I have heard of many reasons why a deers antlers will grow strange on one side or the other. Injury, mineral deficiency and just plain bad genetics. What are your thoughts on this? I now have 4 bucks on my lease with odd growth on one side.
Well his rear end is much larger then the rest of his body so I am guessing he's just really backed up. But I think it may be from being hit by a car or some other injury.
I have no proof other than my own observations. While some may be due to injury I think this is also genetics. The reason I say this is growing up the deer we hunted had that same antler configuration that lasted from one year to the next. Perfect 4 points on one side and a spike on the other. We saw it on all age classes. My first archery harvest was this configuration. We targeted these deer and after 10 years finally stopped seeing them. There were too many occurrences to be injury and they persisted year after year.
One of the most common causes of this is the pedical not healing properly after the antler is cast. Sometime the next years antler grows normal, sometimes the pedical is damaged permanently. After shedding an antler if the pedical gets infected bad enough it can create an absest that can even be fatal. Its not genetics.
If you have 1 buck with an odd rack like that, its likely an injury. If you have 4 bucks with similar racks, its a genetic thing most likely. I mean, what are the chances that 4 deer injured their pedical in the exact same way?
Here is one of the other 4. As you can see his left side is growing downward and is very small. He was the first buck I saw like this and my initial thought with him was injury. As I saw more and more bucks with similar growth I started to question if it were bad genes.
