The fish there should be wild-caught from the north sea. I'd say a good fatty species would be a good start, like TD said. Hunting in a lot of places in Europe is really weird, but if it is possible to hunt where you are, that's a sure-fire wild raw fat/meat source. Even better than grass-fed raw if you can hunt clean land.

It would take some major problem like a big economic downturn or a major scandal for Romney to beat the incumbent. The election was already decided before it began.

The second part I'm sure of, but the first I dunno. I've heard stories that $5 gas will be here this summer. How high that goes will probably tell us who's been picked. We'll see, I suppose.

lol I thought that was his definition of insanity?

Haha oops, yeah. I stand corrected.

I'm actually hoping Romney gets elected. The reason? He's gonna drive this shindig into a hole so deep it'll come out the other side all brown and sticky. There will be a handful of rich people and 300 million poor. Then maybe a few more of us will understand that money + politics = fuckover, every single time.

Seriously, why does anyone think any of these dickheads would spend MILLIONS (arguably, millions that aren't theirs) on a job that only pays about $500k a year? These guys get that much for playing with themselves for ten minutes.

It's all about control. That's why I just can't fathom even bothering to vote.

I think Einstein's definition of stupidity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, sums it up nicely.

I don't know about the organization, but a place to put a collection of sticky topics sounds like a good idea. I'm still relatively new to the board but I've seen them put to good use elsewhere. The topics would have to be about as correct and well researched as humanly possible, because a lot of people would likely take them as gospel.

Oh, nice! I'm on it.

Thanks for the book recs. I just looked them up, and they sound like amazing reads. Good forums for civil discussion of controversial topics do seem few and far between, don't they?

Aye, that they do, lass.

Thank you for the link. I'll check all of that out. Wow, that is a big change, going from big city life to heading out into the wilds. Will you post some pics of your hand made bows? I'd love to see them. Or if you don't have a digital camera and or scanner, just describe them a little. What materials are you using? Are you going for a recurve or compound design? Do you have any finished yet?

We can encourage each other. I have a feeling I'll be hitting a lot of stationary targets while building up form and muscle again after all these years, plus scoping the land around here for the game trails and getting reacquainted with tracking techniques. I was lucky as a kid that my Dad took me camping and fishing a lot. He taught me basic tracking. I frequently managed to get close to deer and turkeys, but I was also a lot smaller and a lot more lithe then. He was also a deer, duck, dove, and quail hunter. I had no interest in that then. I could kick myself for it now, because he's too mobility challenged for us ever to be able to do that together.

Thanks for the advice on dressing and cooling down the big guys. I've heard hog in particular can go bad really fast. I might feel a little silly posting pics of me with a downed squirrel or rabbit, but then again, small game is a big challenge with a bow. Anything I can take down I'm probably going to be proud of!

Haha, yeah - I'll be proud of just about anything I take with a bow I made myself! If you get into the bow discussions on paleoplanet you'll see that there is a LOT more to wooden bows than just the run-of-the-mill recurve. Some of the biggest names in the traditional archery community are on there, including all of the authors of the Traditional Bowyer's Bible (TBB) series. Generally, "compound" is a bad word there. As for me, no one can make a compound by hand, so it's pointless for me to even try. You'll want to take a look into your hunting regulations to see what weights are legal.. here in Minnesota 30lbs is legal for big game, in NC and FL, it's 40 minimum. Those weights should be fairly easy to pull for anyone healthy enough to consider hunting their own meat. That's not really a discussion for this forum though, so I'll be posting my bows (and MAYBE kills) over at paleoplanet instead. I'm GC there, too. I lurk more than I post (just like here). I don't have any finished yet but there are two in the works, and will be more when I can get out to cut a few saplings.

As for being on topic, I think that this is probably the best thing we can do. In the wild the animals have no choice but to eat their natural diet at least 90% of the time. You'll get ALL of the organs rather than having to ask for them special or order them from some faraway farm. They're exactly 0% processed. That should make what little fat they have incredibly healthy. You'll have to watch that-- the natives almost universally considered fat as valuable as we euro-descended considered gold for a reason. Wild critters don't generally carry all that much of it. Read Lex's journal to see how important it really is! In some states it's legal to planet forage for them on your own property, too, so you can sometimes even keep track of what they're eating and therefore keep them as healthy as possible.

Another thing to consider is storage. If you intend to go raw you might want to get crazy with the jerky dryers. A lot of people on this forum believe that frozen is not as good as fresh, which I rather agree with. However, you can't eat a whole deer by yourself, raw or not, before it spoils! I know that when I manage to finally go this route I'll be drying a LOT.

I've had squirrel - greasy, but not tough, and their hides can make ok bow strings!

That isn't the documentary, is it? Two guys talking?

Sounds like heaven. I grew up by the ocean so I miss the ocean like you miss the forest Lex.

And the meadows and the clean streams and the rocks....

When I was a wee tyke, my mom would take me and my brother to the Detroit Zoo. I had no idea what the zoo was, all I know was that I was goin' to "go see the nakes." My mom still tells people this. I'm 38 now.

While in my 20's I raised a female burmese python. She was awesome. She only struck once and it was because I stupidly stuck my arm back in the cage on feeding day after feeding her with a hand that still smelled like rabbit. My bad. I had about 600 needle-sized puncture wounds on my arm before she realized I didn't taste like rabbit. God I loved that snake.

I'll be 20 mins north of St. Paul by the end of this week.

I had 6 removed (yes, 4 on top). I am the only person I know who had 13 teeth removed and still had a full set. My jaws were just not wide enough to carry them all. Nowadays I know that the reason for this is the SAD diet while I was a child and for the time while mom was preg with me. But I digress.

Getting them removed has to be on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps our children won't need to have them done because of what we eat (I'm new but working my way to raw.. I got my wife to accept that we both are primarily carnivorous, but baby steps), but our parents believed in the 4 food groups and still trusted the FDA and here we are, asking this question.

Do it if they have to go. But I would not do it if they didn't. Mine had to.