Gryph

No don't give up! I would trade several of these little boys for one of your fantastic sambar stag trophies. A lot of hunters hunt a lifetime without scoring a stag as good as some of those. But thanks for the nice comments.

My story - at first I was going to put it straight into the forum as a post - then cut and pasted it out as I realised I had too pany photos I wanted to use.

The stag only scored about 170 Douglas Score points though he would have been higher had the left antler not had the rear half of the palm snapped off, probably due to fighting. I didn't see this until after he was shot. Hindsight - should have waited longer and checked better - but the venison still tasted good.

At first I was reasonably happy with this stag and to tell you the truth thought I had shot the one I saw all along. But with hindsight I thought it over and remembered how wide and magnicient the first look of the stag was and realised I had shot a different one. I didn't think the area had any really good heads until two weeks after my hunt when another member - much more experienced than I - shot a 220 DS stag. The one I saw with hindsight may have been at least in the 200 DS range but I didn't see him for long. In my opinion a true trophy starts around 200 DS, but as said I have this boy hanging on the wall as I still have to take a really nice fallow trophy myself. Could arrange a game farm hunt but prefer looking for a free range animal. I don't know his age but his neck has quite a few scars so he has been through a few ruts.

These stags have good feed inaddition to the pasture they raid the local market gardens. They actually live very near quite a built up area and I believe they get hammered by the local Italians and Greeks.

I will try to take some photos of his antlers if I can - with vintage I am pretty busy at the moment. In the picture the better antler is facing the camera (obviously).

A lot of the stags in that area do have cleft palms as do one or two other SA herds. When it was still legal releases of high quality breeding stags would have improved a lot. Plus some animals have escaped from farms over time - fences broken down by trees, deer ripping off the wire fighting with wild stags outside etc.

Even in my captive herd on my farm - there is a mixture of cleft palms and full palmed stags. Though none have shown really good palms yet - the breeding stag is five years old and is an OK head - I have four three year olds from him and two are looking pretty good. The other two will get culled this year for venison or be sold off live.