Before me, a doe stood in an open lane, unaware of my presence. I didn’t have to be told what was following her, and it didn’t take long for him to show himself, sooner than usual for most bucks when they are romancing a doe. She wasn’t ready for the romance, but he was. His neck was swollen, his mouth open, and his antlers impressive.
He may have been a 10 pointer and his rack was unusual in that the tips of it extended out past his nose. I just dropped to my knees and focused on him with my camera, but I knew it was too dark to get the photo I wanted. He saw me and turned back into the timber. The doe headed away at a trot the other direction.
But if you had been with me, and just sat down in that little lane, you would have seen what romance does to a buck. He would have returned to chase her, exposing himself to the dangers of carelessness in the pursuit of his natural instincts. That buck was what many of the lesser class of nimrods who refer to themselves as “trophy-hunters” call a “trophy buck.”
I can’t think that way. I wasn’t 10 years old when my father gave me that talk and I can remember it yet today almost word for word.
“When you catch a big fish or kill a beautiful duck,” he told me, “don’t look at it as an achievement, or some personal accomplishment. God made no living thing to be a trophy. An outdoorsman has to have a ‘reverence for life.’ I want you to have that, always.”
Years later when I was in college I learned to mount ducks and geese, and after we had floated the river, and the day with my dad or grandfather was particularly memorable, I would save the skin of a mallard or wood-duck, or some rare species like a widgeon, and mount it in a winged-flight pose. Beauty and memories they give me; not trophies.
I asked dad if ol’ Bill Stalder and ol’ Jim Splechter down at the pool hall were wrong to brag about the antlers hanging from their shed or porch or on the wall behind the woodstove.
“They would be, if that was the reason they hunt,” dad said, “but it isn’t. Those men take care of the venison as if it were a butchered hog, and they always stretch and tan the deer hides for something.”
Not all Indian tribes thanked the Great Spirit and the animal itself for the gift of such “trophies” as moose and deer and elk. But some really did, and apparently nothing about the animal was wasted. In archaeological digs I participated in at Missouri University so many tools we found, of various kinds were made from bone or antler, and adornments and tools made from teeth and bone.
We found shoulder blades that were made into affective digging implements and found that the bones were split open for the marrow, always been removed for food. In grandpa’s boyhood, goose and duck feathers and down were always saved and used in various ways. I was shown the way that river families made use of everything, carcasses of trapped coons, muskrat, even possums, were always eagerly sought for meat even into the 1950s and ’60s. Bobcat meat was a prized feast for almost any backwoods family.
I won’t speak too awful bad of the trophy hunter; many of my friends are really into “scoring” antlers, hanging “trophies” on the wall. I think it’s memories those antlers represent. But when men who call themselves “trophy hunters” are seeking big antlers just for monetary gain, I do not want to be around them. It is a plague upon hunting in this day and time, and it could be that the new diseases are the Creator’s answer to that greed.
Trophy hunters have long used corn and concealed cameras to tell them where big antlered deer are and the times they pass by. Now they are learning to use drones with cameras to find and kill their “trophies.”
Times change and men change. Our state game department people know well that they make a lot of money through “trophy” attitudes. They found years ago that many deer hunters didn’t want the meat from the bucks they killed, and leaving the carcass untouched in the woods falls under the laws prohibiting “wanton waste.” So they came up with the idea of “Share the Harvest” and it was a good thing, converting venison from “trophies” to usable meat for poor families. But the Creator has thrown a wrench in that idea with the coming of “transmissible spongiform encephalopathy” which is the real name for “chronic wasting disease.” Lots of creatures get that TSE disease; cattle, goats, elk, sheep, deer, caribou – and humans.
Last week I talked to the son of a famous Missouri biologist from the 1960s and ’70s who told me that he had just lost a relative, diagnosed with TSE. Maybe that person got it from eating the meat from a goat or sheep or caribou. Surely they didn’t get it from deer. Anyone in the “Share the Harvest” program will tell you that cannot happen. The hundreds of humans who died from TSE, got it from something else.
Before you hunt deer this season, please read the letter about telechecking your deer, sent to me by a retiring enforcement employee who has a warning for you. That letter is found at larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
To get information on our upcoming magazine or any of my books, or to receive the eight pages of research I have found concerning TSE in deer (chronic wasting disease) just call my office, 417-777-5227 or write to me. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo,65613 or email lightninridge47@gmail.com.