Jerry Kinnaman was up early, hunting in southeast Missouri, when he saw it. It had been a chilly night — the ground was crunchy — but on Tuesday morning, Kinnaman spotted the albino buck about 85 yards in the distance.
Kinnaman bagged the buck — which was called “arguably Cape Girardeau’s most notorious deer” by the Southeast Missourian. It was a legal kill, but a controversial one.
“This is a buck of a lifetime,” he told the newspaper.
“Not my biggest buck but at 7 1/2 years old he might be the oldest,” Kinnaman wrote on Facebook.
“Let the bashing begin!”
And it did. Kinnaman said in an interview with The Post on Thursday that it has gotten so bad, he’s received death threats over the deer.
“People are all tough on the computer,” he said, “but it’s easy for them to say that because they know they’re not going to get in trouble for it.”
The deer was something of a celebrity in Cape Girardeau. Kinnaman said that some locals felt a connection with it and would notice the animal on drives through the Southeast Missouri city.
“I was the same way as anybody else about this deer, so I understand the relationship some of these people have,” he said.
Here’s the thing, though: The deer wasn’t doing well, Kinnaman said. He said there was “not an ounce of fat on him,” and Kinnaman’s taxidermist noted that the deer’s teeth were in poor condition. The animal would have died this year, Kinnaman said, whether he harvested him or not.
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SOURCE: MSN / The Washington Post – Sarah Larimer