JEFF JOHNSTON ADMITS he’s a walking paradox. A lifelong whitetail hunter who manages his farm in eastern Oklahoma for record-class bucks, Johnston has written widely about his obsession with outsize deer. He’s even developed an algorithm-based antler-scoring system, called Trophy Scan, that can estimate a score based on a good-quality photograph of a deer’s rack.
But for all his devotion to identifying, hunting, and killing what he calls “big-ass” bucks, Johnston has never put a tape measure to his own trophies, and he’s never entered them in the Boone and Crockett or Pope and Young record books, which catalog big-game species that achieve a minimum size, usually measured in inches of antler.
“I have a deer that’s pushing 190 [inches],” says Johnston, “and I have another that’s probably over 200. These are free-ranging whitetails that I hunted hard and am very proud of. But I don’t want or need to know their specific score. It’s almost more fun for me to have people guess and for them to think I’m a great hunter than to know a precise score. But the main reason is that I just don’t think it’s anybody else’s business.”
Johnston is hardly alone in his disinterest in publicizing his achievements, or quantifying the size of his trophies, by entering animals in the records. Every year hundreds or maybe even thousands of eligible trophies are not entered in the record lists of Pope and Young (which recognizes big-game species killed with archery gear), Boone and Crockett (the oldest big-game record-keeping organization), the Longhunter Society (muzzleloader kills), or other organizations.
The reasons are as varied as the hunters who kill them.