Collectors are known to pay $1,500 for a particularly desirable pair of elk antlers, and upward of $10,000 for “deadheads”—skulls with the antlers still attached.
Two years later, Congress created the National Elk Refuge, which eventually expanded its acreage by acquiring property from John D. Rockefeller and other wealthy landowners. Natural challenges soon arose. One year, there was too little snow, which meant not enough grass for hay the following summer; another year, there was too much snow, which led to winterkill within the herd.
Chinese farmers have been raising sika deer for their velvet for hundreds of years. Some spas in Russia, which is home to Eurasian elk and reindeer, offer a treatment in which customers bathe in water mixed with velvet and blood from the harvest. Deer and elk are not native to New Zealand, but European settlers imported deer, and then in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt gifted the country twenty elk from Yellowstone.
According to Joe Fowler, a former Yellowstone ranger, some shed hunters looking to thin out the competition resorted to snitching on other poachers. “It got to be, among the horn hunters, sort of a blood sport,” he said. “We would occasionally get telephone calls anonymously saying, ‘So-and-So is going to be picked up with a bunch of horns at the Yellowstone River Bridge at eight o’clock tonight.’ ” In 1982, a man was found drowned in the river.
Thomas reached out to white-tailed-deer farms, which abound in Texas and breed bucks for large hunting ranches. The ranches kept piles of old antlers, but Thomas did not seek the type that you would proudly display in your home. Antlers are graded by quality. The top grade is fresh, or brown. The next grade is composed of hard whites, which are often a year old, and smooth and unbroken. Then come C-grade antlers, which are sun-bleached and dried out. Last is crumbling bone, or chalk.
In recent years, the domestic antler business has been fuelled by another invention: YouTube. In 2006, Eric Chesser, then a twenty-three-year-old former bodybuilder in Utah, began producing videos in which he walked into the woods carrying a camera and discovered an antler. In real life, finding an antler is a small miracle, like stumbling onto a mountain spring. Watching someone find an antler online is about as exciting as buying a bottle of Poland Spring.
Last May, Chesser and Ben Dettamanti, a fellow shed influencer, woke up in the beds of their trucks, where they had spent the night parked near a mountain range in southern Nevada. Dettamanti turned a handheld camera toward himself and started recording: “Plan to be out here for at least three or four days, get some good videos for you guys, get back on this shed-hunting life!”
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