I' ve heard this reply on this board a lot also and am beginning to wonder how many buddies I would have if I dropped them for every transgression or character flaw they may have.

The buddy I mentioned in my post is a great pheasant hunter, I' m not. He tolerates my mistakes, and I tolerate his. There are some fields he hunts where he doesn' t take me along because there are not a lot of birds and I guess he doesn' t want to watch me miss half of my shots and not bag out. I take my deer hunting seriously, he doesn' t his. He takes his Pheasant hunting serious, I don' t mine. When I say ' take more seriously' , I mean that I read about and practice my archery deer hunting more than he does and he practices his shotgun shooting and pheasant hunting more than I do.

I just can' t drop a friend simply because he doesn' t hunt up to my standards. We do a lot of other things together outside of hunting to just turn my back on them because they have made some mariginal shots or come into the woods smelling like Taco Bell with greasy, leather boots and a Harley t-shirt on that hasn' t been washed in two weeks of wearing. However, that doesn' t mean I' ll encourage him to go into the woods when there is a big buck involved.

Also, while I' m ranting here, some people are not interesting in being ' tutored' by their buddies, so the argument of, " You need to take him aside and teach him how to hunt and shoot properly" just doesn' t hold water very often in my experience. There is almost always a pride issue involved, a competitive spirit that exists in almost all sportsmen, especially sportsmen of similar age, that really interferes with the teacher/student relationship between even the best of buddies.