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 All those berries and bananas add up.

Any tips or tales from your own area would be much appreciated.

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  

Hunting whips? Now that is just cool. Not sure I have much to add to this post but that is cool, thanks for posting.

LukeWebb wrote on Nov 9^th, 2010 at 1:25am:

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.

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 

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.

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.

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.