Hunting Mule-Deer and Related Thoughts

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But what of the victims?

I have witnessed the nightmare of the slaughterhouse, I have held my nose while touring a poultry operation, I have watched bound lobsters agonizing in a 10-gallon purgatory — and I have seen the wild deer die at the hands of a hunter. Forced to a choice, I would choose to be a deer — born free, living wild, and, sooner or later, dying quickly and cleanly with a bullet or arrow through my heart. Further, were our 17 to 21 million deer given a voice in the matter, I venture they would support hunting themselves — for without it, only a few of them would ever know life at all. And as to being subjected to the terror of the hunt, deer evolved as a prey species — nervous by nature, wound spring — tight, past masters of evasion. Civilized man has removed most of the deer's natural predators from the wild; were deer not hunted by man, they soon would become something less than the clever and elusive creatures whose appearance is so rare, fleeting, and magical that it quickens the pulse.

The deer I know best is the western muley. Even though a handful of whopper whitetails in the 400-pound category have turned up over the years, the mule deer, on the average, is the larger-bodied of the two, with mature bucks frequently topping 300 pounds. The muley's antlers are proportionately larger and are bifurcate, or forked, rather than having all the tines sprouting from a single main beam as does the whitetail's. And there are other distinctions, both morphological and behavioral. Even so, it's not the differences between the two species that dictate how each is hunted, so much as the geography and vegetation of the dissimilar biomes they inhabit.

For a p rime example, sitting in a tree in a hardwood forest, overlooking the intersection of two or more well-used game trails is arguably the most productive method of hunting whitetails. But tree-standing is rarely used and only occasionally successful for mule deer. That's because muleys are more wide-ranging and less predictable in their daily movements than whitetails; also, much of the best of their habitat (above-timberline tundra, sage and piñon-juniper flats, slickrock canyons, and desert) has no climbable trees. Similarly, antler rattling, squatting in a ground blind, hunting over rutting scrapes, and calling — all of which can be lucrative whitetail tactics-are far less effective for mule deer. And still-hunting-moving slowly and quietly through the forest in hopes of seeing a deer before it spots you — while po tentially equally effective for both species, is less productive for mule deer simply because of numerical probabilities: There are fewer muleys than whitetails, and they're scattered over a much broader and an often more rugged range.

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