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Hunting whips (Read 8897 times)
hybrid_throwback
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Hunting whips
Nov 7th, 2010 at 9:24am
 
Gday guys. Hope all's good in you-land.

This question is probably as complicated as you want to make it! Just wondering if any of you slingsters in other parts of the world have any local customs of similar tools or practices?

Where I live (NE Australia) Indigenous people used to use long vine whips for taking out prey such as bats, birds and possums. These were usually made of "laywer vine", the classic "wait-a-while" vine and apparently sometimes made in multiple sections. The hunter would scout out a decent spot where critters flew / hung around between large trees in the rainforests and when a mob was seen approaching, try and swipe as many out of air as they could.

Local tales indicate it was made in three pieces, a stiff handle, a semi-flexi middle section and a softer, floppier section with a hardened tip... much like aussie stockwhips. Same sound-wave riding technique and I imagine they did hefty damage to something as tiny and gentle as a fruit bat. Legend has it some of these things were 30 feet long, or more...


Flying fox mobs here can number easily into the thousands and often fly the same route everynight. These days we think they're shifty, diseased little mango-thieves but they used to be a staple food for thousands of years.

Lawyer vine makes kickarse cordage, fish traps and baskets / packs... imagine something as viney as a giant jasmine, twice as tough and flexy as young mulberry shoots but covered in millions of tiny recurved barbs that pop right into your skin, drawing a lot of blood (hence the lawyer part!) and taking ages to get untangled from (hence the wait a while part!).

I haven't heard of it anywhere else but I know you fellas do your reading, hey? Was apparently restricted to the far NW of australia but here in what I guess you could call the mid NW, some people can still remember great-grandad or whoever, going on about them.

For the record fruit bats are the only self saucing mammal Cheesy All those berries and bananas add up.

Any tips or tales from your own area would be much appreciated.
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LukeWebb
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #1 - Nov 7th, 2010 at 1:39pm
 
  I've never heard anything about using whips for hunting before, but for what you described it makes perfect sense, you could snap a whip a lot of times at a flock passing by or take a couple snaps at least at a retreating possum.  Thanks for posting this, I'll have to look around for any youtube videos on it.
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Dan
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #2 - Nov 8th, 2010 at 8:00am
 
That is pretty neat thanks for sharing I know a friend of mine when he was younger used to take a pair of panty hose and put an orange in it and sling it up in the air like a one rock bola and the bats would smell the citrous and attack but then they would get their claws stuck in it and fall to the ground where they were rapidly dispatched with a 410., but your way sounds cool too  
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I was pretty good at slinging like 10 years ago.
 
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Masiakasaurus
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #3 - Nov 8th, 2010 at 8:34am
 
Dan wrote on Nov 8th, 2010 at 8:00am:
like a one rock bola

Those things were pretty popular for rabbit hunting by the local Mississippi and Alabama Amerindians way back in the day. They're called bola perdidas or "lost bolas" in Spanish. Bola means ball btw, but I'd rather avoid saying lost balls. Wink
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Pikåru wrote on Nov 19th, 2013 at 6:59pm:
Massi - WTF? It's called a sling. You use it to throw rocks farther and faster than you could otherwise. That's all. 
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #4 - Nov 9th, 2010 at 12:46am
 
Hunting whips? Now that is just cool. Not sure I have much to add to this post but that is cool, thanks for posting.
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LukeWebb
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #5 - Nov 9th, 2010 at 1:25am
 
  I wonder how big an animal you could dispatch with a whip?  Would it work on rabbits and waterfoul like ducks and cormorants?  I suppose you could design ones that don't just snap but actually have a weight or some sort of ripper on the end.
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Masiakasaurus
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #6 - Nov 9th, 2010 at 7:28am
 
LukeWebb wrote on Nov 9th, 2010 at 1:25am:
 I wonder how big an animal you could dispatch with a whip?  Would it work on rabbits and waterfoul like ducks and cormorants?

I imagine that it's hard to be accurate with a hunting whip and that you have to limit yourself to flicking at a flock of something.
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Pikåru wrote on Nov 19th, 2013 at 6:59pm:
Massi - WTF? It's called a sling. You use it to throw rocks farther and faster than you could otherwise. That's all. 
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kuggur slingdog
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #7 - Nov 9th, 2010 at 9:53am
 
In my experience when I played around with a snake whip couple of years back is that accuracy is no problem at all, you can get quickly very good at hitting small targets.
I think the trouble is you are not delivering a lot of energy in your target, not sufficient for killing something as big as a rabbit. You´d hurt it a lot though, bet it would reach its topspeed racing away from a hunter using this method.
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #8 - Nov 9th, 2010 at 11:12am
 
I have been practicing with whips i got about two years ago (when i have time and dont get stopped by some racist idiot) and my favorite at the moment is a 4 ft snake whip. I can agree that it doesnt take much practice to get quite accurate, and have been on the receiving end of the lash when caught on a branch or something else solid, any decent speed will hurt (and i was only catching myself with the slow moving middle) I think that while it may not always kill something larger (not saying that it couldnt, with a good crack you can easily leave large, deep gashes with only nylon, and i'd imagine hunting you'd fashion a barb of some kind on the end of the fall instead of a nylon cracker) it would at the very least stun the animal, allowing you to dispatch it with a knife, large stick, large rock, etc etc. It depends on the area you're hunting in as well, as a whip needs a LOT of space to work in (4 foot whip ~ 12-16 feet of clearance needed, though that figure is for playing it safe around observers)

PS. I'm going to message the person i bought it from as it appears to be a different method than i've seen before, but the fall recently came untied and I'm unsure as to how to retie. Any advice would be useful, i'll be sure to post a picture of the fall and end of the whip once i get home tonight as it is very hard to explain  Undecided
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #9 - Nov 18th, 2010 at 8:46pm
 
Sounds interesting! I can't imagine handling a 30 foot long whip though!  Shocked
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #10 - Nov 18th, 2010 at 11:01pm
 
Check out what wikipedia says about bullwhips for hunting. :

A Canadian Inuit named Simon Tookoome is an expert bullwhip handler and has used it to hunt ptarmigans, caribou, and to kill a wolf:

"Tookoome took the advice to heart and began hunting bigger animals [than ptarmigans] with the whip, even after his family acquired a rifle and a snowmobile. He took down several caribou, and once even used it to kill a wolf that he had shot and injured. He kept the whip with him because operating a rifle was too expensive."[4]


Yes, it's wiki, it might be false, but you should give it the benefit of doubt.
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kuggur slingdog
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #11 - Nov 19th, 2010 at 8:13am
 
"taking down caribou", "killing a wolf"....
Apart from having a really hard time believing these wild claims, I´d say it is a sadistic jerk (this is an understatement used here because the forum censure won´t let me use more adequate terms) that chooses to kill an animal with a bull whip when he has a riffle at hand.
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kuggur slingdog
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #12 - Nov 20th, 2010 at 6:27am
 
For the record, after posting my last post i looked up this Simon Tookoome, and the wiki article about him does mention he is a master whippr, but no mentioning of killing animals using a whip. The only hunting story in the short article shows a man with a lot of respect for the animals he hunts.
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hybrid_throwback
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #13 - Nov 20th, 2010 at 9:08am
 
wow, thanks for all the info, links and replies fellas, much appreciated!

legend has it the tree hunting whips here were used mainly against flying foxes, who while travelling higher up in vast numbers sometimes also tend to hunt around trees in ones and twos, in dense country anyway. Otherwise if you could find a colony duriing the day they'd be easy picking, thousands of em tucked into the branches just hanging there.

I've seen some pretty impressive accuracy with stock whips. I imagine lengths of lawyer vine would be a little trickier to master Tongue but once you had the knack...

Am going wandering in a couple weeks into some old growth rainforest, will be cutting some lawyer... in the meantime am plotting making one up out of Burny vine, or Trophis scandens subsp. scandens to get all technical about it Tongue

Not planning to pop any bats or possums (both are highly protected here and you'd have to be a bit of a bastard to do that anyway, outside of a survival situation) but I can see some very sore looking cardboard boxes to come.
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Re: Hunting whips
Reply #14 - Nov 28th, 2010 at 11:18am
 
Okay - whips are very dangerous.
They crack because the tip is travelling in excess of the speed of sound.

All the energy put into the tsroke is funnelled down to the very tip which can strike with the force and almost the velocity of a small bullet.

If you tip your whip then it becomes a very lethal weapon indeed and can cut pretty deep into flesh.
Hell an untipped leather whip will slice pretty deep into flesh. 

So for an experienced whip handler to kill a large animal is more than believable. Sever a major artety and that's a lethal blow.

Hunting bats and birds is totally believable.

Don't underestimate whips. Try and think of the whips tip as a captive sling missile but travelling much faster.
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