Deer Roping

[Ryder]

I just can't imagine thinking roping a deer would be a good idea! :lol:

That's because you were never a 20 something rope crazy cowboy with more wild ideas then a herd of buffalo.Z

I heard that MillIron. ;-) I am lucky I never came across any deer.

 

[MillIronQH]

I just can't imagine thinking roping a deer would be a good idea! :lol:

That's because you were never a 20 something rope crazy cowboy with more wild ideas then a herd of buffalo.Z

Hey. Ya'll watch this!

Naw it's just something to do in your spare time. Like ride a horse thru the bar on Sat. night or turning the tourist attraction buffalo loose at night in Gillette during the fair.Z

 

[Dave]

Things like I could get hurt or it isn't legal are thoughts that just never cross a young cowboy's mind. Instead they have thoughts like, this could be fun or I never tried this before. And if everyone is still alive when they are done........ well it was just good clean fun.
And heck, deer aren't anything. Back 150 years ago they were roping grizzly bears. Now that could get to be a little wild west.

Dave

 

[flaboy?]

Down here it is illegal to have a deer in captivity without the proper permits and they are hard to come by. I caught one last year in my hog trap. I didn't think I would ever get it out of there but finally did. The game warden stopped to talk to me one day and I told him. He just sat back and laughed and said do what ya need to do to protect your self.

 

[Stepper]

Tommy,

When i first read the story about roping deer i thought it was a true story and really happened. It is diffinately a funny story.

I took and posted the story on hunting web site that i like to visit and i put a little note at the top saying that i had got this story off of another web site saying that this was suppose to be a true story.

There was a couple of members of the forum commented on how funny the story was and then another forum member said that it was a funny story but already on here. He also posted a search link to pull it up and veiw it. Which i did and sure enough it was the same identical story.

So i am guessing it is probably just a story and never ever really happened. But when i read the story i was wondering how it was suppose to of taken place in Kansas and beneath your avitar you are from Illinois. I thought maybe you lived in Kansas at sometime or another.

This just goes to show you can only beleave about half of what you read on the net and really wonder about that half. ;-)

 

[Muratic]

I just can't imagine thinking roping a deer would be a good idea! :lol:

That's because you were never a 20 something rope crazy cowboy with more wild ideas then a herd of buffalo.Z

Hey. Ya'll watch this!

Naw it's just something to do in your spare time. Like ride a horse thru the bar on Sat. night or turning the tourist attraction buffalo loose at night in Gillette during the fair.Z

Did ya'll know that you have to be in a motorized vehicle to get service at a drive thru fast food joint. Went to town one night while in college, was horseback, and they said we had to tie the horses and come inside for service. They couldn't take our order unless we were in a car. :roll:

The deer roping thing was funny. I can see a few folk here trying that.

 

[john250]

Tommy,

When i first read the story about roping deer i thought it was a true story and really happened. It is diffinately a funny story.

I took and posted the story on hunting web site that i like to visit and i put a little note at the top saying that i had got this story off of another web site saying that this was suppose to be a true story.

There was a couple of members of the forum commented on how funny the story was and then another forum member said that it was a funny story but already on here. He also posted a search link to pull it up and veiw it. Which i did and sure enough it was the same identical story.

So i am guessing it is probably just a story and never ever really happened. But when i read the story i was wondering how it was suppose to of taken place in Kansas and beneath your avitar you are from Illinois. I thought maybe you lived in Kansas at sometime or another.

This just goes to show you can only beleave about half of what you read on the net and really wonder about that half. ;-)

I just went back and reread it again. Nowhere does it say it is true. But, it could have happened. All the elements ring true with what I've seen of deer. Whether it really happened to some dumb *** is almost beside the point. Likely Tom Sawyer didn't really happen either.
And, when your buddy says "Hold my beer while I rope this deer" you'll think back to this and say "reconsider".

 

[kjones]

I just can't imagine thinking roping a deer would be a good idea! :lol:

That's because you were never a 20 something rope crazy cowboy with more wild ideas then a herd of buffalo.Z

Hey. Ya'll watch this!

Naw it's just something to do in your spare time. Like ride a horse thru the bar on Sat. night or turning the tourist attraction buffalo loose at night in Gillette during the fair.Z

Did ya'll know that you have to be in a motorized vehicle to get service at a drive thru fast food joint. Went to town one night while in college, was horseback, and they said we had to tie the horses and come inside for service. They couldn't take our order unless we were in a car. :roll:

The deer roping thing was funny. I can see a few folk here trying that.

Myself and a couple of other guys rode horses through a McDonalds drive thru once. The girl at the window thought it was real funny, as did a bunch of other people. For some reason they didn't think so after one of the horses decided to relieve himself while we were waiting for our icecream cones. Go figgure huh? :roll:

 

[davesr]

I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it. The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that since they congregated at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not 4 feet away) that it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down) then hog tie it and transport it home.I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, who had seen the roping thing before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it. After about 20 minutes my deer showed up -3 of them. I picked out a likely looking one, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me. I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step towards it...it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and received an education.

The first thing that I learned is that while a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, they are spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope. That deer EXPLODED.

The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope with some dignity. A deer, no chance. That thing ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I originally imagined. The only up side is that they do not have as much stamina as many animals.

A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head.

At that point I had lost my taste for corn fed venison. I just wanted to get that devil creature off the end of that rope. I figured if I just let it go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die slow and painfully somewhere. At the time, there was no love at all between me and that deer. At that moment, I hated the thing and I would venture a guess that the feeling was mutual. Despite the gash in my head and the several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer's momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think clearly enough to recognize that there was a small chance that I shared some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in, so I didn't want the deer to have it suffer a slow death so I managed to get it lined back up in between my truck and the feeder - a little trap I had set before hand. Kind of like a squeeze chute. I got it to back in there and started moving up so I could get my rope back. Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years would have thought that a deer would bite somebody so I was very surprised when I reached up there to grab that rope and the deer grabbed hold of my wrist. Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse where they just bite you and then let go. A deer bites you and shakes its head - almost like a pit bull. They bite HARD and it hurts. The proper thing to do when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back slowly. I tried screaming and shaking instead. My method was ineffective. It seems like the deer was biting and shaking for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds. I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that claim by now) tricked it.

While I kept it busy tearing the bejesus out of my right arm, I reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose. That was when I got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day. Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right up on their back feet and strike right about head and shoulder level, and their hooves are surprisingly sharp. I learned a long time ago that when an animal like a horse strikes at you with their hooves and you can't get away easily, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and make an aggressive move towards the animal. This will usually cause them to back down a bit so you can escape. This was not a horse. This was a deer, so obviously such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond I devised a different strategy. I screamed like woman and tried to turn and run. The reason I had always been told NOT to try to turn and run from a horse that paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. Deer may not be so different from horses after all, besides being twice as strong and three times as evil, because the second I turned to run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down. Now when a deer paws at you and knocks you down it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What they do instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you while you are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head.

I finally managed to crawl under the truck and the deer went away. Now for the local legend. I was pretty beat up. My scalp was split open, I had several large goose eggs, my wrist was bleeding pretty good and felt broken (it turned out to be just badly bruised) and my back was bleeding in a few places, though my insulated canvas jacket had protected me from most of the worst of it. I drove to the nearest place, which was the co-op. I got out of the truck, covered in blood and dust and looking like h#!!. The guy who ran the place saw me through the window and came running out yelling "what happened?" I have never seen any law in the state of Kansas that would prohibit an individual from roping a deer. I suspect that this is an area that they have overlooked entirely. Knowing, as I do, the lengths to which law enforcement personnel will go to exercise their power, I was concerned that they may find a way to twist the existing laws to paint my actions as criminal. I swear...not wanting to admit that I had done something monumentally stupid played no part in my response. I told him "I was attacked by a deer". I did not mention that at the time I had a rope on it. The evidence was all over my body. Deer prints on the back of my jacket where it had stomped all over me and a large deer print on my face where it had struck me there. I asked him to call somebody to come get me. I didn't think I could make it home on my own. He did. Later that afternoon, a game warden showed up at my house and wanted to know about the deer attack. Surprisingly, deer attacks are a rare thing and wildlife and parks was interested in the event. I tried to describe the attack as completely and accurately as I could. I was filling the grain hopper and this deer came out of nowhere and just started kicking the hell out of me and BIT me. It was obviously rabid or insane or something. EVERYBODY for miles around knows about the deer attack (the guy at the co-op has a big mouth). For several weeks people dragged their kids in the house when they saw deer around and the local ranchers carried rifles when they filled their feeders.

I have told several people the story, but NEVER anybody around here. I have to see these people every day and as an outsider - a "city folk". I have enough trouble fitting in without them snickering behind my back and whispering "there is the d#%&@!#$s that tried to rope the deer."

This is hilarious... This be added to the list of why Women live longer than Men.

 

[Travlr]

The OP is one of the funniest stories I think I've ever read. And some of the comments are almost as good.

And this from Dave... puts it all in perspective... "Things like I could get hurt or it isn't legal are thoughts that just never cross a young cowboy's mind. Instead they have thoughts like, this could be fun or I never tried this before. And if everyone is still alive when they are done........ well it was just good clean fun. And heck, deer aren't anything. Back 150 years ago they were roping grizzly bears. Now that could get to be a little wild west."

 

[CowboyRam]

Dad once roped a badger. The little bugger could get out of the rope in a second. He finally got it around his middle and pulled him up off the ground. The old cowboy that worked with dad had the idea to let it loose in the bunk house. A neighbor came by and sat on the chair that he was under, he snorted air through his nose, and the neighbor was up and out the door in a shot. They later got him captured and put him the the dog kennel outside; he dug him self out and was gone.

 

[callmefence]

I didn't know tommy, but I'll still go out on a limb and say he might be full of corn.
Good story though.

 

[Lucky_P]

We'd bottle raised a buck fawn once. Dad kept him in the dogpen, but would let him out to graze around the yard on a regular basis.
I'd let him out one day, but needed to leave and figured he needed to go back in the pen... we lived on a busy highway, and I could see him getting whacked by a speeding car. Tried luring him back in with a bucket of feed... little SOB wouldn't go back in the pen, so I figured I'd rope him and put him back in . Buddy, he blew up when that noose tightened around his neck - jumping, bucking, kicking, flailing all around. Glad I had a long lariat. I just waited 'til he wore himself out... took a while... and while he was lying there panting, I slipped the noose off and just left him out... figured if he got hit on the highway, it was just fate (he didn't).
But, I didn't try roping a deer again.

Cousin and a buddy caught a young doe swimming across the lake one time. The couldn't get her back out of the boat fast enough... she whipped both of them pretty quickly.

 

[Dave]

Dad once roped a badger. The little bugger could get out of the rope in a second. He finally got it around his middle and pulled him up off the ground. The old cowboy that worked with dad had the idea to let it loose in the bunk house. A neighbor came by and sat on the chair that he was under, he snorted air through his nose, and the neighbor was up and out the door in a shot. They later got him captured and put him the the dog kennel outside; he dug him self out and was gone.

There was a young girl about 8 at a roping clinic we put on this spring. Her Dad is darn sure a cowboy. He puts on team ropings and leases out roping steers along with raising and selling high dollar rope horses for a living. She kept saying that you ain't a cowboy if you have never roped a badger. Her Mom said the girl did in fact rope a badger this spring. Her Dad ended up shooting it because they couldn't let it loose. At church a couple weeks ago I asked her if she had roped any badgers lately. She went to mumbling and grumbling. One of the heeler dogs chewed the hondo off the end of her rope. She probably roped that dog one time too many.

 

[wbvs58]

I'll have to have a go at roping a kangaroo. I'll get back to youse all and let you know how I get on, hopefully.

Ken