Hypothetical question for Buster!

[old3arrows]

Buster, say you are sitting in stand opening morning of firearm season, and you have already tagged a buck in archery season. You hear a shot on your neighbors property, and five minutes later here comes a buck trailing intestines behind him obviously mortally wounded and going to die. You go ahead and shoot the deer and finish him off thinking that your neighbor will be following this deer. You get out of your tree, walk over to the deer, and see your neighbor coming from a little ways off. He walks up to you, and you tell him you went ahead and put the deer down for him so it wouldn't suffer. He looks at you and says, that's not my deer, you just shot him, and he walks off. No one else comes to claim the deer, and you can't prove your neighbor shot it although you are fairly certain he did. Now what do you do? You can't tag it because technically it is an illegal deer. And I bet you are going to tell me I shouldn't have shot it in the first place! So has this scenario ever come up for you in the field?

This actually happened to me with a doe one time. A guy hunting on the neighbors farm made a bad shot on a doe, and it came running past me obviously hurt. I shot and dropped it, the guy showed up a little bit later, thanked me, we field dressed the deer and he tagged it, and I helped him drag it out. No big deal. And if no one had come along I could have tagged the deer with my lifetime license and everything would still have been legal.

[buster]

Buster, say you are sitting in stand opening morning of firearm season, and you have already tagged a buck in archery season. You hear a shot on your neighbors property, and five minutes later here comes a buck trailing intestines behind him obviously mortally wounded and going to die. You go ahead and shoot the deer and finish him off thinking that your neighbor will be following this deer. You get out of your tree, walk over to the deer, and see your neighbor coming from a little ways off. He walks up to you, and you tell him you went ahead and put the deer down for him so it wouldn't suffer. He looks at you and says, that's not my deer, you just shot him, and he walks off. No one else comes to claim the deer, and you can't prove your neighbor shot it although you are fairly certain he did. Now what do you do? You can't tag it because technically it is an illegal deer. And I bet you are going to tell me I shouldn't have shot it in the first place! So has this scenario ever come up for you in the field?

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You shouldn't have shot the deer in the first place. It may seem like the most ethical and right thing to do, but you have already killed your antlered deer for the season, and thus overbagged.