Desperate Trophy

@Daroru: It saddens me as I've become quite an animal lover in my old age. On the other hand, a balance is maintained, and this death means life to other animals, like vultures, even if they appear rather unsympathetic to our eyes.

@Levine: Actually, not to be too gruesome, but there wasn't really much left of the eyes --I think the vultures had already picked them clean.

@Ian Bramham: You can't see them so well in the image size shown here, but there are clear saw/cut marks in the white area of the antler. I'd guess something like a hacksaw was used. They cut through about 90% of the antler and then broke the rest off (you can see the ridge where the cutting stopped and the remaining piece was broken off on the bottom of the elliptical white area).

@Maysam: Exactly.

@JoeB: I hunted in my younger days; but I have no interest in killing anything anymore. I don't have any particular problem with hunting, when the game is eaten, even if the hunter gives away the meat. The trophy aspect seems a little adolescent to me, though again, in conjunction with a hunt where the game is eaten, ok. But a "hunt" that amounts to little more than some guy with a high powered rifle killing a defenseless animal for sport: I find that rather sickening and pathetic. I saw a video the other day of about four guys with high powered rifles shooting a Lion. It was a disgusting spectacle of these "men" slapping and congratulating and hugging each other for the "challenging" feat of using several big guns to kill an animal. Wow. I was frankly rooting for the Lion. Too bad he didn't nail any of those jerks (though the disgust of this event is a pale shadow of the disgust I felt encountering another video of "hunters" literally blowing apart prairie dogs with high powered rifles --those sick and twisted perverts belong in prison or on a deserted island away from any pretense of civilization). As far as stopping to cut the antlers off a dead deer that you either ran over with a car or saw dead along the side of a road: I don't find it particularly disgusting or bad, just very sad and pathetic.