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I don't think it matters if it had antlers when you shot it, its when you recover it and tag it that it matters if it has antlers. The only way they should have been able to check it as antlered is if they believed he somehow got the other side of the rack off the deer when he tagged it.
Try selling that story to the game warden. All that matters is what was there when the trigger was pulled.
 
If the deer is showing normal bases that indicate it has recently dropped its antlers naturally I doubt that there would be any issue at the check-in station with it being counted as non-antlered. They would have no way of knowing whether they were on the deer at the time of the shot. The point I was making in my earlier statement was that if either of the antlers are still on the deer it will be counted as antlered, provided they are at least 3 inches in length.

This late in the season it is not going to matter to folks as far as price of tag because they will need to use a $24 tag. I guess the only thing that would come in to play is whether you could legally shoot another antlered buck. The way I see the answer to that is yes you could if both antlers had dropped prior to checking it in. But me personally, if I shot the deer and it had antlers at the time I would count it as my buck. The law is there to protect the herd from excessive harvest of males and I would feel rather guilty using this sort of loophole to get around the one buck concept.

In the annual deer reports that are published I never see any category for shed bucks. I am suspecting that they group these in with button bucks and other non-qualifying spikes. They mark the sex of the deer at the checking station so it would be considered in the buck numbers, just not antlered.
 
If what crappiehunter18 said was true, I could make a hammer part of my pack. Every time I shot a buck I could knock the antlers off and tag it in antlerless. :D Why not, someone on the internet told me it was okay. :D
 
If what crappiehunter18 said was true, I could make a hammer part of my pack. Every time I shot a buck I could knock the antlers off and tag it in antlerless. :D Why not, someone on the internet told me it was okay. :D
I wasn't implying that antlers could be broken off. Hopefully that is not how you interpreted my post. What I said was if the deer was showing normal bases when being checked in how can they prove that the deer had antlers at the time he shot it. I am sure it is not uncommon for guys to shoot shed bucks during muzzleloader season and not know until they recover the deer. I don't believe the ODNR expects everyone to treat those at antlered upon checking in a deer. If they do then some would be ending up with two antlered deer if they already have taken one.

I understand what you are saying about it mattering what was there at the time the trigger is pulled. To me that is true. But the checking station will have no way of proving that on a deer that has dropped antlers unless they are showing signs of being broken off.
 
I'm not saying that's what I would do, but there's is no way of saying unless the game warden saw you shoot the buck that it had antlers when you shot it. It would be up to the game warden if it should be tagged as antlered or antlerless because it doesn't say in the regs. I didn't say anything about breaking antlers off a deer so you could tag it in as antlerless, I said that the check station could reject somebody using an antlerless permit on a shed buck if they thought the person knocked the antlers off themselves haha, not trying to start an argument just trying to help answer the question.
 
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