This is a great story. I would have shot this buck and I hope it would serve as a lesson to the other high fence farms to make sure your deer don't get out because it just cost them 19K! Teen Hunter Tags Escaped Monster Buck | Field & Stream
I hear people say, "High fence farming is no threat to the wildlife, they are fenced and can not spread disease from farm animals to wildlife." - yeah right, this is another big reason they should not exist.
I was wondering if it will count to a record? Since it wasn't on a farm then couldn't it technically? Pretty funny I thought!
So if this buck bred with other does there could be it's offspring running around forever. No one will know. In 50 years when this has happened a lot more every time a hunter kills a big deer it will be suspect to being an offspring of a nearby canned hunt deer farm. Sad. The debates in the future for admitting record book deer into Pope and Young and Boone and Crockett will be heated. Makes me sick.
Genetics are largely overstated anyway. Most deer, given the same environment of low pressure and high nutrition, could grow stupid enormous racks like AI deer on deer farms.
Playing devils advocate....Can he legally do that? He shot a deer that belonged to somebody, he knew it belonged to someone because he saw the tag in the ear so he knew it was a deer that got out of a deer farm fence. I guess my question is, can the deer farm try to get some kind of money out of the kid? Can they take some kind of legal action? Is it different than shooting somebody's cow that got out? Whats the law? Doesn't the deer farm own that deer? If I had a $20,000 deer that got out and some kid shot it I'd be pissed. Again, whats the law in this situation?
I would think it's very different. The deer was a legal target, as it was deer season, but a cow is a domestic animal and not even hunted. That kid could have easily said he didn't see the tag until after the fact? I hope we hear the outcome, because there always seems to be more to a story than is initially told.
This! If the deer was tagged, branded, or somehow identified as belonging to someone as a member of a domestic livestock herd then that kid just bought himself a huge lawsuit. From a farmer's perspective, that's a big loss to suffer. It doesn't matter how good your fences are, sooner or later they will get out. It doesn't matter if they are cattle, deer, or elk. The farmer still owns them and has the right to get it back. He/she may be liable for any property damage caused by a loose animal but nobody has the right to kill their animal. Whether someone agrees with the existence of high fence farms is beside the point. The logic that says it's OK to shoot his buck also says that any tree stand left in the woods is fair game to take home. If I was my $20,000 deer that got loose, I would have offered a $5 to $10k reward to anybody who tranquilized and returned it.
You could not be more wrong. Many years of selective genetics go into creating these super bucks. An incredibly small fraction of deer possess the traits necessary to grow giant racks. There is a reason that some breed stock is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Genetics are everything in the giant buck world.
He did admit in an interview with a major magazine, that he knew the deer was there, was hunting for it, identified it as the escaped deer before killing it, and then killed it. The farms prosecutor would get them a lot of money if they decided to press charges. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I will say congrats to the hunter. Deer of a lifetime. High fence or not and he shot it fair chase. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
