If any of you will call the Colorado Attorney General, you can access the public record and see exactly what is on Kirt Darner.
I think you'll be surprised that many of the things said here are completely untrue, save the conviction of his guided hunter shooting at the elk decoy which, according to the Attorney General, Kirt took complete responsibility for.
As far as convictions for poaching mule deer, there are exactly zero. Now I realize that no convictions doesn't clear a guy's name, but consider this: Kirt has killed at least 15 bucks that meet the B&C all-time minimums and many were killed in the eighties and nineties including an awesome Mexico typical that nets over 210" B&C. If he were poaching these deer as some have said, shouldn't he have at least one conviction?
The buck on the cover of his book is the only one in controversy but you need to know the whole story. After the book was published, someone submitted a photo of a buck killed on the Kaibab in the 1930's that was strikingly similiar to Kirt's and also had been entered in B&C. B&C dropped Kirt's buck from it's book even though it's score was different than the buck killed in the 30's. Kirt, in protest, removed all of his bucks from B&C. He still has the original letter that he drafted with his attorney to remove the other heads. So when people say B&C kicked all of Kirt's bucks out of the record book, that's not true.
Kirt then took his buck to the University of Phoenix and had an unaffiliated tester run a carbon-14 dating analysis on the buck. The tester said the buck was killed after 1975 and couldn't have been harvested in the 30's which was before above-ground-nuclear testing and easily detectible in the carbon-14 cycle. There is a newsletter printed in 1991 from the original Mule Deer Foundation (or whatever their name was, then) that details this dating story. The pictures of both the bucks are in that story and I can't tell the difference.
Kirt is married to the same wife he was when he wrote "How to Find Giant Bucks" in 1983, Paula. They live in Crawford Colorado, just having moved back from Grants New Mexico. So the theory about her spilling the beans is full of holes, too.
On his second book that the man wrote about that he never received, Kirt did write and complete a second book, "Hunting the Rockies, Home of the Giants" (see Wescout4u.com, as Kilowatt pointed out.) So why the man never received his is anyone's guess. However, he should contact Kirt if he owes him a book. I can't imagine Kirt wouldn't make it right with him.
Kirt has never claimed he wrote the book himself, and points this out in the first few pages of the book. Kirt was a deer hunter at the time, not a writer. Together with Rich Laracco, they wrote an excellent book that was the best in it's class (it was the best selling "how-to" book in history at the time) that detailed the life and techniques used by a world-class deer hunter. The writing is first-rate when compared to what's coming of the presses these days. Anyone who reads it will realize that Kirt was completely dedicted to mule mule deer hunting, a characeristic I've never seen in a "poacher." Kirt was killing big deer long before it became commercialized (which if you think about it, many of us wouldn't be hunting mule deer if they weren't commercialized, hmmmm....) If you haven't read the book, get a copy, I can virtually guarantee you'll be a better deer hunter for it.
I'm not writing this post to clear Kirt of all wrongdoings because I certainly don't know everything that he's done. I'm just friends with the man and want to point out that much of what has been written isn't true. Character assasination isn't fair to anyone who has not been convicted of a particular crime. Guiding a hunter who shoots an elk decoy, while not too tasteful, isn't the same as poaching 15 B&C bucks. Kirt was convicted for his part in the crime and has paid his dues to society. He got his license reinstated in 2004 and took back to hunting Colorado mule deer. His come-back buck was a 27" 185 typical, labratory-aged at 7 years old and killed on public land in a perfectly legal fashion.
A wise someone wrote in an earlier post, "he who is without sin, cast the first stone," quoting Jesus Christ. I know I've done things I'm not proud of while hunting, (I shot my father's deer once)yet I've changed my ways and moved on. I know the Lord has forgiven me and I hope I'm not judged my entire life by the hunting community for something I did when I was 22. I'm glad to extend the grace I've been shown to others.
The Christian
