It's every deer lover's nightmare: giant, drugged-up whitetail bucks wandering around the countryside, their antlers so large the deer can hardly hold up their heads, dwarfing every true trophy that's gone before.
Every big buck and every contest winner would be suspect, every working man's trophy diminished. Every record would carry an asterisk. Like baseball in the steroids era.
Those bucks won't be grown with steroids, one expert said, though there is enough concern about the unrestricted use of antibiotics and other compounds that the state's White-tailed Deer Advisory Committee recently discussed the issue.
The discussion began focused on scientific deer in breeder pens and quickly spread to free-ranging whitetails, said Dr. Ken Waldrup, a veterinarian with the Department of State Health Services in El Paso. Waldrup and Clayton Wolf — Texas Parks and Wildlife's Big Game Program Director — both said that there's no way to know what, if any, danger there is to Texas deer.
"We have no data to look at," Wolf said. "There's a lot of speculation. Some have voiced the concern that anabolic steroids might be used (to enhance antler growth.) We just don't track that stuff, but people talk about it because they hear it through the grapevine."
Waldrup, who has studied white-tailed deer for decades, said there could be some public health issues if deer treated with antibiotics in pens were released and killed and eaten shortly thereafter. However, the threat of growing big deer with hormones or testosterones is overblown, he said, and there's no practical application that would work.
"If you had asked, 'Can it be done?' then I would have had to answer, 'Yes.' In order to do this, one must use drugs forbidden in food animals by FDA because of the concern about their consumption by humans," Waldrup said.
"Please let me quickly add that anabolic steroids (i.e. like those used by Jose Canseco and others) will not do it," he said. "At the meeting, I went through a short diagram showing how anabolic steroids could shorten or even stop antler growth rather than lengthening it.
"Anybody using anabolic steroids to potentially increase antler growth does not understand male deer physiology. Anabolic steroids also have all of the side effects in deer that they do in people, like joint damage and decreased sperm production (not a good thing for a breeding male)."
Waldrup also said that even restricted and banned drugs that might work to increase the size of a deer's antlers won't work miracles.
"Even when I say that it can be done, please let me qualify that by pointing out that you cannot take a 6-point basket rack yearling and make him a 200 class 14-point as a 2.5 year old," he said. "To my knowledge, drugs could only increase antler mass by maybe 10-15 percent at best, and even that decreases as the buck gets older."
Deer breeders in Texas have put their best bucks on a rocket ride north in terms of the size of their antlers and their value to other breeders. Deer have sold for more than half a million dollars already. But the basic belief is that those deer were grown through genetic engineering, matching good genes with better genes to produce huge racks. The real danger, Wolf said, is in the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and drugs to treat worms administered in feed.
"My concern is not the drugs used by a licensed vet, but the use across the landscape of antibiotics and de-wormers in feed," Wolf said. "I don't really know to what degree that's occurring, but there are drugs that anybody can go down and buy."
But a number of deer raised in pens are being released into the wild each year and eventually hunted, Wolf said, and the retention of those drugs in tissue could be an issue for anyone who eats the venison.
Emphasize "could" in the that sentence, because even though some compounds could remain in the deer, there's no way of knowing wh
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