dang guys, don't know if i'm up for that kinda abuse again. remember last time? some guy was callin' me all kindsa names. ok, here goes a condensed version. Kirt shot a buck sometime in the 70's. it's the one on the cover of his first book. some other guy shot a buck in the 40's that is very similar. when i first saw it, i thought he had done wrong too, but have since proven to myself otherwise. there photos of it in the NRA magazine back then. a guy named householder, here in Az., saw the photos and notified b&c. turns out the buck from the 40's had been stolen from siever's taxidermy in phoenix. so they decided that somehow Kirt had aquired the stolen rack. the older buck had been officially scored and entered in the book, so there was a record of it. Kirt's buck is wider and has more points. he has photos of the caped out front quarters, with the antlers still attached to the skull, in the back of a pickup that was made in the 70's. these photos were taken way before all the computer generation crap that can be done now. i've had one for about 15 years. the guy that used to own the rack in question, told me, to my face, not 3rd hand, that the original buck had been dropped and the skull plate had been broken and repaired with fiberglass. Kirt's rack has never been repaired. Kirt's rack was taken by an indepenent party the the university of Arizona and the premier authority of carbon-14 dating tested it. said it was alive at the time Kirt said he shot it. absolutely did not live in the 40's. oh yeah, and did i mention that the guy, householder, that started all this crap likes to take pictures of naked little girls and also snuck into a morgue to take nude pictures of a little girl that was raped and murdered in a cotton field down here? he was arrested and convicted of this crap and it cost the county coroner his job before that one was over. anyway, b&c still saw fit to throw Kirt's buck out of the book. didn't stop there. they threw out a desert bighorn that he shot when he lived in Az. in the 60's. some game warden named jett got on the case an found that the Az. game and fish, not Kirt, improperly filled out the required paper work on the sheep. so they tossed the sheep too. what the problem was, when he took the sheep to the office for inspection, the only person there was a female clerk and the paper work was supposed to be filled out by a game warden. whatever. then they threw out a coues deer he shot in the 60's too. he didn't get it scored until sometime in the 80's. scored big too. they said it was a texas whitetail and threw it out too. no dna or anything was ever done, just chunked it because this jett guy said too. ok, now go back and look at the evidence. who's side is it on? especially on the big muley. and then think about these things. he's shot many bucks larger than the one in question. why would he risk putting it on the cover of a very popular book? anyway, you can see what i mean. well, Kirt got his hump up and got a lawyer and all that. didn't do any good. lost his clothing line in cabela's. lost a bunch of other endorsements. figures it cost him close to a million bucks in lost revenue from things. so he told b&c to take all his stuff outta the books. there was a bunch too. not just deer. he's taken all kindsa record heads. the guys is a hunter. they wouldn't do it, so he sued em and made em do it. they didn't do it because they wanted to, like all the rumors are, they did it because he made them. he told me that he was trying to develop a scoring system that gave animals credit for all the mass that they carried and felt that what happened to him was partly in retaliation for that. but he's held his head high through all of it. he ain't afraid to go out in public or any of that stuff. he ain't embarassed by, just pissed. and, unlike all the other rumors, until he got busted a couple years ago for letting a client shoot at a cow elk out of his truck (turned out it was a mounted elk. it's kinda funny really) he had never been cited for a game violation. Kirt is a pretty down to earth guy. and a real good hunter. people get jealous i guess. since all this crap he's shot a half dozen or so huge mule deer that would make b&c. and a bunch more that any of us would be thrilled with. oh well, the sun still came up this morning. and no, his ex wife didn't turn him in and get him in a bunch of trouble. him and Paula have been married for probably 30 years. he has an ex-wife, but that was a long time ago. hope you guys read with an open mind. later.