What do you say and why?

shoot or kill, that is what we do, and we may as well be honest. The antis won't like you any better due to semantics

Harvest is for vegetables, and as the T-shirt my daughter gave me says (had a picture of a deer passing under a tree stand) - "vegetables are not food, vegetables are what food eats"

An upland hunting writer - the late George Bird Evans once commented you cannot harvest what you have not learned to grow.
 
shoot or kill, that is what we do, and we may as well be honest. The antis won't like you any better due to semantics

Harvest is for vegetables, and as the T-shirt my daughter gave me says (had a picture of a deer passing under a tree stand) - "vegetables are not food, vegetables are what food eats"

An upland hunting writer - the late George Bird Evans once commented you cannot harvest what you have not learned to grow.
I agree completely...Just curious as to the thoughts of other hunters.
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Shoot, shot, or kill. Back in the 50's & 60's my grandmother, mother and aunts, would say Catch, as in "What do you catch?", but I never heard a man say that.

I agree with Rick L
 
I shoot something and it is killed. I have no problem with someone saying harvest and for total take I think it is the more fitting word. I've never understood this argument either way. Total waste of time since all the words fit and it is usually just a regional thing or a simple semantics question.

Yeah antis aren't going to like us any better if we use 'nicer' words but sometimes those words fit just as well. I do harvest nature, be it picking plums, catching fish or shooting ducks. What I won't use it "Blow a ducks head clean off." That seems ignorant to me.

Tim
 
Bob~

I say "shoot" or "kill" when I am talking about my own activities - "taking" (the legal term) mostly waterfowl and the occasional turkey or deer.

On the other hand, as a biologist, I use "harvest" as appropriate. I tend to use it as a noun and not a verb - but always use it as a measure of the take on a large scale for a species or group of species. For example, "The Brant harvest was down 10 per cent over the long-term average."

I do not view the term "harvest" as a euphemism - and certainly not the product of political correctness. There are many words for "kill": murder, annihilate, execute, assassinate, slaughter. Each represents a specific meaning. For example, (although most have forgotten this) "slaughter" means to kill livestock that was raised expressly for food or fiber. In the same way, "harvest" means a planned taking of a renewable natural resource that reflects the principles of sustainability (a concept recognized by "western" biologists and foresters about a century ago but has now found a new - and useful - vogue). In my mind, the term applies equally to plants or animals.

Hope this is helpful,

SJS
 
. What I won't use it "Blow a ducks head clean off." That seems ignorant to me.

Tim

Agreed

And Steve - as you put it in the biologist's context of an over all view, i can see harvest, but having one or two birds in hand and then considering the size of my son in law's family's grain elevators and the effort it takes to fill them , harvest seems a bit grandiose on the individual scale LOL
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Back a few years, I had to chuckle a bit when discovering that according to
the USGS two banded geese retrieved by Daisy were “encountered”.

sLabPointingBand.jpg


bandedgoosecertSharp.jpg


xGoose2Bling.jpg


zzzdaisyband2007r%20(2).jpg


Here is a Canvasback almost "encountered".


Here is the same Canvasback finally "encountered".


Since becoming politically more correct, whenever we are waterfowling,
success is always followed by a subdued “nice encounter”.
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I always say shot which assumes that I didn't call for paramedics to first aid a gunshot wound. "Harvest" just rubs me wrong after growing up on a farm where harvest meant something completely different. "Kill" is assumed by anyone who knows what the hell is going on. We are quickly becoming so politically correct that I'm not sure where it is going to end, just pray for common sense to take over.
 
As a biologist I am with Steve.

Jim, the bird is not encountered, the band is encountered. Not all band encounters come from hunter killed birds.

Edited for missing word.
 
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I generally use the term "harvest". No particular reason, I just do. It's kind of a habit I picked up from somewhere along the line.

Steve
 
I say "shoot," its general enough to encompass regular "killing" and also "blowing the head of a duck smooth off."
 
When I return from a hunting trip my wife ask's did you "get anything".Mom when she' s around wants to know did you "kill any", and co workers ask did you "catch anything" I usually say yea I shot a couple ducks , yea I killed a deer. No big fields of crops here so I "pick"from the garden.
 
I agree on the semantics issue. I guess we ask and answer in "get" and "got", "shoot" and "shot".

How many did you get/how did you do? ~ We got a few... We shot the daylights out of 'em, etc. At one camp we record in total "bag" tallied by boat.

Don't think we harvest too much. We shoot A LOT!
 
As a biologist I am with Steve.

Jim, the bird is encountered, the band is encountered. Not all band encounters come from hunter killed birds.

As a physicist, I was expecting something a bit more "forceful" (pun intended). In the moment of receiving my first ever "notification", the all encompassing description of "the event" remains amusing.
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Well, I'm kind of warming up to using the word "harvest" for all my duck hunting conversations. "Man, we harvested the hell out of them today", or "I had to harvest that bluebill 3 times because he kept diving on me." Or my personal favorite-"What the hell are those guys over there harvesting at, coots?" Actually it seems like "harvest" would be a good adjective to describe shooting and killing a limit of coots. :)
 
Well, I'm kind of warming up to using the word "harvest" for all my duck hunting conversations. "Man, we harvested the hell out of them today", or "I had to harvest that bluebill 3 times because he kept diving on me." Or my personal favorite-"What the hell are those guys over there harvesting at, coots?" Actually it seems like "harvest" would be a good adjective to describe shooting and killing a limit of coots. :)
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Coots are truly natures bounty! Lol.
 
I grew up in a farming community and "harvest" meant crops. I never heard a farmer say that he was going to harvest a hog or cow for food. The word harvest infers that you planted something and raised it so you could combine it when it matures for either food or for cash. Although with the way deer hunting is becoming an "industry" here in Iowa, maybe "Harvest"is an accurate term.
I prefer to say "shoot", that is what I do.
 
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