Hunt Lake Manitoba Narrows

Just Another Monster Buck

I recently talked to an old friend of mine from Ankeny, Iowa, who told me he is teaching his 14-year-old son to trap this year, not because of fur prices, which are very low, but because he wants to see him learn about the outdoors, the ways of the wild, what being a true hunter and outdoorsman is really about. Brad Coulson is an old time taxidermist and he feels, as I do, that deer hunting is the poorest way in the world to make a hunter and outdoorsman out of a youngster. Today though, there are few who trap, or hunt squirrels or rabbits, and the “trophy” idea is running rampant.

To my way of thinking, it is a horrible thing to make a trophy out of any wild creature, but hunters have never before been as they are becoming today, when nothing matters but the antlers.

“I see hunters come in here with a big set of antlers, measuring 160 or so and if they don’t make the Boone and Crockett record book, which requires 170 inches, they are just devastated.” Brad told me. “It is the only reason they have to hunt. I want to tell them how much they are missing. Most hunters 50 years ago would have been tickled to death with a deer like that.”

Today, big antlers are downright common. It takes monster antlers to make the big money now. Coulson gets a constant flow of deer-breeders catalogs in the mail, and he says they list hundreds and hundreds of breeders raising buck deer, trying to sell them to game ranches where “hunters” come in and pay from 15 to 50 thousand dollars to shoot that half-tame, pen-raised deer, fed a diet with meat byproducts to create a set of huge antlers. He says the catalogs increase each year to a point where there are thousands of 250- to 325-inch deer antlers being grown.

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“Some guy will bring in an Iowa deer to be mounted, and he thinks because it will reach those Boone and Crockett requirements he has a rack worth 10,000 dollars,” Brad says, laughing. “Not anymore, a Boone and Crockett buck is fairly common now when you consider what is being raised in pens.”

Coulson has raised a lot of deer himself, raising one buck to the age of 12 years. He says the idea that letting a smaller buck go to become a big-antlered deer next year works just fine, sometimes. But many times, he will not get any bigger than he is. “I have seen 300-pound bucks with big, wide, forked antlers. If he is fed right, and has the right genetics, he may be an eight or ten-point buck at 1 and 1/2 years old, and at 3 and 1/2 years his antlers might be bigger or they might still be the same. But he might also lose a point or two, even though his antlers become heavier,” he said. “As he ages, his teeth wear down, and as his teeth wear, his antlers will not become any more impressive than they are.”

“Colorado tried the same thing years ago with mule deer that Missouri is doing now.” Coulson says. “They began to find a lot of big mule deer killed and left where they fell, because hunters just couldn’t tell for sure how many points the deer had, and they would shoot first and count later.”

He agreed that few hunters in heavy timber or brush, early or late in the day without good sunlight, can positively tell how many points are on each antler. Hunting conditions make it next to impossible to tell unless you use a good scope on your rifle, or binoculars. Too many hunters like me, who hunt with open sights in heavy woods, cannot count points on a moving buck they get a good look at for only fifteen or twenty seconds. And no matter what else can be said about the four-point restriction, that is the thing which disturbs me most… the fact that some hunter who never had a shot at a nice buck before will find out that the heavy antlers he saw had only three points on each side. And yes, sometimes that set of antlers will have more points next year, and sometimes it will not.

Coulson, an expert on deer antlers if I ever knew one, says that each deer is an individual, and theoretically, the whole plan sounds great, but there are so many exceptions to the rule, and a buck that becomes four or five years old, will seldom have the antlers he had at 2 or 3 years of age. That’s why the deer-growers sell deer at two and a half to three and a half years old, rather than keeping them until they are five or six. An aging buck may have heavier antlers with fewer points, or he may have small antlers his entire life.

The whole thing centers around money, and this tremendous ego which big antlers seem to stoke. Trophy antlers conceivably bring in more out-of-state hunters. Estimates are that this year, 18,000 non-resident hunters will come to hunt deer in Missouri, and the tags sell for 225 dollars each. Multiply that! The MDC has a lot to gain if trophy hunters think they can find bigger antlers in the state each year. If 5000 or so small bucks are killed and left in the woods, it isn’t considered to be a great number. The trophy hunter’s attitude about that is… who cares?

But you can count on this… the money factor is declining. Wild bucks will not produce the big-money-antlers in the future, unless you go to Manitoba to hunt. Once while goose-hunting in Manitoba in the 80’s I found the most unbelievable shed antler I have ever seen. Back in Missouri, a trophy-hunter nut said he would give me a thousand dollars for a set of antlers like that, if only I had found both.

But Bass Pro Shops and Cabelas can only buy so many racks for their walls, and they have about reached the maximum number they have room for. Those they bought ten years ago aren’t much now compared to the ones being raised in pens. Today, there are people making synthetic deer antlers which you cannot tell from real ones. A ten thousand dollar rack ten years ago may not be worth 100 dollars in another ten years.

And someday, that will put the quietus on trophy hunting…mounted deer head saturation. It then might thin out the numbers of the once-a-year hunters who stream out of the cities in their bright orange suits, and judge their worth according to the number and size of the deer heads they have hung on their office walls. Right now, the four-point restriction means money. It was instigated for that reason. But we only have to put up with this nonsense for a couple of weeks in November, and then the circus is over. The woods I walk through in December and January will be empty. And you would be amazed at the deer carcasses I will find.

As a side bar, it is interesting that this year a non-resident youngster under 16 years of age can get a deer tag which his father would have to pay 225 dollars for, at a cost of only 8 dollars and 50 cents. I hope a non-resident trophy hunter doesn’t figure out that he can bring his youngster and hunt bucks in Missouri about 217 dollars less. Of course, that never happens in the youth season, why would it happen in the regular season!