[walking buffalo]

http://mainehuntingtoday.com/bbb/200...rophy-hunting/

If anyone here is interested Read carefully, go to links for further reading.

Some Quotes from Geist in rebuttal.

The matter of trophy males contains counterintuitive ironies. Very large horns or antlers are not adaptive. They are freaks. They may be the biggest, but they are not the best!

Hunting regulations have been altered so that now a full-curl restriction is in place, virtually terminating hunting mortality in rams.

Moreover, in some populations rams never reached full curl status because of poor forage conditions.

It has also escaped that vigorous breeding bighorn rams interact with others frequently, and in their frequent, severe clashes of heads “broom” or break back the horn tips. That shortens the horns. Consequently, many of the vigorous breeders never reach full curl or even 4/5th curl status and cannot be legally taken. Moreover, on the Ram Mountain study area rams are now under the full-curl rule. That is, there is practically no hunter kill, as Ram Mountain rams only exceptionally reach full-curl status. And if they do, they are virtually past breeding.

reintroduction programs generated continentally exceptionally viperous bighorns whose rams also grew record sized horns.

Mrs. Beth MacCallum, was instrumental in the matter of rehabilitating coal strip mines to custom-built bighorn sheep habitat close to Hinton in Alberta. For us this experiment was a test if we understood sheep ecology, as we claimed we did. When all was said and done, mountain sheep reproduction exploded! Bighorns from Jasper National Park visiting the custom-built sheep ranges voted with their feet, and never returned to the park. The rehabilitate strip mines attracted mule deer, elk, grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines but also birds and the number of nesting birds rose steadily year-by-year. A moon-landscape was transformed into an oasis of life, and spectacularly so. The female sheep doubled in body weight, while the rams grew into the largest seen in North America since the ice ages! Their horn sizes broke all North American records! The biggest bighorn rams ever in North America were taken from these rehabilitated strip mines.