Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mule Deer - Leupold LTO

Methinks your "brush" is too broad.

Laws put a fence around how we hunt. Some things are inside that fence; others are outside. Since we are engaged in a sporting activity, not merely slaughtering our food, our tradition is that our quarry has to have a reasonable opportunity to evade our efforts to find and kill it. Their "tools" are superior senses, speed, agility, knowledge of their habitat, and cover. We have intelligence, weapons, camouflage, decoys and various baits, and optics on our side to help us locate or attract our quarry, and then kill it, and those have proven to be sufficient for our purpose, while still allowing the game a good chance of escaping by the simple expedient of remaining hidden or distant. Devices like this, drones, live action remote cameras, remote shooting devices, etc take that arrow out of their quiver and shouldn't be allowed, by either the law or our self-imposed restrictions. For scouting and retrieval, sure; for control of vermin like hogs, rats, and livestock killers, absolutely; but not for game animals being pursued under Fair Chase. This is supposed to be sport, not warfare, despite the efforts of manufacturers and military wannabes to make it so.

Great thinking...


Pheasants, porcupines, skunks, fawns, etc., will all thank you!



An aftermarket setup would be good for those of us who can't afford to shell out +$120k for a new machine.

A similar argument over ethics can be made when a drone is used to "scout" from the air.

Another sad possibility would be where some idiot might use one of these to locate game and accidentally shoot a hunter.

Used a thermal unit for recovering grouse 10 years ago.No image,just a heat graph.They work well if you do not have a dog.

My problem with this thermal imaging device is that in the hands of unethical or stupid people it can be used to spot living things. What if I am sitting on the hillside in the brush watching my favorite game crossing and some dimwit sends a round into my spot? Does it work like that or does it say "deer at 250 yards"? Having not seen one or even read about one until I saw this thread I know nothing about them.

The link in the first post has good info on it. But if you want to see something like this in action, go to youtube and search for "apache helicopter takes out insurgents" or some variation of that.

A thermal imaging system (or FLIR - forward looking infrared*) shows the differences in heat between various objects. Warm blooded mammals show up brightly against their cooler backgrounds, in colored images you can even see differences in heat around the body - warm heads and cooler extremities. You can see those differences in body heat in the pic of the deer below.

In theory you should be able to make out the outline of the animal you're looking at but looking through brush one obviously might not see the entire animal. Or if I got this right, if an animal is bedded and completely hidden to normal vision you might not even have to see the animal, its body heat might warm up the surrounding vegetation slightly but enough to cause a contrast against the other ambient vegetation.


It's always hard to make ethical arguments for or against new technology since it’s just a continuum going back to teeth and nails – we went from spears to bows and arrows to better bows to black powder to smokeless with faster, flatter trajectories to scopes to better scopes to range finders to you name it. It’s hard to criticize a fellow for using a high powered scope if you’re using peep sights because the fellow on the other side of you can criticize you for using smokeless powder and the arrow slinger can criticize the BP shooter and on and on.






* I may have FLIR and thermal imaging mixed up but it seems to me they both use the same basic principles, but I'm no expert at this.

No one mentioned spotting big critters like game wardens...

And, hot on yo trail, they'd probably be putting out a great heat signal...

But, they probably got all that stuff, already.

It may just level the playing field a bit, giving new meaning to "fair chase"...

DF

I've never encountered that line before. Gave me a chuckle

This new thermal animal locating device may add to our success in the field finding game?

Has anyone tried one?

Thermal locator