How Can I Harvest a Trophy Whitetail Deer?

When it comes to hunting, one of the major downsides of social media is that whenever some fortunate hunter takes a trophy buck, people in the hunting community get downright jealous and nasty, often accusing the hunter of being a poacher or a high fence hunter.

However, an even bigger issue is that such accusations undermine our authentic wild hunting experiences. The kind of hunting our ancestors indulged in. High fence hunts are essentially the canned hunts that pretty much guarantee a catch even if you’re an amateur hunter. This is basically a disgrace to seasoned hunters who always believe in doing things ethically. Come to think of it, there is no sense of enjoyment and accomplishment you can get out from harvesting a buck if you know beforehand that there’s no way for it to escape, or in simpler terms, it is guaranteed to you.

How It All Started?

It all started in the mid-1970s when the practice of selective deer breeding for whitetails started to produce bucks with more desirable qualities like unusual drop lines and racks. It didn’t take too long for many deer breeders to realize that they could make much more money by selectively breeding big bucks with highly sought-after traits and then selling these bucks to people for hunting purposes.

Many breeders even started pumping their bucks with growth hormones and even choose supplemental feedings to get big bucks with abnormally big antlers. The news spread like wildfire. Within a short span of time, these illegitimate operations were running everywhere.

Now, after several decades, many people in the hunting community have developed this misconception that big whitetails are simply the result of artificial hormones or supplemental feeding –and they don’t exist in reality.

Are Super-Large Bucks Naturally Possible? A Brief Look at the History

It seems that most hunters underestimate the power of nature and what it is capable of achieving when the conditions are perfect. Since it is absolutely possible for all-natural wild whitetails to look like “farmed bucks”, many people don’t waste a second in labeling the hunters of these bucks as high fence hunters.

For instance, the "Hole-in-the-Horn” was a massive 328-2/8-inch buck. It was an all-natural, completely wild buck that lived in Portage County, Ohio for all its life. Other examples include Sal Aherens buck and Alexander McDonald buck.

Though these bucks were completely wild, if you take a look at their antlers, you can’t deny the possibility of them being labeled as high fence bucks by today’s amateur hunters. Many hunters just can’t wrap their heads around the fact that such bucks can still exist in the wild.

Does It Matter?

If you think that you can be prepared to handle such situations beforehand, like filming your hunt, this is still not a completely foolproof strategy. Case in point – Joe Franz buck. This record-sized buck was taken in 2014. Franz had a feeling that such an unusually big buck could draw suspicion from other hunters. For this reason, he decided to film the entire hunt in the hope of staving off accusations of poaching or high fences. However, in the end, it made a negligible difference. He had been accused of poaching. In order to prove innocence and to get his equipment back from Iowa DNR, he had to spend a lot of money and time.

It’s quite unfortunate that hunters need to prove their innocence even when their harvests are completely legitimate. Gone are the days when there was a sense of trust and confidence in the hunting community. In this internet era, trolls waste no time discrediting every abnormally big buck on baseless accusations. Unfortunately, it seems, some hunters are jealous of every hunter who has the skill to take a large whitetail.

It is high time that we recognize the hard work or even the sheer luck of these hunters who manage to take the trophy deer and we stop labeling them as poachers or high fence hunters. Let’s make our hunting community a happy and positive place all over again.

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