For decades, deer hunters have used deer urine and other scent-based products to lure bucks into range for a shot. Generations of hunters have reached into their coat pockets, pulled out small bottles of often foul-smelling fluid and dribbled it on the ground and vegetation. Sometimes without spilling it on themselves, sometimes not.
Perhaps the single most noticeable change in firearms over the last 15 to 20 years has been the proliferation of synthetic stocks. But are they a superior product?
A well-sealed walnut stock will stand up to most hunting conditions, though a wood stock is not as rigid or easy to produce as a synthetic stock. Many of the today’s wood stocks are plain looking, and the highly figured stocks come at a premium. Has the synthetic stock won after all?
Recently I was reminded that I am a dinosaur. We had one of our little 3-gun shoots at our local gun club. Aside from the fact that I was the oldest guy there—by a big margin—I noticed that I was the only one there with a leather holster.
Despite the many naysayers, American Hunter contributor David Draper has long been a fan of shotguns from Turkey and has carried one waterfowling for the past decade—which made him the ideal man to put TriStar's new Viper G2 Synthetic to the test.
The surge in popularity of bowhunting brought the use of deer based scents to the forefront. We now have a multi-million dollar industry based on deer pee. Over 60 companies produce and sell deer urine and gland based attractants in one form or another. Unfortunately, everything is not rosy in the world of cervid secretions.
Weatherby has been in the shotgun game for a longtime, but it changed its approach last winter when it rolled out the new Element, an inertia-operated semi-auto designed with upland hunters across the nation in mind. For 2016 the folks in Paso Robles have plans to put their new shotgun in the hands of even more scattergun aficionados, with the impending introduction of the Element Synthetic and Element Waterfowler.