ORIGINAL: Cougar Mag
Deer and Deer Hunting magazine ran an article with pictures a few years back. In it was an indepth series about spike bucks and included were some photos of pen raised bucks that grew to be super bucks when older.....I am talking monsters! I letem walk, I can take a doe for meat anytime.
I was hoping someone was going to bring this up before I had to go digging through all my old D&DH magazines to find that article. I believe Ozoga collected the research and photos, and then wrote the article.
As a small side note - we used to raise deer a few years back. We had a 1 1/2 year old but with 8" spikes. The very next year he grew a perfectly symmetrical 8 point rack with a 14" inside spread. Unfortunately he escaped from his pen that fall and was killed by a hunter shortly afterwards, but without any doubt in my mind by the time that buck was 3 1/2 years old he would've had a P&Y class rack.
In my opinion - let the spikes walk. The only time I believe you should harvest a buck because of his physical traits is if he has some sort of massive degenerative deformity in his rack, or some other injury that might be genetic or harmful to the herd if he breeds. As an example - I took a 2 1/2 year old buck a few years back with a gnarly 3 pt rack. One side had a 10" spike with a small kicker on the bottom and the other side was just about 2" long. He was also pretty small in body size compared to the rest of the deer in the area.