It's not about killing deer to me, it's more seeing my wife succeed at something she has really grown to love. It's about going into the woods knowing you have at LEAST 50 square miles to hunt BY YOURSELF. It's seeing deer behavior in 4 days that I wouldn't see, and "haven't" seen In New Hampshire my entire hunting life. I treat it like more of a wilderness vacation rather than a hunting trip. No matter how bad it might be this year, I am confident We will see more deer in 4 days there than we will see in 4 YEARS in NH. Remember, EVERY deer is a trophy if you kill it on it's terms. I LOVE hunting with my wife and if she feels pampered at the same time, it's a win win for me.
In the current climate of instant gratification, bigger-is-better, naming of bucks, referring to them as "shooters" or a particular number (score), this is a wonderfully grounded and rather refreshing perspective.
If you hunt in a place with lots of deer and liberal bag limits, like I do, passing on bucks with small antlers seems like the best thing to do, since if you shoot them before they have matured, you'll never know how good they could have been. I only shoot three kinds of bucks; those that have large or interesting antlers that are worth sending to the taxidermist, those that have some sort of antler flaw and probably should be prevented from breeding, and those that have been wounded and need to be put down. That said, it is easy to be picky if you know that you're going to see more deer, often more than 20 per day, and can take 2 bucks and about as many antlerless deer as you want to buy tags for.
I would disagree that every deer is a trophy if you kill it on its terms. Unless you're hunting in a high fence operation, every wild deer lives on its own terms. To me, a deer is just a deer unless it is your first deer or if there is something that physically sets it apart from others of its species.
When my high school buddies come from NH to hunt in NE for the first time, I don't let them carry their rifles for the first day that they're here, otherwise they almost always want to shoot the first deer with forked antlers that they see. After they've hunted with me a couple of times, they tend to be more selective, unless it happens to be the last day of their hunt. I will note for the record that I'm much less interested in hunting than in shooting and prefer hunting squirrels to deer 'cause I can do it whenever I want to over a period of seven months, not just during 34 days out of every 365.
