Hunters tend to argue about the same question in different clothes: what is the right way to do this, and who decides? This week's stories answer it from five directions. An Ohio bowhunter answered it with a handmade longbow and a stone point he knapped himself. A Maine couple answered it with 991 miles of dirt road and four tags apiece. A Wyoming hunter answered it by accepting an empty freezer. Oklahoma regulators are answering it with a long list of proposed rules, and an Outdoor Life writer is answering it with a pile of corn in Kentucky. Taken together, they show how much of hunting is tradition, ethics and paperwork.
An Ohio Archer Takes a Buck With Stone and Osage Orange
On the evening of October 25, Joe McConnell, a traditional bowhunter from central Ohio, climbed into a ladder stand with heavy cover behind him. He was hunting a narrow strip of woods that he owns, overlooking a travel lane deer used to reach a large field of standing corn. He was carrying a longbow, not a compound, and it was the first time he planned to fill a landowner tag on his own ground.
"I was really after a nice 10-point buck I had on trail cameras," McConnell told Outdoor Life. "The wind was perfect that evening, blowing right in my face. I was looking forward to filling my first landowner tag with a deer on my own property." He had built a mock scrape in front of the stand, with a licking branch hanging about 12 yards from the ladder. When a buck came out of the corn, it was not the 10-pointer. It was an 8-point that McConnell decided he could not pass up.
Everything in the shot was made by hand
The details of the gear are what set this hunt apart. The 38-year-old archer, who runs a hardwood flooring and restoration business, drew a 64-inch, 55-pound longbow he made from an Osage orange limb. The 26-inch arrow was cane, fletched with white turkey feathers. The broadhead was a stone point he had knapped himself. He shot instinctively, in a canted style modeled on the archer Howard Hill: leaning forward at the draw, anchoring at the corner of his mouth and using his bare hand as the arrow rest.
"I saw his rack above the standing corn field coming to me, and when he stopped broadside quartering away at 12 yards, I took my shot," he said. The arrow landed behind the shoulder. The buck crashed through the corn and went quiet, and McConnell found a blood trail that was easy to follow. The deer made it only about 75 yards.
What the stone point did
McConnell said the stone head passed through the liver and a lung and smashed into a rib on the far side. The point hit bone and stopped; otherwise it would have exited the hide on the opposite side. "Everything really came together for me with that deer," he said. "I've taken lots of animals with the bows and arrows I've made. But it's the first deer I've taken with a stone broadhead that I knapped myself – and it was devastating."
Friends helped him get the deer out of the field. It weighed 180 pounds field-dressed at the processor, with an estimated live weight well over 200 pounds. His taxidermist put the rack at about 140 inches, and he plans to have it scored through Buckmasters. McConnell has also taken wild hogs and a buffalo with equipment he made, the buffalo with a stone point made specifically for that hunt. He started shooting at 14. "Traditional equipment is remarkably efficient bowhunting gear," he said.
A Maine Couple Finishes the Grand Slam Together
The goal Lauren Waycott and Melvin Waycott IV set for themselves was a Maine hunting Grand Slam, which means a turkey, a bear, a moose and a deer. By the first week of rifle deer season, each of them had all four. According to the Bangor Daily News, which first reported the story on November 10, their hunting app logged 991 miles on dirt roads between the start of the cow moose hunt and the end of that first week of deer season. The total included scouting in the North Maine Woods, driving between camps, and a stop to hunt partridge after the moose hunt.
A moose permit started it
The plan took shape when both Melvin and Lauren's father drew moose permits. Her father listed her as his subpermittee, which let her hunt and tag a moose on his permit. The couple knew other hunters who had completed a Grand Slam but had not heard of a married couple doing it together in the same year.
The season, tag by tag
Lauren opened the run in spring turkey season with a 19-pound tom, hunting alongside her father. Bear season came next. On opening day of bear trapping season, Melvin trapped a 276-pound boar. On September 15, Lauren took a 265-pound sow on a guided hunt with Good Ole Boys Guide Service. Later that month she took Melvin back to her favorite turkey spots, and he tagged a 17.5-pound tom, leaving each of them with two of the four animals.
Moose came in October. Melvin hunted with Tobey Brooke Guide Service and took a bull on October 13 with a 42-inch antler spread; the Bangor Daily News lists its weight at 652 pounds, while a National Enquirer rewrite of the story says 625. Ten days later the group headed north again to Wildlife Management District 5 for her father's hunt with Blackwater Guide Service. Shortly after first light on October 27, Lauren took a 352-pound cow moose.
Instead of driving home, Lauren and her father continued to Wildlife Management District 1, where they had rented a camp for a week of deer hunting before the moose permits ever arrived. Melvin stayed behind to chase a buck he had followed on trail cameras. On the evening of November 3, at 4:10 p.m., Lauren tried unfamiliar ground and shot an eight-point that weighed 188 pounds. That completed her slam. Her father shot his first patch buck, a seven-pointer weighing 208 pounds, the next morning. On November 7, while they were packing the camp, Melvin called to say he had taken his eight-point, which came in at 220.6 pounds. All three deer taken by the family were donated to the Hunters for the Hungry program.
A Wyoming Elk Hunter Writes Off the Meat
Jacob Paintin of Rawlins, Wyoming, was already having a poor season. His deep freezer had failed and spoiled most of his game meat. He had some leftovers from a cow elk the year before and a mule deer buck from this fall, so he figured he was set, until the freezer quit. On Halloween he went elk hunting near Rawlins with friends Aaron Krob and Alex Davis. They held general elk tags and were on public land.
The bull that was already hurt
Around noon on October 31, Paintin walked a small forested patch of public ground that bordered private property. It did not look promising, but he found elk in the timber, and most of them ran. One bull was slow to rise, with its antlers turned toward him. It had an unusual rack, with one side essentially a single long spike. He shot and dropped it.
Up close, something was wrong. The bull was gaunt, its eyes were sunken, and it had a visible old wound on the neck. When Krob and Davis arrived and the three began to gut the animal, the smell hit them. "We were doing everything we could not to toss our cookies," Paintin told Cowboy State Daily. "It was just absolutely foul," Krob said. "It was the worst thing I've ever smelled coming from an animal." The inside of the animal was full of infection, probably from the neck wound, which Paintin thought might have been festering for weeks. Krob described big cysts in the ribcage.
From check station to butcher's table
The hunters thought the front quarters were likely inedible but felt obliged to haul them out and show them to Wyoming Game and Fish at a check station, where wardens agreed they were too infected to eat. They had cut the bull in half hoping to keep the infection from reaching the hindquarters. The next day, at home, Paintin found the hindquarters were riddled with lead fragments, discolored and spoiled too. Krob wondered whether the lead came from one bullet that broke apart or several. The wound could have come from another hunter's bullet, or from a gouge in a rut fight with another bull; the story does not settle it.
Paintin ended up with no meat but kept the principle. "He didn't die in vain," he said. "I'm trying to teach my sons good ethics. As hunters we try to do the ethical thing and make sure animals aren't suffering." He says he hunts to fill the freezer, not for antlers, though he hopes to make a European mount from the unusual rack. Krob plans to give him some of his own game meat, and said the bull "was putting up a good fight for his life but probably wouldn't have survived."
Oklahoma's Possible 2027 Rulebook
The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation has finished taking public comment on a long slate of proposed rules, as The Oklahoman reported. Comments closed at 4:30 p.m. on November 6. The department's governing board, the Wildlife Conservation Commission, is scheduled to consider the proposals in December. Even then it will not be final: anything the commission adopts goes to the Oklahoma Legislature and the governor for approval or rejection. The Oklahoman notes that its list is not complete.
Deer hunting changes
The proposal drawing the most attention for hunters is a two-day waiting period for out-of-state deer hunters, counted from when the license is bought. There would be no wait for a license purchased before deer season begins. The commission's stated reasons are to support effective wildlife management, ensure equitable access and promote licensing compliance. Other deer-related items include limiting deer hunting at Ft. Cobb State Park to archery between December 15 and January 15 in designated areas, allowing controlled hunts at Arrowhead State Park on Lake Eufaula, and barring wildlife rehabilitators from taking in deer and elk, including orphaned fawns, without the wildlife director's permission, because of disease risk between captive and wild herds.
Hogs, traps and small game
Hogs could be hunted during deer season, under deer hunting rules, in the Canton, Hackberry Flat, Kaw, Keystone, Sandy Sanders, Spavinaw and Waurika wildlife management areas; killing them there would stay illegal outside deer season. A trapping rule would bar leaving an animal in a trap longer than 24 hours. Inside Ft. Cobb Wildlife Management Area, small game could be taken with a shotgun, bow, slingshot, or hand-thrown or air-propelled weapons. First-year birds could be taken any time of year, but only if they can sustain flight. Several carcass-documentation exemptions are also listed, including for people receiving meat from Hunters Against Hunger locations, and vehicles on department-managed land could be driven only by licensed drivers.
Fishing changes
On the water, every vessel would have to be fully drained within 100 feet of leaving a body of water, with drain plugs left open in transport. Crappie would be excluded from existing limits in "Close to Home" waters, the small stocked lakes and ponds near cities such as Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Lawton, Enid and Bartlesville, giving the commission flexibility to set annual limits. A Lawton-based outlet counts 45 of these waters and says the change would also drop size restrictions. Resident lifetime fishing license holders could also upgrade to a lifetime combination license by paying the difference. That writer cites a current combo price of $1,024 and a lifetime fishing license price of $375.
Hunting Mature Bucks Over Bait, and Whether You Should
An Outdoor Life piece on baiting opens with a confession. During the 2023 season, its author shot his biggest buck ever, a Kentucky 12-pointer with extra points that scored 168 6/8 inches, over a pile of ear- and persimmon-flavored shelled corn, with a protein block and scent added for good measure. He expects the angry comments. Baiting is still contested in deer country, and rules differ sharply by state, so what follows is his case, not a how-to that works everywhere.
The legal patchwork and the disease argument
The article states that baiting is illegal in many states in the Midwest, Northeast and West, popular in much of the South, and that hunting in Texas is synonymous with hunting over a feeder. It also recalls the uproar when Kansas regulators discussed a ban. The National Deer Association argues baiting alters animal behavior, degrades habitat, raises predation susceptibility and boosts disease transmission. Its position is that it opposes expanding baiting where it is not legal, will not work to repeal it where it is legal except where chronic wasting disease or another known disease is present, and supports research on its effects. Because rules shift with disease detections, check your state agency's current regulations first.
Not a cheat code
The author rejects both common taunts, that bait makes big bucks easy and that it cannot kill mature ones. He says it is easier to ruin a hunt on a mature buck with a poor baiting plan than to fill a tag, and that it took him years of baiting Kentucky whitetails before he started killing mature deer. No amount of bait will draw a monster buck that does not already live there.
His season-by-season advice follows bedding and food. In early season, with low pressure and plenty of cover, he targets warm-season bedding such as north-facing slopes or low ground near water, identifies the destination food such as green soybeans, fresh-cut corn or falling white oak acorns, and places the bait between bed and food. In the pre-rut, when bucks move more in daylight, he does the same along travel lines. In the rut, he says, bucks are more interested in scent-checking does, so he sets piles downwind of doe bedding or between two doe areas. In the late season he looks to solar bedding on south-facing slopes, thermal cover in conifers and woody browse, using bait as a staging area close enough to bedding for a buck to reach it in legal shooting light.
The ethics, in his words
He calls baiting a gray area: if it is legal it is legal, state differences resemble those on crossbows, deer urine lures and season structures, and agencies that allow it have judged it not detrimental. He argues it is not a canned hunt, since bait can attract, hold, supplement and inventory deer. Whitetails approach piles downwind, he says, and no buck is 100 percent nocturnal; a buck that avoids bait in daylight may have been disturbed, moved his bedding or switched food sources. "The point is, hunting over bait is still deer hunting," he writes, and most of the time the big buck wins.
What Ties the Stories Together
Each hunter here made a call about method and consequences. McConnell chose equipment that demands a close, clean shot. The Waycotts chose a difficult goal and gave away the deer. Paintin gave up his meat for a principle. Oklahoma's regulators are deciding how much to restrict, and a Kentucky hunter is defending a tactic that other states have banned. The details differ by state and by season, which is the point: legality, tradition and conscience do not always line up, and every hunter ends up weighing them.
