16-point Buck Turns Out to Be a 16-point DOE

Getting a big buck is a goal that most deer hunters strive for. When that opportunity comes it is incredibly exciting. But sometimes what you saw in the scope and what you walk up to are two very different things.

A deer hunter in Monroe County, Missouri harvested one of the most unique deer a whitetail hunter can encounter, a doe that had grown a fairly large set of antlers.

The antlers on this doe were nontypical. It had brow tines, the points that grow up from near the base of the antler out of the main beam, but they were very oddly shaped and jagged and looks to be where most of the counted points came from.

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The odds of shooting a true antlered doe are about 1 in 10,000. Assuming that the conservation agent, Jessica Filla, confirmed with the hunter that the deer had all-female sex organs inside and outside, it would be a true antlered doe.

The deer could have been a hermaphrodite, meaning it had both male and female sex organs. I'm guessing the wildlife agent would have mentioned that if it were the case. The hunter, Samuel Perotti, would have

Another possibility would be that it was a pseudohermaphrodite, also known as a cryptorchid, which means it has the external sex organs of a male or female deer, and the internal organs of the opposite sex. In either case, the hormones of the deer are all out of whack and weird things can happen with the antlers.

A photo posted to the West River South Dakota Hunting and Fishing Facebook group on November 16, 2021, showed a reported cryptorchid deer shot in South Dakota that still had fuzzy velvet on its antlers.