A Confederacy of Dickheads

A question: why is a rifled slug gun a shotgun, not a rifle?

The reason Napoleonic tactics turned Civil War battlefields into savage killing grounds was rifling. The barrels of muskets were grooved on the inside to approximately one turn in seven lengths. Bullets were ever so slightly larger than the bore (interior diameter), and were compressed by the barrel, filling the grooves, imparting rotation, spin. Spin increased trajectory and velocity hugely, making lethal an armament with a range of tens of feet into a source of hell for two hundred and more yards.

In Indiana, modern rifles are not permitted for hunting big game (read: deer - go figure). One reason is bullets maintain lethal energy for over a mile, and our typical field of vision is much smaller.

Hunting is limited to black powder arms, large-caliber pistols, and shotguns. Whence evokes my question. Shotguns, "smoothbores", lack rifling because there is no way to compress shot, a bit larger than a BB to much smaller. In fact, popular belief is shot will "destroy" rifling.

Slugs were developed as an option to traditional "buckshot". A solid "bullet", in the large bore of a shotgun, has a lethal range out to about 40 yards (my best guess).

Then came rifling for "slug" guns, and these huge missiles were deadly to 100 yards, and beyond.

So why aren't they "rifles"? They certainly meet the principal criterion.

Horse racing is no longer a popular sport.

It is under attack by moralists (most of whom are despicable) and human rights activists (most of whom mean well).

There is scads of room for improvement in every aspect of our treatment of animals.

All of them.

Everywhere.

In fact, animals are in many ways smarter than we are. For one, their language lacks loose tongues, which means they don't waste large chunks of life apologizing for dumb shit they said.

Another, huge, difference is they are totally in tune with their surroundings, their environment.

Animals adapt to environments. If there isn't enough food, they move on. Or limit litter size to compensate.

Whereas we use everything up. Denude, despoil, take, take, take, until it's gone.

Our insatiable apatite for "stuff" has picked the oceans nearly clean, denuded thousands of square miles of rainforests, stripped away mountains in a lust for cheap energy.

We have made extinct the mammoth, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and a host of other, lesser-known species.

Can you imagine a pride of lions running to ground the last wildebeest, the last zebra?

Of course not.

Our fascination with that flaming turd, the bible, has reaped living hell on animals of every size and stripe.

That "Dominion" bullshit has been the terminus of species, and will surely be the end of us.

People in the horse racing business are taken to task for their treatment of horses as a commodity, to be used, abused, and discarded after racing.

There are many exceptions, but they tend to be high-profile, and don't usually include the majority in the sport, who never see Churchill Downs, Saratoga, or Del-Mar.

There are tens of thousands paid to play baseball: only a few ever join the few hundreds at the

MLB level.

So horse racing.

Ferdinand, the winner of the 1986 Kentucky Derby and the 1987 Horse of the Year, went to stud in Japan. In 2003 it was learned he was slaughtered for food.

Okay, this sickens me.

Who the fuck needs to eat a horse?

I don't object to a source of protein being provided to those in need.

But horsemeat isn't. It is used in dog and cat foods, and in countries where it is on the menu (Japan, and for one other, Belgium) it is more expensive than typical domestic fare.

And the plight of hundreds and thousands of cattle and hogs, and millions (25 million chickens per day, commonly cited) is not taken lightly.

But, one distinction: a horse's use to man isn't as food. It is only after whatever use seen fit (racer, companion, showman) that horses are slaughtered.

Again, sickening.

In 2008, after years in court, horse slaughter was ended in the US. 2 plants in Texas were closed (by the TX Attorney General, citing law already on the books), and one in Dekalb, IL.

The Illinois case was interesting. The people approved the cessation of horse slaughter in a ballot referendum, the State Legislature approved the law, the governor signed it, and the fucking courts still kept the goddam place open for another two years.

The latest nutpunch was that kill buyers were frequenting BLM wild horse and burro auctions, then trucking our national heritage, our wild horses, to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. By Federal Law, wild horses belong to us.

Montana and North Dakota have bills in State Government to open horse slaughterhouses.

I wish the most terrible and catastrophic calamity on anyone who supports this barbarism.