This entry from one of the blogs we follow here is well worth reading:

Foothill Agrarian: The Emblem on the Wall: On the wall of the FFA classroom at Placer High School hangs an FFA emblem, made entirely of vegetable seeds. It’s a remarkable piece of w...

I just started following this blog, but in reading it, while there are certainly some differences between my experience and his, and my world and his, there are a remarkable number of similarities and many of the sentiments expressed on it find reflection in various posts here.

And here's one.

I've split the rural/town divide my entire life. I'm a rural person, but I've always had a town address. Had it been possible to simply become a rancher in the early 1980s, when I graduated from high school, I would have done that, no matter what it meant. I.e., while a friend of mine claims that I'm so intellectual I could only have found a career as a lawyer or a priest, in his German view, that's not really so. I would happily have spent my days around cattle, horses, cats and dogs if I could have. Being born in 1963 meant that wasn't possible, just as it would have been impossible had I been born in 53, 43, or probably even 33. Realistically, it's probably only my grandparents who last lived in a world where that was a realistic option, i.e., to go from a city street to full-time employment in agriculture. I've made it part way there however, and indeed but for the more realistic economic concerns of my spouse, maybe I would be full time there.

Anyhow, my father was the first member of his family to go to university, let alone obtain an advance degree. Of his three siblings, two more attended university, but I think he's the only one that obtained a degree. An uncle ended up in the Army before he completed his studies and then had a long career as a fireman, a job he loved. One sister was married fairly early after high school and another did attend university, but I don't think she graduated, although I don't know.

They were all highly intelligent. Indeed, their father, who left school at age 13, helped them with their calculus homework when they were in high school. I didn't take calculus until I was in university and I found it extremely difficult. I can't imagine how smart you have to be to pick it up on your own.

My mother was not a high school graduate, or the Quebec equivalent of it, but she did obtain an associates degree in the 1970s. Her schooling was cut short by the Great Depression. Both of her parents, however, were university graduates, with that status being very unusual for a woman such as her mother at the time.

The point, well I'm not sure if there is one other than to note that all of these people were really sharp. On my father's side, they were very sharp people associated with the cattle and sheep industry, which my father was to until that was cut short by my grandfather's death.

I guess that's all background to something noted in the linked in article.

When I was growing up, the rural/town divide was there, but the lines were very blurred compared to what they now are. Many of us kinds in town were quite feral, so to speak. I.e, being a town kid meant, if you were male, that you were probably at least somewhat of a hunter and/or fisherman. But things worked the other way around too. Of my father's friends, quite a few of the men were ranchers or had come from ranches and farms before they went into professional jobs in town. A doctor or lawyer was as likely to have grown up on a farm or ranch than in a city, and to retain rural interests.

Ranchers in my region have always been pretty conservative. They haven't always been 100% Republican. Part of that has to do with the way that the parties have evolved, but as an example, a ranching member of my wife's family was such a Democrat that he always voted a straight Democratic ticket, no matter what. The point is that as late as the 80s, at least, a diversity of views existed beyond the city limits. For that matter, a diversity of views existed within the city limits.

Political party diversity has all but died in my state, starting for some reason with the Clinton Administration. Up until that time the Democratic Party here was a minority party, but a strong one. At one point in the 70s our Senator and Congressman were Democrats. We had an entire string of Democratic Governors, having had one up until fairly recently. Something started to fall apart during the Clinton Administration, however.

Anyhow, conservatism has always been strong in the rural areas outside of town. And its expressed itself a couple of times in huge divides between agriculturalist and everyone else, including other people, that resulted in near political uprisings by the regular folks. All of these have involved efforts by ranchers and farmers to take over, in some fashion, the public lands or wildlife. This is massively unpopular with average Wyomingites and it's been put down, as noted, a couple of times, but that hasn't stopped our Congressman from supporting it or Sen. Barrasso from getting it inserted into the 2016 GOP Platform.

What's become really remarkable, however, is the absolute elimination of diversity of views in the countryside.

Now, in fairness, diversity of views has been much reduced inside of town as well. It's still there, but it's much more likely to show up in the break room or in closed door office conversations than openly. It does occur, however. Indeed, one of the things I've noted about Rep. Harshman's recent off color remarks about Rep. Gray is how many people, if they know you, will now say "he said what we were all thinking". I'm really pretty surprised by it.

We vaccinate cattle.

Eh?

Now, that's not a sudden non sequitur.

I note that as the resistance towards COVID 19 vaccination was an epic level out in the prairie. Not so much anymore, but it took some people dying in order to change that. And even now, at a recent gathering, I was hesitant to mention that yes, I'm vaccinated.

Now, in town there are people who will subject you to a blistering lecture about being vaccinated. But they're a minority. Most of the people who are avoiding vaccination on a whatever basis will at least cite individual rights as part of their view and that people shouldn't be required to get vaccinated on that basis. That's an entirely separate topic, but in some rural quarters the opposition to vaccination was really so strong that you just avoided the topic if you could.

As noted, that changed when people started getting really sick and some died. A lot of the hold outs started getting vaccinated at that time. It baffles me a bit, however, as we vaccinate our cattle and horses, and nobody seems to think it inconsistent to vaccinate them, and not ourselves.

But then there's politics.

Ever since the election of President Obama there's been a turn towards polarization in politics that's had a disturbing corrupted aspect to it. And coming up with it there started to be a set of beliefs that oddly you had to subscribe to. Indeed, the one real sharp distinction, I think, at this point between conservationist who are sportsmen, and agriculturalist, is that conservationist have adopted the mantra that "you are entitled to your own beliefs, but nobody is entitled to their own facts".

Like it or not, you really aren't entitled to your own beliefs. That's an American bromide, but it's completely false. The truth, and much truth can be objectively determined, dictates what you are entitled to believe. This is true of the physical and the metaphysical, and therefore it not only dictates what you have to believe about physics and science, but religion and philosophy.

Now, as Shakespeare noted, human knowledge is quite limited, and can be much in error, which provided the basis for the quote from Hamlet that:

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

In that quote, it should be noted, the bard was referencing "philosophy" as science, the two being a combined discipline at the time. And what it also doesn't mean is the left wing position that somehow science and religion are diametrically opposed to one another. They are not. Indeed, I'm a Mass attending, Confession going, Catholic, and I have a degree in the hard sciences and there's no conflict at all, something that every Catholic agreed upon until very recently.

So what's my point?

Somehow, in the last twenty years or so, people went from being in camps to nearly being in cults, politically. That is usually the end stage for a democracy. When members of the opposite party become the enemy, in your mind, you become the enemy of democracy yourself. And we're darned near there.

There are now those in the local GOP, and more than a few, who are at the point where the only thing they can see is whether or not you agree with Trump populism or not. Whenever a Republican legislature shows an inclination to ponder or debate, if he's not right in line with Trump populism, he's criticized simply on that basis alone on a basis that shows no inclination to thought. To depart from the line is to question, apparently, something held to be dogma. One Republican figure at the time of the last election seriously backed a proposal to boot Republicans who didn't unyieldingly adhere to the official platform out of the party. The leadership of the party more or less officially takes the position that the January 6 insurrection didn't happen and is pretty close to maintaining that the election was stolen, which is simply untrue.

That's not the point of this post. But this is. Nobody, in any occupation, should take their beliefs from a political party unthinkingly. But people out in the sticks should do that least of all. The political parties didn't come up with their platforms at a branding or at a lunch break during the harvest.

What everyone should do is to have reality inform their political beliefs. You can believe what you want to, in other words, as long as it isn't contrary to nature, science and reality.

And, we might add, as long as it isn't contrary to the true principals of your Faith. Faith is supposed to inform your world view. Your politics doesn't inform your faith.

But, for a lot of people, it seems like it does.

Anyhow, some points to ponder.

For those out in the sticks, there's a lot more of them, than us. When people tell us that the election was stolen, we ought to consider that we're a tiny minority and that what natural and obvious in our political views probably doesn't seem that way at all to most people. The amazing thing isn't that so many liberal politicians are elected the US. . . the amazing thing is that any conservative ones are.

In other words, you might not have wanted Biden to be elected, but the fact of the matter is that Trump only was President in the first place because of the Electoral College. He lost the popular vote twice. Most Americans don't want him as President. The surprising thing was that he ever was, not that he lost, and he did lose, in 2020.

Most politicians aren't ranchers or farmers and there's a lot of money in politics and it didn't come from us. People don't invest money in something and not expect to get a return. Being a member of a conservative political party, therefore, is one thing, but buying off on everything it says about everything else, including science and industry, is something a person shouldn't do without really thinking it over.

Neither political party is the Agricultural Party, or the Rural Party, or the Agrarian Party, and frankly they don't really have that much interest in the topic at the national level.

Just because agriculture is an industry doesn't mean that what's good for other industries is good for it. Far from it.

Science is science and you can't ignore science as you don't like what it means for you personally. You don't get, for example, to smoke cancer free because you like smoking.

Agriculture has much more in common with conservationist movements than any other movement out in the wider American landscape. The two should be allied, not at each others throats.

We should be adaptable, and there are a lot of things we may have to be adapting too. Ironically, unless you are Amish or eccentric, almost everything you are doing today features some sort of adaption that your grandparents or even parents made in the first place.

Moving forward sometimes means moving back.

Lex Anteinternet: Some feral threads in the fabric.

Lex Anteinternet: Some feral threads in the fabric.:

Some feral threads in the fabric.

I'm not going to take this too far, and you definitely could, but a couple of odds and ends I've run across recently.

One is this Agrarian blog I recently located:

Foothill Agrarian

There are only handful of really worthwhile agrarian blogs around. That's at least better than the situation with the distributist situation, where there's nothing worthwhile whatsoever. Of the handful that are out there, the two best ones are linked in here. A third one that is also worthwhile (which is a successor to two prior blogs, just as this blog also is), is also linked in, but it's not quite as good. I'll do a thread on them some other time, or on all of these together. A fourth one would get a link for its actual agrarian posts, but it descends into "Southern Agrarianism" of the Lost Cause variety, and we're not going there. Nope, no way.

Anyhow, I thought that this entry by an agrarian California sheep rancher, who is an adult entrant into hunting, really interesting. He's also a self professed agrarian.

Persistence

We've posted a lot about hunting here, from the prospective of the nearly feral agrarian who has been a hunter his entire life. It's interesting to see some similar views come about from the thoughtful agrarian adult who came to it late.

I haven't made it all the way through the back entries on Foothill Agrarian. Not by a long shot, but I was also struck by this entry:

Coming to Terms with Being Part-Time

This is a little like reading my own thoughts. Indeed, this guy is just about the same age as me (I'm a little older), and he's a rancher, not a "homesteader", which anymore conveys something else, and frankly something less serious, or perhaps less realistic. I'll be looking forward to perusing his prior entries.

I'm glad I found his blog.

Here's the other thing that caught my eye.

Helsinki says no meat will be served, single-use cutlery used at its events

This quite frankly is a deceptive headline, but that's how it generally reads, even in English language editions of Finnish newspapers. What it really means is that the City of Helsinki will be changing what it serves at official state and municipal functions, and venues it owns, and it actually still will be serving meat.

What it will serve is local fish and also local game. We don't see wild game as a restaurant item much in the US, and indeed its subject to very strict statutory provisions everywhere. Why peole make the distinction between fish and "meat" baffles me, but they have here.

This is being done, maybe, by Helsinki (its drawing a lot of criticism) to reduce, it claims, its carbon footprint. There's a certain "m'eh" quality to this as frankly the concept that bovines are farting the plant into a climate crisis is not really well thought out. Humans are omnivores and meat is part of our diet, including meat that is raised by farmers and ranchers.

Having said that, I've long been an advocate for getting your own meat directly, and therefore I'm somewhat applauding Helsinki here, probably surprisingly to those who might know me. They're emphasizing local fish, which is something that people of that city probably mostly subsisted on until the mid 20th Century. And hunting wild game has always been a big part of Finnish culture, and still is.

Now, I'm not advocating for what Helsinki did, and I suspect that the Woke city counsel of the city, or whatever its administering body is, won't have this in place long. I'm a stockman and I'm hugely skeptical of the cow fart accusations on the climate. Depending upon how cattle are fed, this is not the problem its made out to be, and so to the extent its a problem, and there's always been ungulates around all over, it can be addressed. But I find it really surprising that in 2021 I'll occasionally find even ranchers and farmers who don't hunt.

People should get their meat locally if they can, and included in that, is getting it directly from the field. Its healthy, and honest, and connects you with reality in a way that going to the stocked shelves at Sam's Club doesn't.

Lex Anteinternet: Momento mori.

Lex Anteinternet: Momento mori.:

Momento mori.

I can't recall exactly when it was, but it was some point while I was in university. As I don't remember it being right when I first went down to UW, I suspect it was when I went to law school, which I would have started in the fall of 1987. I was supposed to start in the fall of 1986, but I had reservations about it, so I held off for a year, and my mother was also deathly ill as well, so I had reason to return home.

I'll leave that story for some other time, but what I recall is that I went back down to UW and at the start of law school I was under the impression that it was going to be really hard. Truth be known, law school, and I suspect any law school, is an incredibly easy course of study. Indeed, one of the first deflating things about becoming a lawyer, at least for me, was to realize how easy law school was. ^[1] I'd just gone through an undergraduate course of study in geology, and that was very hard. Law school involved readsing cases and knowing what they held. Any idiot can do that.

Anyhow, the first year I didn't come home much to my old hunting haunts as I thought the finals as the end of the semester were going to be really hard and I couldn't afford the time off. M'eh, they were not. That did establish a course of conduct, however, in that throughout law school I didn't come home for Thanksgiving. It was right before finals and I always used it to study for finals. I didn't go home for Spring Break either.

Somewhere in there, I came home and found to my surprise that my father hadn't gotten his antelope. He had gone out after I had come home and got mine, but he didn't get one that time and didn't get one at all. It was a shock. Even my mother, who was quite ill, remarked on it, and she'd gone out with him, whihc was also very surprising.

More surprising is that he hadn't hunted waterfowl at all.

It concerned me as it didn't seem like him.

When I returned from law school, he was much his old self, but slowed down. He still fished regularly when the streams opened back up. He went with me when I hunted antelope and sometimes deer (he never took weekdays off to do these things ever, but back then I would). He helped, and by that I mean did almost all the work, butcher a moose and an elk I shot back then. But he also was getting a little absent minded, enough that I noticed.

The year he turned 62 he was too sick to go antelope hunting with me and my good friend Tom. I knew he must be really sick, as he'd never cancelled on anything like that ever. He died the following April, never recovering from what started off like a cold.

This has been on my mind.

It's not on my mind as I'm missing hunting season. I'm not. But it has occured to me that I've become so busy in recent years that I'm now like my father. I don't take weekdays off to go, unlike when I what I did when I was younger. At some point my father went from a schedule that was six days a week, with half a day off on Wednesday and half a day off on Saturday, to all of Saturday off, and retaining the half day off on Wednesday, but he still started work incredibly early. For my part, over the years I've reached the point where I work six days a week nearly every week and sometimes seven days a week.

The past year, or indeed ever since the onset of COVID, I've been really busy. Things may have slowed down for oether people, but they sure didn't for me. So I've had my whithers to the yoke the entire time. So I'm a bit tired right now.

Which is what my wife tells me is going on here.

Well, during the really busy run up to a trial I started waking up early, as in 4:00 a.m. Recently that retreated back to 3:00 a.m, then a couple of times after that, it started crowing 2:00 a.m. At that point you have to do something and so I'm not back to sleeping into 5:00 a.m., thank goodness. But I'm just back to that.

Deer season has been wrapping up.

I didn't make the weekend before last out, as I had to work one of the days (I ended up working on Sunday) and we shipped cattle on Saturday.

No problems there, up at 3:00 a.m., worked all day, came home, ate out, and then up for Mass the following morning. And off to work after that.

That meant that I didn't go out for deer that weekend, but I met my son in a new area that we tried the following weekend. And that went fine. Up at 3:00, drove to Medicine Bow, met him there and hunted all day, without luck.

That takes me to this past weekend.

It was a frustrating week for a lot of reasons, some of which I'll not go into detail with but which make me feel a lot like John Daly, the saddle maker, in the 1920s. Anyhow, I had to work again on Saturday, which I did until a little after 2:00 p.m. About that time I knocked off and stopped by Our Lady of Fatima for confession. That took a little longer than I'd anticipated as the pastor was ill and a substitute priest came from downtown, but he was a bit late. I stopped at the sporting goods store after that, thinking about getting a replacement 15 watt gmrs radio for the Jeep to replace one I'd recently bought which was defective. I went home after that, getting home a little after 3:30.

I'd thought about going to Mass that night, and asked Long Suffering Spouse about going, but in the end we went to the across town sporting goods store instead. I was just pretty fatigued by that point for some reason, with the suspect being that I"d bee up since about 2:00 a.m. I'd have been better if I went that night, as that would have given me all the next day to go deer hunting, but I was simply worn out. I ddin't even get ready to go the following day.

The next morning I slept in to about 4:00 a.m., much later than I'd bee doing, and felt pretty good. While I was tempted to skip breakfast (I think eatinng three meals a day has contributed to my earlier rising for reasons I'll skip going into), I intead made two breakfast sandwiches with eggs, Canadian bacon and cheese, which is a gigantic breakfast for me. I don't really know what I was thinking, quite frankly.

I continued to feel fine until about halfway through Mass.

About that time, I was hit by a wave of fatigue that's difficult to describe. I attributed it to eating a big breakfast, but about the same time I began to feel odd. By the time I left Mass I was definitely feeling odd. At home, I briefly considered staying home for the day or switching to nearby duck hunting, but that was conceding I didn't want to, so I loaded up and got ready to go. By that time, I didn't just feel sleepy, I had a toothache where my one remaining wisdom tooth is located.

Now that might require a little explanation.

I was born with wisdom teeth, having a full set of four. When I was a teenager they started to "erupt", and my father pulled out the top two when it was convenient to do so. We always think of oral surgeons doing that work, but he did it for me as a result dentist. And both of them were removed without pain or inconvenience. I amazed at the time when people complained about how painful this process was, as it wasn't for me.

But he didn't get to the bottom two before he died. For the most part this hasn't been much of a problem. They'd erupt from time to time, but generally that would pass with there being only a little pain while they were erupting.

Once I was in my fifties, however, I began to break molars. And I broke one that was near my back left wisdom tooth. When that one was pulled by the oral surgeon (it was cracked right to the base in three pieces), the wisdom tooth in that area was removed as well.

That left just one.

This wasn't a problem until just the other day. I cracked the molar over there, and it was crowned, just like its opposite on the other side, leaving one molar between it and the wisdom tooth. The crown came in just last week.

All of a sudden, on Sunday morning, the wisdom tooth made its presence very much known.

It started hurting, and that went from annoying to really noticeable. I ignored it however, hoping it would go away. I packed up, and drove off. By the time I left the gas station, I had an incredibly dry mouth, and it was really hurting. This grew worse and worse as I drove out to where I wanted to hunt. I finally reached a place I wanted to check my maps and stopped.

By that time I was incredibly sleepy and in a huge amount of pain. I got out a canteen of water I had with me, checking its appearance (I filled it up about two weeks ago), and took a drink. The drink tasted good and I sat in the truck for a while contemplating the maps. By now it was foggy and wet and had snowed, I was tracking mud, and we still had a very long ways to go.

Normally I would have done that without hesitation.

Well, I hesitated. I felt so sick, I turned around to head back in.

Driving back in quickly became dicey. I was driving much slower than normal just due to the fatigue and the pain. To add to it, my tongue started to swell up on one side, the side that the wisdom tooth was on. I began to worry a little, but just a little, that I wouldn't be able to make it all the way back in, but then I was calmed by the double realities of being in far too much pain to accidentally fall asleep and that I had no other choice. No other choice really focuses a person.

I hit the highway finally, by which time I took the truck out of four-wheel drive as it seemed like the weather had improved. I started coming on in the hour-long highway speed final leg of the trip, still keeping my speed down. I was doing highway speed, but not high speed, which was in part because of the road still being wet. As I crossed the road where the bridge over the Power River is, I realized it was more than wet.

As I approached the accident scene, I knew what had happened. The Dodge truck, just like mine, had slip on black ice, its sudden disaster created in part because it was towing a trailer. It had happened on the bridge. It' had made it over the bridge, by which time the disaster was on. It had gone off the road and the trailer had rolled. One of the truck's windows was out.

I was headed towards the bridge myself of course and I knew that it had black ice, and I was in two-wheel drive. I'll go into four-wheel drive at the drop of a hat, but there was no time to do it now. Normally this would be pretty tense for me, but it wasn't. Just hurt too much. Up the hill I drove through what I knew to be a fatal accident site in bad weather from just a couple of years ago. I stopped in Powder River and went into four-wheel drive.

By the time I got home, I didn't feel so bad, but I didn't feel great. My wife recommended I take some Tylenol, but the tongue swelling had gone way down. About 4:00 I drank a glass of Irish whiskey, very slowly. I had a second over dinner, very slowly, and started to feel a lot better. I stayed up as long as I could, but when it was obvious that no Trick or Treaters were going to common in the 20F weather, I went and took a shower and hung on for bed.

On Monday I mostly felt a lot better. The mouth pain still comes and goes. I probably ought to call the dentist. I recall my father telling me that oral infections have the risk of being fatal, simply due to their location. The plan was, after all, to take that tooth out.

So, what of this experience, and those leading up to it? When I was a kid in the 70s I recall watching in math class in junior high, for some inexplicable reason, a Disney cartoon that was filmed in the 40s, probably for industrial workers, reminding them to stay home if they were sick. The film took the position that a cold was nature's way of making you take a day off.

Maybe.

Or maybe it's an opportunist predators chance to take something out, as it's worn down. Slow moving member of the herd so to speak. Or, more accurately, somebody who have worn themselves down through long hours and stress has a bit of a weakened immune system, maybe.

Still, maybe that means take some time off. That's hard to do, however, with things rolling on by. Or at least so I imagine. Perhaps it's often we imagine things that way. Not like a month or anything, but a day or two.

World War Two Office of Defense Transporation poster. Vacationing at home was no doubt easier prior to the cell phone and all of its electronic intrusions.

So perhaps none of this is as ominous as a person might suspect. At 58, I'm in a lot better shape than many, probably most, my age. But other than trying not to pack on too much weight (something I've always tried not to do, but I've always had to be careful about it), and being the beneficiary of my father's strong genes and my mother's athletic ones, I haven't been as active in any fashion as I used to be. I don't have a regular exercise routine like I once did, which was based simply on the 1980s Army Physical Fitness Test and walking or riding my bicycle to work. ^[2] And that's not really good. For some time, I've thought I should get back at it, but that's difficult when there are reasons you need your car at work and that you don't feel like doing much when you get home.

Still, as noted in a prior entry, the scene from No Country For Old Men put in above makes more and more sense to me as time goes by, and like Servant of God Black Elk, I agree "“Death? There is no death, only a change of worlds.". That's pretty evident.

And I'll be back out there next weekend. Probably for waterfowl. Deer has closed.

Footnotes.

1. There are a whole series of things like this.

Being a lawyer is really hard work, but you soon find as a lawyer that the field isn't populated by super genious of a Wil E Coyote level. There are huge intellects in the law to be sure, but you also encounter some folks whom you know aren't Albert Einstein or Richard Oppenheimer.

One of the big deflating things is the poor quality of oral argument, I'd note. I've been to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals twice, and when you do that, you sit there waiting for your turn, listening to the prior arguments. As a rule, they aren't great. Indeed, all in all the arguments I've heard at the Wyoming Supreme Court have been much better.

2. I'm not a "gym" guy and simply couldn't bring myself to do that, even though some of the gyms around here have swimming pools.

My mother was a fanatic swimmer and bicyclist which probably helps explain her remarkably physical condition after she recovered from her long illness. She basically went from somebody on death's door to somebody in their high 70s who was incredibly fit. Indeed, her really fit condition helped stave off, in my view, her ultimate mental decline, and when she suddenly quit her physical activities, I knew that something was very badly wrong.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday October 7, 1921. 4H Clubs and Baseball Clubs.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday October 7, 1921. 4H Clubs and Baseball Clubs.:

Friday October 7, 1921. 4H Clubs and Baseball Clubs.

A Third year high school girl in the chemical laboratory, - Greenbank Consolidated School, Oct. 7, 1921. Location: Pocahontas County, West Virginia

A photographer spent a second day documenting the lives of teenagers and the condition of schools in West Virginia. In doing so, he took this photo of a "third year" (either a junior or a senior) girl in the chemical laboratory.

The photos speak volumes. She's of our age, but not Very plainly dressed and very adult looking.

On this day in 1921, The New York Giants beat the Yankees 13 to 5 in Game 3 of the 1921 World Series.

China responded to a demand from Japan for certain rights in Shantung province with a complete rejection. The demands were based on the Treaty of Versailles transferring German possessions to Japan following World War One, which included port cities in the province. The Chinese were not willing to go along with the treaty on these points, and ultimately their position prevailed.

Austria and Hungary submitted a territorial dispute between them to the League of Nations, with Italy to act as the mediator.

The same photographer that toured schools in West Virginia took the photos of members of a 4H Club.

Betsey Price, - First year High School at her club sewing. 4 H Club work - Marlinton, W. Va. She would have been in 9th or 10th Grade, but again looked quite mature in this photo.

Forest Kellison, 4 H Club Member raising a sheep. Examining the quality of the fleece under direction of Harold Willey, Farm Bureau Agent. Location: Pocahontas County, West Virginia

Forest Kellison, 4 H Club member, treating his sheep for internal parasites.

Susie Kellison, raising chickens. Examining the wing and looking for smut. The club in this county had 250 members at the time. Location: Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

Harry Harper, with his registered calf. Location: Pocahontas County--Hillsboro, West Virginia.

Earl Kidd, with his registered calf. Hillsboro, Pocahontas Co. W. Va. Location: Pocahontas County--Hillsboro, West Virginia

The photographer also documented conditions at schools, some of which were quite advanced, and some not so much. This was a one-room schoolhouse, and the photographer disapproved of the location of the privies.

And he photographed farms as well.

Gen. W. D. Connor, who was a significant figure in the Department of the Army at the time, sat for a portrait.

Brig. Gen. W.D. Connor.

A group of South Dakotans visited the President.

Lex Anteinternet: The Killetarian Cookbook. Cooking Wild Game.

Lex Anteinternet: The Killetarian Cookbook. Cooking Wild Game.:

The Killetarian Cookbook. Cooking Wild Game.

I'm sure that nobody would mistake me for a five-star chef, but I’m not helpless in the kitchen either.

One of the things that anyone who reads this blog (which, of course, are darned few people) will already know is that I'm pretty feral, for lack of a better way to put it. An Agrarian and a Distributist at heart, I'd prefer a more agrarian world in every way, including getting as much as your table fare from the fields and streams where you live. I'm a lifelong hunter, but not a head hunter. That's the way hunting where I live when I was a kid. You hunted to put food on the table. I'm not saying that you can't and shouldn't put a trophy on the wall, or go for a big example of what you are after, but hunting is primarily for that.

Not only that, but it's the most honest and ethical way to put mean on the table. I'll truck no arguments from vegetarians and vegans, and others who would maintain a deeply anti nature view of the world. Hunters and Fish Hunters (fishermen) are the population that's most connected to nature, and part of the body of people who try to keep the plant livable for us all. Meat hunters and fishermen most of all.

Wild game, moreover, is the meat source that's closest to what we're evolved to eat.

If I could have my way, the vegetables we'd eat here would come from our own garden, and the meat from the fields. That is in fact partially true now, although I haven't put in a garden for several years as my well is down and, like a lot of things in my old age, I haven't gotten around to having it fixed.

Well, having spouted off. I'll be putting in some recipes here, an endeavor that was inspired by something recent that I'll keep off-line.

I'll note here in addition that there are some links below. I think these links are useful, which doesn't mean I've tried everything listed there. I'm not, as noted, a trained chef. The links are to sites by people who have a lot more food knowledge than I do.

My bonafides

Okay, so what, if anything, qualifies me to say anything about the topic of cooking wild game?

Well, quite a bit, really.

For one thing, I grew up eating wild fish and fowl, as well as wild leporids (i.e, rabbits).

My father was an avid outdoorsman. Unlike me, he inclined more towards fishing than hunting, but when fall came he switched from fishing to bird hunting. He started fishing in the spring as soon as you could, and then fished all summer, and into the fall He continued fishing basically until the snow flew, even after he started bird hunting. He didn't ice fish much, however, so he took the cold winter months off from fishing.

He started hunting birds when sage chicken season opened in the fall and soon started hunting ducks and geese after that, with an occasional mix of other birds as well. When I was old enough to hunt and fish, which in the case of hunting was five years of age, I started that. When I was just about that age, I started hunting rabbits as well.

My father had hunted big game when he was single, but some time after he married, he stopped for a while due to the pressures of work and having a small family. Also, in those days, hunting big game was more of an expedition than it is now, in spite of what people might think. When I was about 10 or 12 or so, however, he started again, probably as he had more time and I wanted to. At that time, you couldn't hunt big game until you were 14, so I had a couple of years of observational experience before I started hunting big game too.

When my father started hunting big game again, it was antelope. I don't recall him getting a big game license during my lifetime for anything else. But I did. I started hunting deer the same year I started hunting antelope, and added elk hunting as soon as I had the automotive freedom to do that. By the time I was a late teen, I was fishing in the spring, but switched to hunting as soon as the season was on, and hunted until the last of the seasons. I wasn't an ice fisherman at that point either.

Now, we were a family of three. And what this should tell you is that we were eating a lot of wild game. When I was born Catholics still had meatless Fridays every week of the year, and therefore we normally had trout for Friday dinner. We continued on with this even after it was no longer required, as we had lots of fish. My father froze fish so we continued to have them long after it grew too cold to continue fishing. And as this should also indicate, we ate a lot of waterfowl during the season as well as some other game birds. Once my father started big game hunting, and then I did, we had antelope and deer as well. As both my father and I took antelope, and I usually got additional tags, we had quite a bit of antelope.

So I grew up in a household were wild game was a staple.

That doesn't mean, of course, well-prepared wild game. My mother was an awful cook and that applied universally to everything. But my father was a really good cook and when she could no longer cook, my father took over. By observation, I started to learn how to cook wild game then.

To add to this, from 1983, when I graduated from community college, until 1995, when I got married, I lived pretty much exclusively on wild game. That's a period of 12 years, of course, which is a significant period. I didn't normally buy meat at the grocery store when I was a college student unless I flat out ran out of wild game, which would occur. And when I was first practicing law and living at home, I was bringing home a lot of wild game. When my father died, and it was my mother and me for a time, I did the cooking normally, and wild game it was.

Cook a lot of wild game, and you'll learn how to cook it.

An additional bonafide

My grandfather owned a packing house and my father had worked in it. He knew how to butcher meat. Watching him do it, I learned how to do it, although I was never anywhere as good at it as he was.

I don't like taking my game meat to a meat processor and for years I absolutely wouldn't. I butchered things myself. The pressures of work and life, and the fact that my wife didn't like me spending an entire day butchering, meant that I eventually relented, and I do now, and have for a number of years. I'd still rather not, but I have made that compromise.

I've butchered or helped butcher everything from rabbits up to cattle.

A note on wild meat and how not to ruin it.

Eat wild mean and sooner or later you'll hear somebody say they don't like it, as "it's gamey".

Taste is an individual thing. I heard one Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan go long on praise on Afghan goat, for instance, which not everyone would, I'm sure. Some of that observation, "it's gamey", really means that the person who is speaking has only eaten grain fed American beef or pork. Grass fed beef, which is the kind we normally have here, tastes considerably different from the beef you buy at the grocery store or get at a steakhouse. Indeed, this is so much the case that if you get used to grass fed beef and then have the latter, it's a shock and not necessarily a pleasant one.

In fact Plains Indians complained, soon after they were bound to reservations, that allotment beef they were give was "sweet" and they didn't like it. Used to leaner bison, it tasted odd. And I can vouch for something similar. After over a decade of normally only eating wild game, getting used to store bought beef again was a bit difficult. I like beef, but to go from lean antelope and deer to fed beef was strange and I found I had a preference for the wild game.

People, I note, make similar complaints about lamb, once an American staple, and all sorts of people claim to dislike mutton, even though they mostly have never eaten either. I love lamb and I like mutton as well.

Which gets me next to this. Some people think they don't like wild game as the meat has been ruined by how it was treated.

You can ruin any meant, and the easiest way to do that is to not remove the heat from it.

The other day I was at the meat processor to drop off an antelope. I was stunned when I got there as the antelope I was dropping off was the only one that had been skinned. I can think of no surer way to make antelope gamey than to not skin it in the field. I can't imagine why people do not do this.

Learning to skin an animal is not hard, and its vital to do it.

When I shoot a big game animal, the very first thing I do is to bleed it by cutting its throat. This involves, I'd note, an element of safety as a person should never ever draw a knife towards himself. If you don't know how to do this, have somebody show you, least you slice yourself open accidentally. People die in the field cutting themselves with hunting knives. If its sharp enough to cut game, it's sharp enough to kill you. Anyhow, you shouldn't be running a knife towards yourself. I'm not going to explain how to do this as, if you don't know, you should have somebody show you so you don't slice yourself open. Bleeding doesn't take long, however, and it removes a lot of heat, right away.

After that, you need dto field dress it. I'm not going to explain how to do that either, but don't ever draw a knife towards yourself or put yourself in a position where you can get cut. Then you need to skin the animal.

The only reason not to skin an animal immediately is that you need to drag it to where you are loading it. Okay, that's a reason. But skin it as soon as you can.

On this, years ago I shot a moose in weather that was right at about 0F. We field dressed it and skinned it and loaded it in my 1/2 ton pickup truck. In spite of that, I still lost a little of it to spoilage.

I'm convinced that at least half of the claims that meat is gamey is due to the meat being absued. The rest has to do with odd occurances, unfamilairity, and bad cooking.

What I'm noting, by the way, applies to smaller game as well. When you shoot rabbits or birds, you really need to field dress them in the field. Rabbits should have their fur removed in the field, both to cool them down, and because they always have fleas. Birds are a little tougher call simply because sometimes you need the plumage to show game wardens what you have. Indeed, that can be true for big game animals in terms of their heads and other evidence of sex. Fish, of course, are easy as you simply remove their guts before you leave the stream.

Big Game

Okay, with all of that, we'll start on big game.

I'm going to really deal with two types of big game here, one being antelope and the other being Cervidae. Cervidae are deer, and that includes all types of conventional deer in the United States, as well as elk, caribou and moose.

This isn't to suggest, I'd note, that every Cervidae tastse the same. Far from it. But they tend to be more similiar than different for the most part. I.e., elk doesn't taste like mule deer, and neither taste like moose, but none of them are close to tasing the same as antelope.

What I'm not dealing with, therefore, are things like buffalo or bear. I'm not, as I have no experience with cooking either. I'm only dealing here with things I know.

Which brings up this. Save for moose, which is a very dark rich meat, every recipe I'll give here works for everything, but you need to keep in mind they are different by degrees. These meets have different characteristics, and a recipe that works really well with one meat, will be so so with another.

Useful Sites:

Hunter Angler Gardner Cook: This site, I'd note, is the most useful, in my opinion. The Author also is sometimes featured in Wyoming Wildlife. He additionally has a podcast, although I haven't listed to much of it.

Wild Harvest Table. This site is sponsored by New York's Cornell University extension and has very good practical recipes. It was originally associated with a (then) young university professor who blogged a lot about hunting in New England, but whose cooperative blog on that topic seems to have gone into the ether, like so many blogs have over the years, but who was clearly, along with his wife who was the main driver of this blog, a fellow killetarian.

Food For Hunters. This blog, like the first one mentioned, has some really good recipes, and it also brings some different prospective to recipes.

A 12 Gauge Girl. Another blog with interesting recipes, from a killetarian prospective, although its very infrequently updated.

Chef In The Wild. Interesting blog, but not updated since December 2020 at the time I'm putting this up.

Cowgirl's Country Life. Not a hunting specific site, but with some hunting recipes. Also, infrequently updated.

The Prairie Homestead. This site has a very active blog and a podcast that has a cult following. I'll be frank that I don't know that this link really belongs here, and I'll also admit that I have some problems with the modern "homestead" movement, while also finding it interesting and sympathizing with it.

Cast Iron

Okay, the item above is cheating, but it's another page here on our site.

The Agrarian's Lament

Lex Anteinternet: Foothill Agrarian: The Emblem on the Wall.