Well, out of the handful of writing contributors that write for the PON, Bob Steiner has consistently been my least favorite. I don't care for most of his "ideas", nor do I typically share his way of thinking. Well, after expressing such on here, I have to give the guy a bit of credit. He actually wrote a column that contained snippets of humor that made me giggle (just a little bit), and contained truth also. It was on all the MASSIVE Deer that are submitted to various publications. Not horn-wise, but rather weight-wise. His premise pretty much was, either get a reliable (properly callibrated) scale, or just stop the nonsensical guessing at a Deer's weight. What "appears" to be a big Deer, may very well be a big Deer, but trumping up the weights to the tune of an extra 50+ pounds just makes all these captions with the photos appear silly. It seems that every single Deer photo nowadays not only comes with the "green score", but also an exorbitant weight with the additional proclamation of it being "dressed weight" to really convince the reader that it was just as big as a Holstein.
Every Buck, in nearly every photo is a nice rounded multiple of 5 or 10 number, and never less than 170 "dressed".
. I agree with Steiner on this one. I've whacked my share of big Deer, and have estimated some at incredible weights (Doe included), only to be humbled when popped on a reliable scale. Sure AR/HR may be producing healthier full-bodied Deer compared to 30 years ago, but some folks need to get a grip......... or a nice reliable scale.


