October 17, 2006
You can fool hunters' hopes and expectations some of the time, but not their sense of reality for long. So it is that the "world's biggest elk" turns out to be something like the world's biggest prairie dog.
A carnival act. A freak with a secret. Or an outright lie. Just in time for Halloween.
In cheap literature, readers employ something called "the willing suspension of disbelief" to overlook implausible plots and characters in the interest of entertainment.
Antler worshippers found themselves in a similar swoon of denial over a giant 12-by-9 bull elk whose photo has been circulating on the Internet. But their enchantment was short-lived.
A caption accompanying the photo claims the bull was killed in Idaho's Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness during bowhunting season. The beast's antlers were said to have an outside spread of 79 inches and a green score of 575.
That would be more than 130 points bigger than Boone and Crockett's fair-chase world record and Pope & Young's archery world record. It would be 110 points bigger than the biggest antlers ever found, on a dead bull elk at Upper Arrow Lake, British Columbia.
"This is the biggest bull ever taken with any weapon," the anonymous caption claims.
It was the old shell game, played not so skillfully by someone trying to cover up tawdry reality and gain acceptance in official hunting records. The bull was raised as livestock and slaughtered by a paying consumer, not a hunter. And it did not originate in Idaho.
Credit Rich Landers, outdoors editor for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., for ferreting out the truth behind the lies and the lies behind the truth. After some sleuthing, Landers found a California man paid to shoot the animal at a 1,000-acre, fenced, commercial "shooter-bull" operation in Quebec.
Landers twigged onto the ruse and followed its foul scent after Idaho biologists and a Boone and Crockett trophy expert told him the Selway could produce no such animal. The biggest rack ever packed out of that Idaho wilderness scored 150 points less.
The manager of the operation in Quebec told Landers shooters negotiate prices into the high five-digits to harvest trophy bulls there. He confirmed the bull's measurements and said it was 10 years old.
And it wasn't an elk of the Rocky Mountain subspecies. It was a Manitoba-strain elk, raised with European red deer.
As for "big," that would be relative to one's antler-induced hypnotic trance. The manager said the bull weighed 595 pounds. That would be something like a 110-pound man.
The incident, and its likenesses across North America, is a slur on hunting. Commercial shooting is capable of delivering generous truckloads of antihunting fodder into the hands of extremist groups, as sure as if the shooters and livestock providers were anti-hunters themselves.
Fortunately, most hunters blench at the notion of attaching the term "hunting" to the shooting of captive, artificially raised animals for profit, although the general public might not know that.
At least the farce never will be recorded in official trophy records. The Boone and Crockett Club and Pope & Young Club have fair-chase rules that disqualify trophies taken from anything but wild, free-ranging animals.
In the words of founder Saxton Pope, which Pope & Young flies as an ethical banner: "The true hunter counts his achievement in proportion to the effort involved and the fairness of the sport."
Similarly, Boone and Crockett spells out its rules: "Fair Chase, as defined by the Boone and Crockett Club, is the ethical, sportsmanlike and lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild, native North American big game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals."
What we have here, instead, is a farm-grown, state fair blue ribbon- winning pumpkin. And someone buying that pumpkin to display on his mantle to prove what a great farmer he could be, if he knew anything about farming.
It's a Halloween story, swarming with bad smells and flies. And demons posing as hunters.
dentrye@RockyMountainNews.com