One has to wonder if that might be the case….just asking!
The Wall Street Journal is carrying a story of a man from North Carolina who went to Kansas to hunt deer and shot a large antlered female deer.
The Wall Street Journal article references three other stories of hunters killing antlered does this year. One was in Maine where a hunter took an unusually large, by body weight, female deer (185 pounds dressed) and sporting a large, 8-point rack of horns. There were also similar incidents in Montana and in Arkansas.
How rare this is appears to be a matter of one’s perspective with opinions varying all over the place. A wildlife professor at Mississippi State University says, “We collect data on about 25,000 bucks every year in Mississippi, and from that data I don’t think I’ve been informed of any antlered does.” Others say there’s a one in 5,000 or one in 10,000 chance of shooting an antlered doe. An Online search for antlered female deer reveals ample reading material with photos of poorly formed antlers – the more common variety – to the “rare” type as has been written about of late where female deer are sporting antlers more typical of 4, 5, or 6-year old mature adult males.
A study of antlered does published in the Journal of Wildlife Management in 1965 described findings from the necropsies of 23 antlered does. “Seventeen were functional females, four were males with undescended testes in the intra-abdominal fat, one was a hermaphrodite, one bore an adrenal-type tumor,” said the paper.
We have seen and will continue to see these “rare” and anomalous occurrences. What I don’t know is if there is becoming an increased occurrence or if it appears that way due to the growth of instant access to information. However, being that we know of other events prominent in this country and around the world, it would seem a reasonable thing to ask the question of whether or not man’s contributions to the air, the earth and the water are playing a role in the incidences of freak deer or other wildlife?
We know that due to drugs from birth control chemicals found in drinking water and public waterways, it is causing fish to have both sex organs. Back in 2006 there was a report in Wisconsin about a man who shot a seven-legged buck deer that had both sex organs. We know that the U.S. Government and military run a continuous rain of hell upon us from the sky with their relentless 24/7 chemical aerosol spraying. One has to believe that all of this must somehow be contributing to deformities and what we often think of as biological anomalies.
At the end of the Wall Street Journal article, an Arkansas farmer, familiar the the case of the 72-year-old woman who shot a female deer with horns, said in a profound statement, “If this can happen to an animal, I can’t see why it can’t happen to people as well.”
