Spikes are perfectly legal in most places and a legitimate trophy to take home for steaks, roasts, jerky and sausage. We hear things such as, “It was the last day ” “I’m really busy at work ” “It was close to the road ” or simply, “I was hungry.” I pity the kid who wants to shoot her first deer and is told by a parent to wait for a bigger one, as if that is important somehow for ethical or conservation reasons. My own agency sends a post-hunt questionnaire that asks if you harvested a spike or a buck! This all leads to hunters feeling like they need to make excuses when they shoot a spike. The peer pressure to shoot a large buck can be tremendous in some circles, with friends talking about spikes as if they are not really bucks at all. This all gives the average hunter a warped sense of reality and causes nothing but disappointment when they return home. Stores display shelves of glossy-paged hornography magazines with large-racked individuals on their covers that most hunters could only dream of laying their hands on. There is an undeniable increase in the number of hunters who should be registered as “headophiles.” This perception is exaggerated by internet forums and social media, but today a hunter’s reputation seems to be more related to the content of a forum post than a meat pole. As an average hunter and a proudly self-proclaimed meat hunter, I’m not sure this progressive trend constitutes progress.
Somewhere along this progression of successful conservation we might have lost our heads in the quest to mount theirs. It is only because of the abundance of deer that some now have the luxury to let a young buck walk. I suppose the shift in focus by some hunters from the hindquarters to the antlers is simply a by-product of our incredible success in conserving whitetails throughout all of their historical range. To the early hunter, the age of the deer was not important, except for the realization that younger deer tasted better. For most of our history of hunting deer, humans were interested in the meat and leather they provided. Deer hunters were not always so discriminating.
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