My new (old) little .177 bullpup.

What I mean is the thermal scope is amazing for finding game (pests/rabbits) in the darkness of night.
It makes it possible to quickly and easily shoot 20 or 30 rabbits in a few hours, in total darkness.
For me that’s culling/pest control, and the thermal scope is an amazing tool for that job.

Hunting, for me, is very different. For me hunting revolves around the principles of “fair chase”, meaning the animal should have every chance and opportunity to use its well developed senses of hearing, sight and smell, it’s ability to be stealthy, to use its natural camouflage etc, to outwit the hunter. The animal deserves the opportunity to be able to escape unhindered if it detects me (no cages or fences), I also don’t hunt from a vehicle or with in 200m of a vehicle. I believe in walk and stalk. Getting close, on foot. Stalking is sadly a dying art these days.

For me, to be a hunter you need to see the animal before it sees you. You need to approach the animal with out being detected (that’s called stalking for the millennials), and get as close as you possibly can before you make your lethal shot to take that animals life.

When you have done a perfect stalk, when you have been staring at that animal for ages, when you can see it’s eyes, but it hasn’t seen you, when you have been focused and fixated on it while planning your approach, feeling and reading the wind and keeping it in your favour, when you have felt your pulse racing and noticed your hands trembling as you close in… then you are hunting!

Not bashing anyone or how they may choose to hunt, but in my humble opinion shooting an animal from 600m away is not hunting, it’s target practice.
You don’t need to get out into the bush to do that, you can do it at any shooting range. If someone thinks killing an animal from half a kilometer away is hunting, then they have missed the whole point of going on a hunt.

Weather I’m hunting a stag or a warthog or a rabbit, and weather I’m using a rifle or a bow, it dosent matter, the principles of fair chase still need to apply if I want to call it a hunt.

For me a thermal scope is an amazing tool, it is the pinnacle of our species technological marvels and inventions… but it dosent feature in the principles of Fair Chase. It dosent just tip the balance in the hunters favour, it completely skewes the odds.
Fricken amazing pest control tool though 😉

Ja it is an amazing piece of kit.
Unfortunately it is not mine, but I’m lucky enough to be able to get to use it 👍🏻
For pest control it is a game changer. For hunting, it feels like cheating!
So I only use it for pest control 👍🏻

flock wrote: Did you use your night vision? Still vote for pollymags at short distance or havn't used them the gamo redfires.

Yes, used the Pulasr Thermion 👍🏻.

Did you use your night vision? Still vote for pollymags at short distance or havn't used them the gamo redfires.

I attended to the pigeons on Monday night, after the pub had closed and everyone had gone home.
Went past this afternoon and there were no pigeons to be seen.
Seems we might have succeeded 👍🏻.
But I’d still like to keep testing to work out what the perfect pellet, speed and penetration combination is for any further tricky pigeon problems.