By Dave Hurteau

Brand loyalty makes sense. If you plunk your money down for a bow and both it and its maker serve you well, you have every reason to buy products from that brand again. But in archery we have something more than mere loyalty; we have brand worship and its corollary, brand bashing.

In my experience, the brand most frequently bashed on is Mathews, which is insane of course because they make great bows. But it all comes out in the wash because Mathews seems to be the most worshipped, too. The John McEnroe of bow companies, I guess. I don’t know who is nuttier, though, the Mathews haters, who are so certain of the company’s impiety that they would never lower themselves to actually try one, or the Mathews worshipers, for whom the possibility of another company making a comparable bow causes such physical pain that they can’t even entertain the thought. Both are stark-raving mad.

By Scott Bestul

High whitetail numbers have been blamed for the spread of Lyme disease for years. But according to the latest research, we might be pointing our finger at the wrong critter. According to this story in a recent issue of Scientific American, a sharp decline in red fox populations may have gone a long way to making Lyme disease go viral in the last decade.

The red fox, as most of us know, is an efficient predator of small mammals like the white-footed mouse; known to be one of the prime hosts of the Lyme-carrying “deer” tick. Red fox numbers are in a general decline across the country, thanks largely to ever-growing coyote populations. Coyotes eat foxes whenever the populations overlap, which is frequently. Though both canines dine on mice, foxes take the greatest toll on the little rodents. So when fox numbers dive, mouse populations climb and ticks follow suit.

By Scott Bestul

For those who think antler envy is a recent phenomenon, the Broder family may beg to differ. They’ve been dealing with it -- over a single, magnificent mule deer -- for decades. According to this recent story in the Calgary, Alberta Herald, the Broder’s fight centered on the reigning world record nontypical muley, a buck shot by Ed Broder way back in 1926. The chocolate-horned buck carried a whopping 355” of antler, and has reigned—without serious challenge—atop the B&C books for 85 years.

By Dave Hurteau

Well, I was going to go yapping about why I think both baiting and hunting over kill plots are (or at least can be) examples of fair chase. But the comments generated by the last post move me to parge the discussion’s foundation a bit first. So bear with me. I won’t name names, but a few of you seemed to use the terms legal, ethical, and fair chase interchangeably or nearly so. I’d like to suggest that they are distinct and sometimes pretty divergent. So let’s have a rundown:

Legal
It’s popular these days to say, “Hey, if it’s legal, go for it,” which implicitly embraces anything the law does not expressly forbid. But hold on just one durn minute: What’s legal is not always ethical or fair. It is legal in Texas, as I understand it, for rank amateurs and, I’ll add, nincompoops to shoot pigs from helicopters, maiming fifteen for every one they kill—for fun (see the video below). That’s legal. It is neither ethical nor fair chase.