Stewardship
Where Hunting Happens, Conservation Happens™
Genesis of a Scoring and Records System—B&C Impact Series
What good is a score? Is it bragging rights? A path to backslaps, free hunts, and a book deal? The answer is none of the above.
Once upon a time in North America, there were a handful of sporting gents with a pessimistic outlook on the future of the continent’s wildlife resources. You can’t blame them. At the end of the 19th century, large game like bison, elk, pronghorn, and even whitetail deer was on the brink of extinction because of market hunting. They worked to change that, but first, they recorded measurements of antlers, horns, and skulls from the largest specimens. Over time, the scoring system and big game records have become a testament to the progress of the conservation movement that the Boone and Crockett Club launched well over a century ago.
A History of the Tape
A chance encounter between Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell set the country’s first conservation movement in motion, starting with the formation of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887. Just seven years later, the two men and Archibald Rogers were invited by the organizers of a sportsmen’s exhibition at Madison Square Garden to measure trophy heads. Event organizers dubbed them the “Committee on Measurements.” They measured the length and girth of horns and antlers belonging to bison, bighorns, wapiti, and others. It was the first time Club members measured and recorded their results.
That same year (1895), Club member Madison Grant and others formed the New York Zoological Society and built the foundation of the Bronx Zoo. Then in 1902, the Club appointed Roosevelt as chairman of the Club’s first records committee, the duties of which included developing a record-keeping system for North American big game. Two years later, Club member James Hathaway Kidder published the first scoring manual in 1906.
On the grounds of the zoo stood the Boone and Crockett Club’s National Collection of Heads of Horns, formed in 1906. The National Collection at the Bronx Zoo began as an homage to big game that Club members thought would go extinct. A plaque outside the exhibit read, “To the vanishing big game of the world.” The display at the zoo generated enough public interest in conservation that Club members needed a way to measure the success (or failure) of their conservation efforts. As a result, a standardized scoring system was adopted by the Club, but it wasn’t exactly the system used today.
The original score chart for deer.
In 1932, longtime Club member Prentiss N. Gray authored the first big game record book, Records of North American Big Game. It contained entries with measurements that included the length of the skull, or the longer antler or horn, plus a basal circumference. Gray noted that the scoring system may need improvement. Grancel Fitz, a big-game hunter and photographer, took note.
In 1939, the Club published the second edition of Records of North American Big Game, which included a chapter by Fitz that outlined flaws in the old scoring system. He rejected subjective European scoring systems and insisted that America needed its own unique system.
It took a decade, but the Club formed a special committee in 1949 to create an equitable and uniform measurement system. Samuel B. Webb was appointed chair of the committee. Other members included Dr. Harold E. Anthony, Milford Baker, Frederick K. Barbour, James Clark, and Grancel Fitz. A year later, the committee consolidated the best of both systems posited by Clark and Fitz. With a few minor tweaks and adjustments over the years, they adopted the same scoring system we now use.
Records as a Conservation Tool
When hunting moose in Alaska, a single track isn’t much to get excited about. But add a few fresh rubs, steaming scat, and a melted bed of grass among the frost, and that should spark your interest. Think of the Boone and Crockett records in a similar way. No one record—not even a World’s Record—is enough intel to draw a reasonable conclusion. But add up enough record entries from a particular area over a designated period of time, and you might just have a useful set of data to indicate a biological trend.
Over the years, we’ve published several articles using record-book trends as a starting point. One article takes a hard look at Buffalo County, Wisconsin, in an attempt to find the secret recipe for their meteoric rise in whitetail entries. Another article does the same with Indiana, which is no longer a sleeper state in the whitetail world. Biologists also utilize the records in their research.
In 2013, Dr. Kevin Monteith was the lead author of a paper titled “Effects of Harvest, Culture, and Climate on Trends in Size of Horn-Like Structures in Trophy Ungulates.” Dr. Monteith worked with professional members Jim Heffelfinger, Vernon Bleich, R. Terry Bowyer, and other researchers to evaluate trends in horn and antler size recorded from 1900 to 2008. They used more than 22,000 records among 25 trophy categories to test the idea that hunting has the potential to influence the size of horn-like structures of some ungulates adversely. They found “the number of entries per decade increased for most trophy categories.” Second, and most interestingly, the general trend in the size of some categories declined.
Other studies have investigated the efficacy of the Boone and Crockett Records as a research tool. Tayler LaSharr of the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and ten co-authors, including numerous B&C professional members, published “Biological Relevance of Antler, Horn, and Pronghorn Size in Records Programs” in 2019. That study researched several questions and presumptions regarding records and scoring systems, including records of the Boone and Crockett Club, Pope and Young Club, and Safari Club International. One takeaway from the study is that records should be viewed and interpreted only within small, focused segments of a population. For instance, if one county in Wyoming sees a drop in record pronghorn entries, it is inaccurate to say that the entire state’s pronghorn population is suffering.
Records in Restitution
In the fall of 2007, Frederick R. Schoenick killed a trophy mule deer in Idaho before the season opener. He took the head and cape, leaving the meat. He then entered the buck into a local big buck contest, and a warden matched the DNA from the head and the wasted meat to solve the case. The buck scored 214-3/8 points, and the fine was typically $400 for such an offense. Because the buck scored more than 150 Boone and Crockett points, though, it was considered a trophy animal by Idaho statute and subject to a fine more befitting. Idaho law cites Boone and Crockett standards as the official definition of “trophy” for several species, including mule deer. Schoenick pleaded guilty to taking a trophy mule deer during closed season and wasteful destruction. He received a $3,158 fine, five days in jail or 120 hours of community service, two-year probation, and lost hunting privileges for two years.
States such as Idaho, Montana, Ohio, and others, use all or parts of the Boone and Crockett scoring system for wildlife law enforcement. Law enforcement and the courts use the Boone and Crockett scoring system to calculate restitution values in poaching cases. The bigger the animal, the bigger the punishment.
As part of the Club’s Poach and Pay Program, we sponsored a study that examined various state restitution programs. The 2017 report stated that in Ohio, for example, the minimum value calculated by state wildlife biologists for an antlered whitetail deer is $500. If the buck qualifies for trophy status, the B&C gross score is plugged into an equation ([gross score-100]² X $1.65) to determine the additional trophy restitution value. If a violator is convicted of poaching a whitetail buck with a gross score of 180, they would have to pay a $500 base value penalty plus an additional restitution of $10,560.
To some, assigning a dollar amount to a set of antlers or horns may not seem right. It may seem just as sinful to assign a score to them. But there are scientific reasons for the numbers and the records. Bragging rights and back slaps are not among them. Some hunters take great pride in “getting a Booner” or their name in the book. There’s nothing wrong with that. As our system of wildlife conservation continues to evolve and improve, we will likely see more “Booners” on the landscape. And if you choose to shoot the first legal animal that walks by and it doesn’t make the records, that’s okay, too. No one ever complained about a full freezer.
About the Impact Series
The Impact Series is dedicated to showing how sportsmen, members of the Boone and Crockett Club in particular, saved the wildlife and wild places of the United States. Early members of the Boone and Crockett Club comprised the movers, shakers, and initiators of the American conservation movement. They were hunters, anglers, explorers, lawmakers, soldiers, and above all conservationists. These members established laws that allowed our wildlife resources to flourish. They also protected landscape-scale geologic marvels and American icons like Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Denali, and many, many more. These members may no longer be with us, but their legacy remains. This series aims to honor their accomplishments and remind us of the good work still yet to do.
PJ DelHomme writes and edits content from his home in western Montana. He runs Crazy Canyon Media and Crazy Canyon Journal.
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