Stewardship
Where Hunting Happens, Conservation Happens™
The Origins of Keeping Score
Big-game scoring as a measurement of both abundance and poverty of the natural world
From Fall 2024 Fair Chase MagazineBy Andrew McKean, B&C Professional Member
It’s become customary to describe the various methods of assessing a big-game animal’s trophy parts as a way to quantify the dimensions of a particular specimen while celebrating the conservation successes that produced the animal.
But if that narration rightly celebrates abundance in one form or another, there’s another, more downbeat way to assess our big-game records and scoring systems, instead, as exhibits of a vanishing world.
The dozens of big-game scoring systems, many of which have been lost to time or have faded into obscurity, share origin stories. They rose during the developed world’s transition from a mostly rural population to one in which humans—in the northern hemisphere, at least—moved to cities, either because they wanted to, or because that’s where the work was, or because they no longer had a place on their farms, homesteads, shtetls, and bourgs.
To a contemporary watching the rapid industrialization of whole landscapes in the days before we had adequate institutions to conserve and preserve wild places, the future must have looked bleak, indeed. Some naturalists of the latter half of the 1800s, from Charles Darwin to John James Audubon, devoted themselves to cataloging this fleeting world. Painters like German-born Carl Rungius depicted heroic American landscapes conspicuously without the railroads, fences, and roads that were, year by year, carving them to human scale.
Historians describe this unsettled time in vastly different ways, with some extolling progress and all the ways humans embraced and adapted to change. Others look back fondly, with a sense of nostalgia for old ways lost in the headlong sprint to the future.
The truth is industrialization wasn’t all bad for big-game hunters. It gave us accurate rifles, reliable gear, and the means to travel to places yet untouched by industrialization. And it gave us the impetus to quantify and catalog wildlife specimens that were being discovered and exploited at about the same rate.
The First Record Book
Capitalizing on the sudden accessibility of African safaris, British taxidermist Roland Ward published the first Records of Big Game in 1892. Ward did a lively business as a travel consultant to get clients in the field, and then mounted and stuffed (and measured) their trophies on their return. His record book was at first mainly a catalog of dangerous-game horns and skulls, but it was read at the time as a directory of places to go if you wanted to encounter remarkable animals.
“The Book is a valuable source of knowledge on the distribution of game,” Rowland Ward noted, “and it gives taxonomic features as well as a historical, geographical, and biological record of all game.”
Importantly, it was never intended as a Who’s Who of trophy hunters, though various editions included entries from such luminaries as kings Edward VII and George V, the Rothschilds, and even Winston Churchill. Instead, the foreward of “The Book,” states that it was meant to “celebrate the animal, not to glorify the hunter. It does not matter whether the animal’s horns, tusks, or teeth were picked up in the veld from one that died of natural causes, was killed by a predator, or was shot by a hunter. By establishing the benchmark for what constitutes a trophy, The Book makes a most valuable contribution to conservation. By setting the standards high, The Book ensures that trophy hunters will concentrate on those big, old, lone males that have long since passed on their genes to younger generations.”
It’s worth noting that the high-water mark of this records-as-conservation-yardstick, the Boone and Crockett Club’s Records of North American Big Game, hews much to that same ethic.
Ward’s records—the 31st edition will be published in 2025—now include pretty much every big-game species imaginable, from tahr to the tur of the Caucasus, water deer to pronghorn antelope, and American bison to Asian wild cattle. But Rowland Ward scoring has always been a relatively simple affair. For deer species, for instance, scoring accounts for main-beam and tine length, basal measurement, and spread, but only one circumference measurement. For Cape and Nile buffalos, add the sum of both bosses and the greatest spread to arrive at the score.
The Case for Displacement
It’s an indication that there’s more than one way to measure a rack. In fact, quantifying wildlife anatomy is an old idea with lots of variation. We see reflections of hunters’ preoccupation with trophy parts in cave paintings and Medieval heraldry. One way of assessing antler size, the water-displacement method, borrows heavily from Archimedes, a 3rd-century B.C. physicist who lived in the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Archimedes famously used a principle that’s now known by his name to determine the fraudulency of a royal crown.
According to chroniclers, Archimedes determined that the buoyant force on an object submerged in liquid is equal to the weight of the fluid that’s displaced by the object and that a more dense object displaces more liquid. In other words, it’s possible to accurately measure the volume of irregularly shaped things—say, a roe deer’s antlers or a king’s supposedly golden crown—by weighing the water that the antlers displace.
Though this measurement method is more than 2,500 years old, it’s still the preferred scoring method for those who want to account for every bit of bone and tusk of a trophy, and who think that “measuring air,” as they call the inclusion of antler-spread measurements, is as meaningless as methods that reward symmetry in their calculations.
Along the way, from the classical age up through the Industrial Revolution, hunters have used methods as varied as mass weight to total points to quantify their trophies. In Europe, as big-game hunting became the exclusive domain of the ruling class, outsized antlers were given majestic names as a way to describe their specialness. Hence, we have “crowns” on the top beams of mature red deer stags, elk with six points on a side are called “royals,” bulls with seven points are “imperials,” and eight-pointers are “monarchs.”
But language is notoriously imprecise, and scoring methods were so arbitrary that pitched arguments and sometimes physical fights were sparked over which hunter’s trophy was the more “worthy,” according to subjective standards.
Measuring Beauty
The idea of an aesthetic ideal shows up in what’s called the Nadler System of big-game scoring. In the late 1800s, as Europeans moved to cities in great waves of relocation, Hungarian naturalist Herbert Nadler was developing a system for measuring the antlers of red deer, fallow deer, and roe deer, all of which were abundant in the forests and on the estates of central Europe’s ruling class. Nadler’s scoring system, which is still used in large part by the CIC, or Conseil International de la Chasse, considers beam length, the dry weight of antlers measured 90 days after the kill, and deducts points for “defects,” such as irregular beam length or non-typical tines.
Nadler’s system was the first to incorporate “beauty points,” features like antler “pearling,” dark coloration, and intact tine tips, to arrive at a score. Nadler’s system also rewards symmetry.
In America in the late 1800s, most scoring methods simply considered the length of the longest beam. But that rewarded “freaks” that, due to an injury or genetic mutation, grew outlandishly long headgear on one side and puny spikes on the other, hardly a “trophy” either from an aesthetic standpoint or as the product of healthy habitat.
A Path to Objectivity
The urbanization and industrialization of North America, which followed that of Europe by about 20 years, may have razed forests and encouraged settlement of wilderness areas, but it also had an important effect on Americans’ consideration of big-game heads. For much of the country’s settlement phase, when a whitetail deer’s main value was its ability to feed a family, antlers were considered superfluous adornments. But as industrialization gave Americans more leisure time, and as markets for foodstuffs replaced subsistence hunting, the emergence of “the sport” defined a hunter who pursued animals not because he had to but because he (and it was nearly always a male) wanted to. For the sport, trophy parts were everything, and roughly at the turn of the 20th century, the rise of local big-game contests created a new imperative for a consistent scoring method.
On the way to widely accepted standards, regional variations had to be resolved. You can still spot many of these regionalisms. The Virginia Peninsula Sportsmen’s Association, which claims the Old Dominion’s first big-game contest, penalizes “non-symmetry, random prongs, and excess spread” in their scoring. Hunters in many Great Lakes states and provinces reward the heaviest carcass, not the animal’s headgear, with trophy status. And, of course, there’s still the issue of how to differentiate the larger antlers and horns of pen-raised animals from those that have to survive in the wild, living lives that are often “nasty, brutish, and short.” Not unlike the way human lives were once characterized at the dawn of the industrial age.
But at the turn of the 19th century, as big-game contests offered increasingly hefty purses, organizers struggled to find a uniform and fair method of evaluating horns, antlers, and skulls of animals.
The first super-sized big-game contest in America was the 1895 Sportsmen’s Exposition, held in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. By this time, the Boone and Crockett Club was nearly a decade old and had started to develop its reputation as a serious voice in matters of big-game hunting, classification, and promotion. Possibly to give the exposition’s contest the luster of respectability, judges were Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, and Archibald Rogers, all Boone and Crockett Club founders.
The topic of big-game heads as a way to memorialize a depleted wild kingdom must have been top of mind for these early conservation leaders. That same year, 1895, B&C members Roosevelt, Madison Grant, and William Hornaday established the New York Zoological Society and lobbied for the creation of a zoological park, or zoo.
We now think of zoos as venues for field trips where visitors learn about wildlife and the natural world in tightly managed environments. But early zoos established in the larger cities of Europe and North America were considered essential for the preservation of species vanishing under the tide of progress.
In the first decade of the new century, both in Europe and North America, the majority of citizens lived in urban areas. The 1920 U.S. Census revealed that, for the first time in the country’s history, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas. In these years before fish and wildlife departments or federal land management agencies, the few protected areas were—thanks to Roosevelt’s administration—national parks, forest reserves, and national monuments.
Zoos had been established in larger European cities by the middle of the 19th century, but they were slow to come to America. The Philadelphia Zoo, the nation’s first, opened to the public in 1874, followed by zoos in Cincinnati, Buffalo, Baltimore, and Cleveland in the next couple of years. The Bronx Zoo, founded by the New York Zoological Society, aimed to house animals whose wildness seemed to be perishable. Early residents of the Bronx Zoo were the last remaining wild bison shipped from Yellowstone Park and western rangelands.
But the Bronx Zoo is remarkable for another reason. It’s the first repository for the National Collection of Heads and Horns, an assemblage (at that time) of over 700 trophies representing all the big-game species of North America, plus a few from other continents. It’s worth noting that when the collection was officially consecrated in 1922, it was dedicated “In Memory of the Vanishing Big Game of the World.”
The National Collection, plus the growing number of big-game contests, and a rising interest in the conservation status of America’s remaining huntable big-game populations, all combined to focus the Boone and Crockett Club’s attention on the matter of big-game scoring, which had been percolating among club members for at least 25 years.
A First for the Club
The club’s first record book, compiled in cooperation with the New York Zoological Society, was published in 1932, the work of long-time member Prentiss Gray. Titled Records of North American Big Game, the publication listed trophies based on that old American ideal of objectivity: the length of longer horn or antler, plus the length of the skull, and a basal circumference.
But the book also included a chapter from Grancel Fitz, a commercial photographer and hard-bit big-game hunter who had his own ideas about how to measure and quantify trophy heads. Following World War II, as professional wildlife managers turned their attention to conserving wildlife habitat and inventorying big-game species, the democratization of trophy hunting resulted in more records and a dizzying variety of antler and horn configurations coming to the measuring table. How to appropriately deal with not only the qualities that make a trophy a trophy—size, maturity, representative conformation, and the methods of take—but also how to deal with outliers brought Fitz back to the fore.
The Club leaned on Fitz, Samuel Webb, and taxidermist James Clark to consider creating an objective scoring system that emphasized a species’ most normal or common antler or horn configurations and bilateral symmetry.
Fitz brought a number of considerations to the Club’s system, including accounting for antler spread, tine length, and abnormal points. But none was as influential as his belief that scoring a trophy should be easy and accessible for every hunter. He pushed for inexpensive and widely distributed copies of the Club’s measuring guides, a volunteer corps of certified scorers, and stressed that all measurements could be made at home or in the field with a commonly available ¼-inch steel tape.
Modern-day Scoring
With a few modifications since it was adopted by the Club in 1950, Fitz’s system forms the basis of the Boone and Crockett scoring methods and the Club’s extensive records. But, just as hunters have been doing for millennia, there are vocal critics of the system. Some consider deductions for asymmetry to be punitive. Others quibble about its de-emphasis of antler mass.
As has been happening for centuries, new systems pop up periodically to address these perceived shortcomings. The Buckmasters Full-Credit Scoring System, developed over the last decades, doesn’t require a drying period and intends “to measure every inch of antler and classify it accordingly, rather than forcing it to conform to a standard of perfection.” Similarly, the SCI System, developed by Safari Club International, doesn’t deduct for asymmetry but does allow high fence entries. The Boone and Crockett records prohibit entry of game taken on game farms or high-fence enclosures.
As much as the Boone and Crockett system’s emphasis on symmetry is criticized, it can also be celebrated as a return to the origin of various scoring systems. Symmetry, noted drafters of the B&C system, isn’t just an aesthetic consideration. It’s also a reliable indicator of the best representation of a big-game species. A trophy’s score, they stressed, shouldn’t simply celebrate an individual outsized animal. It should also give future humans an idea of the appearance and even behavior of a species of wildlife that could disappear from the planet at any time.
After all, one of the original reasons the Club established a record-keeping system was to memorialize the bounty of wildlife that our young country was losing to indiscriminate slaughter and headlong industrialization of habitat. Once Club members worked to establish rules and regulations, the records became a way to measure the progress of their conservation efforts. Today, world’s records are broken frequently and the number of entries continues to grow. While there is still plenty of conservation left to accomplish, the records indicate that we’re heading in the right direction.
Support Conservation
Support Hunting
Support Conservation
Support Education
"The wildlife and its habitat cannot speak. So we must and we will."
-Theodore Roosevelt
Headquarters
Boone and Crockett Club250 Station Drive
Missoula, MT 59801
Hours and Phone
Weekdays 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
406.542.1888
