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412 lb whitetail?
hivoltg
Member Posts: 928 ✭✭✭✭
Has anyone seen pics of this monster? Supposedly(sp) he was killed in Nebraska bya an Arkansas bowhunter. I have pics in my email, just don't know how to post them. If someone wants to post them here for me, post you email address and I will shoot them over to you.
Cody
Cody
Comments
Bigger or byte-sized?
Technologically, the hunting and fishing have never been better. A Nebraska deer supposedly weighing 412 pounds appears to be the latest proof of the power of computer trickery.
Dennis Anderson, Star Tribune
Last update: January 21, 2006 - 6:35 PM
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Louie Spray was born at the wrong time.
Spray is the late Wisconsin angler whose world-record 69-pound, 11-ounce muskie caught in 1949 was upheld last week by the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wis., despite a voluminous protest by a coalition of muskie fanatics filed last year.
Did Spray catch the big muskie? Undoubtedly.
Was it as big as he alleged? Maybe.
But maybe not.
Some University of Minnesota mathematicians -- employing complex formulas understood only by them -- raise suspicions that the weight of the fish was a stretch, given inferences gained from a photo of the fish being held by Spray.
But no matter. If Spray did indeed fudge the truth, he lived in a time when hunters and anglers wanting to tell tall tales had to fill their muskies and whitetails with lead weights or other ballast before hoisting them onto a scale.
Not so the modern fibber.
As evidence, consider the many photos paraded on the Internet in recent years of outsized walleyes, bogus grizzly bear attacks and now, most recently, a 412-pound -- 412 pounds -- white-tailed deer supposedly killed in Nebraska.
Perhaps a photo of this creature has arrived in your in-box.
And what a monster is.
Or isn't.
Maybe, given the possibilities of software programs such as PhotoShop, it's not even a 200-pound deer. Instead it might be a fairly commonly sized animal that has been "blown up" by computer wizardry.
Perhaps the hunter (or hunters, depending on which photo you're looking at) in the photo with the deer wasn't even kneeling next to a whitetail.
Perhaps instead he was kneeling next to a campfire. Or part of any setting, really.
These days, all it takes is a moderately skilled computer operator to grow a deer or other beast to otherworldly size. And put you, with your rifle, next to it.
I called Nebraska Game and Parks Commission big game manager Kit Hams to check out the biGodeer story,
Hams is a genial man. But he said he's tired of talking about the phantom deer.
"I've wasted more time on this," he said.
Hams doesn't think such an animal ever existed.
At least not in his state.
"At one time we had a name of a guy who supposedly was in one of the photos going around the Internet," Hams said. "But we couldn't find such a name on our list of nonresident hunters."
Nor has a Nebraska resident ever recorded shooting such a deer, Hams said, adding no one in the state has even heard of such a deer being shot there.
Hams said he couldn't recall a 300-pound whitetail being shot in Nebraska -- never mind a 400-pounder.
At least peripherally, the issue is pertinent to Minnesotans because this state is home -- as far as anyone knows -- to the two largest whitetails (by body weight) ever killed in North America.
Both weighed a few pounds over 400 -- field-dressed.
The first was killed in 1925 near the boundary waters in northeast Minnesota. Obviously, the slight chance a certified scale was available back then to weigh the deer raises legitimate suspicions about its actual weight.
But another hefty Minnesota buck -- again, weighing just more than 400 pounds, field-dressed -- was killed more recently. This one was dropped during firearms season in the early 1980s on the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation west of Duluth.
That deer's weight was verified.
Deer appears gut shot, bloated
If the deer appearing in the Internet photo has not been altered by computer, a couple of things seem apparent.
One is the animal was probably gut shot, lost for a time and found by hunters only after it had bloated.
Indications of this are found on the animal's side, where dried -- not fresh -- blood seems visible.
Additionally, the deer's body seems curiously out of proportion to its head.
"The antlers don't look to me like they're any more than 16 inches wide," Hams said. "That would indicate the deer is relatively young."
The question is why anyone -- no matter how much time they have to waste -- would go to the trouble of posting such a photo on the Internet without information substantiating its credentials.
After all, according to an old Chinese saying, "Man who catches big fish doesn't take alley on way home."
Meaning that -- this is America, after all -- fame and money by the bucketload await anyone who legitimately shot such an animal.
Yet, and still -- this is part of all such Internet mysteries -- someone must know the people who posed with this "big" deer.
Yet no one in deer-hunting chat rooms I visited had a clue who the "hunters" were or whether the deer was real.
"I don't have any trouble with people having fun on the Internet," Hams said. "But I wish they would have said the deer had been killed in Kansas or Iowa.
"Not Nebraska."
Cody
http://www.booneandcrockettclub.org/news/trophyWatch.asp?area=news#watchE7691985-CDB2-491F-971C-A1DBAB12B89A