Yeah, I'm getting to be the same way, partly because there aren't many places to put antlers anymore, even in the garage. But aside from the meat quality, have also found that getting smaller elk out of the woods is much easier once you're over 60.
One interesting side-note to all this. Ran into Craig Boddington at the SHOT Show a number of years ago. He'd long been an advocate of larger cartridges for elk, at a minimum the .30-06, and had discouraged the use of the .270, even though he'd never used one--which a number of people kept pointing out.
He'd hunted the Whittington Center for elk that fall, and decided to use a .270, using 150 Partitions and, I believe, H4831. The Whittington has some good bulls, and when Craig found the one he wanted, the shot turned out to be a little over 400 yards--at the time the longest shot he'd ever taken on a bull. Craig's a good shot and put a Partition just behind the shoulder through the lungs--and the bull also died quicker than any he'd ever shot before!
He was smiling at himself as he told the story, but I noticed from that year onward he mentioned smaller cartridges far more favorably than he ever had before, both for elk and African plains game. Of course, his daughter started hunting about the same time, and she used a 7mm-08 very successfully, which had something to do with it. But I don't know if Craig would have gone along with the 7-08 if he hadn't already had his .270/elk epiphany....
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” John Steinbeck
