons without a problem in The 7 Most Stupidly Overpowered Hunting Weapons. Don't feel too bad for the animals though. They can be pretty crafty when hunting too, as seen in The 5 Most Impressively Convoluted Traps Set By Animals.
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