Wasteful bunch of ingrates!

As many of you may know, I love hunting, whether it be for deer (my favorite), rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, goose, duck, or whatever else is in season. I think hunting is a great way to spend time outdoors, get some exercise and put some meat on the table. I will, however, never shoot an animal that I don't intend to eat. This is something my dad stressed to me from the first day I ever picked up a bb gun, "Only shoot what you plan to eat." This is why I usually don't shoot crows and other nuissance animals except for coyotes which I will shoot because they have been known to eat house pets and kill young children, plus they eat deer which I disapprove of.


Today I went out to the same public hunting land where I got my doe this year and my buck the year before to look for deer tracks around my hunting spot and to see if I could maybe get a squirrel or rabbit or two.

It was a beautiful snowy day for being in the woods. The entire woods looked like this:

Four roosters (male pheasants) flew up from the side of the creekbed as I was walking back to my spot. Unfortunately, pheasant season is over, otherwise I would have had a decent shot at 1 or more of them.

When I got back into the woods, I was pumped because there was a lot of deer tracks, scat and beds right around my usual spot, which bodes very well for next year. I also saw some turkey tracks as well as some coyote tracks, which were interesting to see if nothing else.

Two separate squirrels came into view, but never close enough to get a shot at, which really didn't bother me that much since squirrel isn't my favorite wild game food.

After I left the woods, I walked over to a feed plot which the DNR maintains on this large chunk of public hunting land where I kicked up 3 more roosters, 2 of which would have been easy shoots. Had it been pheasant season, I would have looked at the roosters kind of like this:

After I got done walking aroundin the field, I headed back to my car to go home. I decided to drive around to the West side of the public land to the access road there to see if there were any deer in fields and such. About halfway down the access road, I saw a dead deer on the side of the road partially covered in snow.

I pulled over and was disgusted to see the carcasses of 3 dead bucks laying there field dressed (guts removed) and with their antlers cut off! There was also the carcass of a doe and the skinned remains of a 5th deer, which I couldn't tell if it was a buck or a doe.

Some wasteful bastards had shot them for the sole purpose of cutting off their antlers and left the meat (probably about 70+lbs of meat per deer) sitting there to waste. There are multiple things that bother me about this;
1. The last time any hunter could legally shoot a deer with antlers was Jan 10th. This was before the last major snowfall, yet the three de-antlered bucks were laying on top of the bottom layer of snow, which likely indicates they were poached.
2. The meat was completely wasted, probably more than 300lbs of meat! Iowa has the HUSH (Help Us Stop Hunger) Program that allows hunters to donate their deer at over 80 meat lockers in the state who will process the deer for free and give the meat to homeless shelters, women's shelters, and various other food shelfs. The nearest location that accepts deer for Hush was less than 20 miles from where these deer were dumped. If the bastard hunters/ poachers weren't going to use the meat, they could have at least donated it to people who would! The only problem is that this requires a deer tag (indicating that the deer was legally harvested) on the animal, and based on the circumstances, I don't think these deer were harvested legally.
3. Why shoot the deer if you're only after the antlers? If you want antlers, go on e-bay and buy a set.
4. There is really nothing I can do about this situation or to prevent it in the future.
5. Why the doe? If you're not going to eat the meat from a doe, why even shoot it? She didn't even have antlers these idiots could hack off of her!


Here are some pics of the poached deer (Warning, not for the faint of heart):
You'll notice that in several of the pics you can see where the deer's antlers were either cut off at the base or removed with a portion of the skull.

1st pic: pile of 3 de-antlered bucks
2nd pic: Buck with antlers and part of skull cut out
3rd pic: Buck with antlers cut off at base
4th pic: Other buck with antlers and part of skull cut out
5th pic: Doe