Bigfoot

I'm jumping in here kinda late, but earlier you said that Bigfoot might eat deer during the winter. I would just like to ask you if you've ever seen a chimpanzee or a human (the omnivorous primates):1. Hunt down and kill a deer with its bare hands.
2. Skin that deer with its bare hands.
3. Eat the flesh raw.If not, then that's one more source of food that's gotta be scratched off the list.

Oh. Then it seems kind of weird that you would suggest that arboreal, mountainous Bigfoots are subsisting on a diet that includes clams, if clams aren't commonly found in mountain forests. Sightings of Bigfoot? Or sightings of clams? Never heard of that. What is that, like a deep-fried lamb penis or something? God, the things you southerners eat.

The biggest problem with MVP or PVA calculations on an organism like bigfoot is that, since no one has ever observed them, we have no way of knowing their ecology and natural history. Talk about operating in a vacuum. However, I think the general rule about thousands rather than tens is probably accurate - at least if we're talking about primates. Heh. Not to mention the generations of trappers, loggers, hunters, backpackers, etc that have been wandering about the area. I mean, it's kind of fun to speculate on what it could be, but in the absolute absence of any concrete evidence - from subfossils to roadkill to scat to foraging traces - it's a bit hard to accept that it actually exists. I've never been comfortable with the "if there's smoke there must be fire" kind of arguments in the absence of any corroboration.

I was thinking about this today. Ya know, it doesn't have to be a hunter in its own right. It could conceivably be a scavenger off winterkill or other hunters. Just add that bit to the ever-growing strings of "ifs" surrounding this critter. As in, if we have a cold-adapted primate, and if it has sufficient gut adaptations to subsist partially on leaves (during spring-summer) and partially on dried grasses under the snow (during winter), but is still capable of subsisting on meat at other times and if it has the behavioral adaptations to follow the herds of grazers during the winter altitudinal migrations and if ...Speculation is fun, isn't it?

Okay, I wasn't going to respond to any more of your posts, but that was really funny.If he likes rocky mountain oysters, there is a good chance that bigfoot is a bear.**(Bear is a gay term for big furry men - think bikers)

I won't quibble on your numbers. But I will point out just because a species drops below the threshhold of viability, it doesn't suddenly disappear.In other words, Orangutans are doomed. They are above the threshhold currently, but their populations are declining at very very troubling rates.When they cross the threshhold, we could say they've crossed a point of no return. However, even with only 10 orangutans left alive, they could still father several (albeit inbred) generations.With orang's living 35-40 years, we're talking a century? two centuries? before they are actually extinct.What's needed for a guarenteed future does not necessarily dictate the present populations. Though, you could use it to predict past populations.

Yawn.Jar, I expect better from you of all people. The map rebuts Crash's EXTRAORDINARY claim that there were no Native Americans living in the Pacific Northwest other than along the coast.That is CLEARLY not the case.Likewise, his subsequent declaration that NO NATIVE AMERICANS could survive away from the coast is also completely incorrect.The map does not predict where Bigfoot populations would be, nor is it meant to.As for your list of places where Bigfoot has been spotted, I agree that there are sightings everywhere and many of those places are ridiculous.I notice you missed Ohio on the list, but that's one that jumps out at me as being extra ridiculous. Maybe I'm mistaken about Ohio, but I never got the impression that there was much wilderness there.But, more importantly, I thought you had decided that the eyewitness accounts were worthless.Which is it? The eye witnesses prove Bigfoot exists and therefore he must exist in all the places you mentioned or the eye witnesses are untrustworthy and none of their accounts should be given any credit.Can't have both be true.

Big Foot doesn't exist. Period.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Tud,Are you suggesting that a chimpazee lacks the strength to kill a deer, skin it, and eat it's raw flesh?Here's the results of a 2005 attack on a man: That's in a sanctuary with people literally shooting the chimp to get it off the guy.If your suggestion is that I've never seen a chimp kill a deer, therefore it could never happen - I'd point out that polar bears never kill penguins, but I bet they could.

Or off deer killed by starvation or cold - since both of those things actually take out more deer than preditors.

Yawn. Thanks for the detailed explaination about your inconsistancies.Btw, this is not what is being debated. But, I suspect you knew that already, seeing as I HAVE TOLD YOU as much.

NugginHaving travelled a lot of the pacific northwest here in Canada and also having witnessed the occasional footprints of sasquatch [unfortunately failing to be other than forgery in the cases I saw] the subject was a favorite of mine at one time as well.However as I checked in to the stories the pattern that tended to stand out most in my eyes from the anecdotal reports going back a hundred and twenty or so years is that the most plausible explanation was as a narrative device to prevent the spread of settlements of whites into the area.The sasquatch is not the only story told. In my teens back in the early '70's there were even then stories of the existence of dinosaurs in the areas north of Pitt Lake B.C. where there was also rumoured to be a huge motherload of gold found.Of course the people telling the stories tended to be older fellows with a penchant for exaggeration and a bottle of whiskey.Yet the possibilty is intriguing since the forest lands of the region are quite dense and I can vouch for the ability of a man to hide quite easily from others {as I sometimes did with my friends} however I doubt very much that the capability of a creature, such as the sasquatch is described as being, would be able to avoid detection unless the numbers of them were both incredibly few and their social structure non-existent since these tend to be signs easily discovered within a forest due to the numerous opportunities to disturb the soil of the forest from day to day activities.As a caveat in favour of the animal though I will mention here that a small plane once was lost in the interior forests north of the Fraser Valley and were not discovered until 20 years after despite an intense search effort. Apparently the plane was finally located eventually and was found to have actually been within the search grid that was checked.
I could also relate that in the mid '80's ,at a small lake my friends and I used to frequently swim in there happened ,one day , to be a small accident in which an elderly couple drove off the road into the lake and though they were promptly rescued , police divers that went into the lake to recover the truck, discovered another vehicle close to where the truck was found and remains were found within the car.
The person was a school teacher from Surrey B.C. who {in 1964 IIRC} apparently was driving to visit relatives in Mission and never arrived. Further investigations revealed that the weather on the night he was driving to Mission was foggy. Just before the Lake there is a curve in the road and as near as they could reconstruct he simply drove across the lanes and off the road into the lake. We swam for years there unaware of the tragedy that had occured laying in the water not 30 feet below and had been there for a couple decades.Anyway I for one think the evidence is highly weighted against the existence of Sasquatch.

From your map? It's clearly not - because it's a political map, not a population map. That a given area is delineated as someone's territory isn't proof that such people live at any given point within it - no more than a map of Minnesota is proof that there's a Minnesotan standing on any given square foot.Your map doesn't prove anything, in other words - because it's a map of political areas, not a map of habitation. While it's generally true that people live within their territory, arguing anything more specific, as you keep doing, is clearly fallacious.And it's amazing that you've required three people to tell you that. Again, you fail to understand the proof by contradiction - which is not asserting that the opponents premises must be true, only that if they are, they lead to contradictions.That you're able to discern the contradictions between the various positions Bigfoot proponents are putting forth doesn't undermine Jar's position - it undermines your own. Jar hardly needs to assert that the eyewitness accounts are true in order to argue that if they were true, Bigfoot proponents have some explaining to do.You think you're catching us in these ridiculous gotchas, but all you're showing is your faulty grasp of the simplest logic. You really don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about when I say "proof by contradiction", do you? It shows.

Funny - I think about three people now have told you that the problem is the catching, not the killing.Is there some reason you're so intent on misrepresenting people's posts this way? Or are you just having reading comprehension problems?

I don't want to take this thread off-topic, so I won't address the thoughtful responses to my earlier Message 152, but I do want to reemphasize that much in this thread is not really a scientific discussion. It's more sort of a meta-scientific discussion. As others have noted, because of the scarcity of evidence, the primary focus can only be on speculation. It isn't really possible to discuss the merits of mostly absent evidence and whether any particular conclusions are warranted.This means that rebuttal can only focus on the internal logic and consistency of other people's speculations, but this really has no bearing on the existence of Bigfoot. If one side or the other engages in significant errors in thinking, that's completely unrelated to the biggest fact of all concerning Bigfoot: there's almost no evidence, and what exists is of the same amount, nature and quality as a whole host of other pseudoscientific phenomena, and I'll spare people the litany of such phenomena this time.The body of scientific thought is formed from a consensus, and what this thread really represents is an attempt by those under the main body of the bell-shaped curve of scientific opinion on Bigfoot to convince outliers residing under the nether reaches of the curve to join them under the fat part. Not that this isn't a worthy exercise, but given the available evidence and the resulting focus on speculation in this case, it isn't really a scientific discussion.That's why I still encourage the anti-Bigfoot side to maintain focus on a scientifically defensible position. It doesn't matter which one, as long as it's a valid one, but pick one and defend that. I don't think the assertion that there's no such thing as Bigfoot is scientifically defensible, though it can be easily acceptably rephrased as "the available evidence is insufficient to conclude the existence of Bigfoot at this time." My own preferred position is that Bigfoot is merely one of many, many popular sociocultural beliefs that are driven chiefly by the lack of, rather than the presence, of evidence.--Percy