My most recent dealings with slingshots was in and around 2001 to 2006 in and around Fernández, Santiago del Estero province, Argentina. I lived on the edge of the town of Fernández, mostly dirt streets, where the neighbours and students of the school would use slingshots. One of the uses for the slingshots was to kill my chooks. I was a relatively naive Canadian gringo of temperate continental clime, dumped in to a Spanish-speaking foreign country and culture in a dryland, very hot, sub-tropical climate, and raising chickens for the first time in my life. I often could associate better with the weather, plants and animals than with most of the human specimens however foreign those all were to me. For slingshots, the kids would fashion their "Y" piece of the slingshot from a locally available tree or branch crotch. The elastic, flexible, part of their slingshot came from old bicycle inner tubes. In this climate one could bike all year and could nearly go barefoot all year. Gentle, generous, but very hot at times and unbearable. This compared to my climate of native origin as was evidenced by the bizareness and foreign practice of hot weather at Christmas and New Year's eve, plus that i could hear the roosters calling all night as well as the firecrackers at night to mark these. Much different than the cold, snow and relative quiet—and lack of firecrackers and fireworks—at this time of year. Plus i was a total newbie at/with chooks, the Australian word for chickens. The chooks there in Santiago del Estero were partially nomadic, they would range far even if it was through other peoples' gardens, properties or spaces . Neighbours' chooks would be crossing through, travelling in and amidst my edges of living and working.
Ammo also needed to be invented or specifically located and obtained: there weren't even rocks in this bioregion-- ancient lakes, seabeds and also plenty of saline environments. So the slingshotters had to be creative, imaginative. Construction materials might sometimes yield ammo.
It was thanks to the slingshots—home mande, including from rubber from disgardeded, excess, unwanted, no longer useful (in its first function/iteration) that they were able to speed their trajectory onto plucking, gutting and BBQing my chooks to eventually feast on them. I have to say that the Argentinians are real masters of the original barbequeing. They have gotten the science and art of cooking/baking/roasting/boiling with fire down. For example, they manage their fires such that they always have a (small, secondary) fire going on the side to heat up water or for other utilitarian uses as well as a source from which to scoop out their real, home-made coals (charcoal purchase avoidance) to power the BBQ.
