JG, why is your son sleeping with a fine buck like that in his hands? I just don't get these young sprouts. They just don't get excited about anything but nintendo...LOL. Those are some dandy bucks.
As far as goats go, look for mass compared to the eyeball like Greenhorn said. Mass FAR outweighs a couple of inches in tine length. Tine length is nice to talk about, but give me the "fatty" bucks with mass. They look so much better and don't shrink on the wall quite so bad.
I laugh at all the hunters I run into every year that swear they have seen 20-30 16" inch bucks. Of course, every one of them is a "Booner"! I have measured a pile of "16 inch bucks" that barely squeaked past 12". The hunter always says, "I must have hit the wrong buck. The one I shot at was over 16 inches." Kind of like every bull is a 350 6x6 and every 4x4 buck is 30 inches. No species on the planet is more misjudged and experiences more ground shrinkage than speed goats.
I killed a nice 15" buck a couple of years ago that netted 75". While hunting for him I turned down a couple of nice bucks at first light. A couple of punk kids out on their first hunt knocked the bucks over that I had just passed on. I just had to go check them out....right? One went 16" with a score of 80. The other one was just under 17" with a score of 81! I really kicked myself! It must have been the low light...no wait, the sun was in my eyes. Yeah, that is what fouled me up ;o) Neither of those bucks looked to be over 14.5 inches, nor would I have thought they would have scored over 74. Goats are tough to judge, unless you see a real gagger, then you can't get the gun on them fast enough. Few critters are more fun to hunt! Flinch
