Thanksgiving Surprise

[rr2241tx]

Struggled out in the drizzle, fog and early morning blackness Thanksgiving morning against my better judgement. Half an hour after legal sunrise I watched this buck slowly emerge from the fog and disappear straight into the brush. Half an hour later as the fog burned off enough to see again, he was standing in the middle of a crowd of does just at the edge of the clearing not far from where he'd disappeared earlier. Not a Kansas Monster, but completely respectable for the Texas Hill Country. The real surprise came when I started skinning him and discovered he was a stag!

[rickyrick]

Nice looking animal

[TX Hunter]

good looking Deer. But im curious what do you mean by a Stag ?

[rickyrick]

I'll admit, I looked it up the other day and its meaning is ambiguous, but in his context I think it was castrated or otherwise sterile.

[TX Hunter]

I didnt know, but that makes me wonder how a Deer would end up like this, I wonder if it would be done by Man, an accident, or maby a birth defect? Guess we will never know. Anyhow, if it has the same effect on Deer that it does on Cattle, the meat should be delicious.:)

[Dr. A]

Surely the testes were retained. I've castrated thousands of animals in my life, and unless an animal is castrated by man or accident, they have gonads. Once in a while they are retained (cryptorchid).

[hogdogs]

Maybe he means hermaphrodite?

Brent

[devildog66]

That is a nice kill. I have heard of wild pigs getting larger tusks after being gelted.

[thallub]

Congrats on the nice buck.

[rr2241tx]

Thanks guys. The local term is stag. Cryptorchid is most likely the correct medical term. Once in a while there are tiny little testicles undecended, other times they are so small there's not even any discernable gonads. Nobody seems to know exactly why these animals occur but it seems to follow a "wet" year when the does eat a lot of lichen while they are pregnant (according to A&M). The problem is the animals are usually several years old before their condition is known. There may be sterile does too, but we have never bothered to look, a fat doe is usually presumed to have lost her fawns to predation. It could be like in cattle when there are mixed sex twins, the heifer is invariably sterile (freemartin), the bull calf goes to market, so we would never know about him. In any event, they are like barred hogs and castrated steers when it's time to eat.