14-year-old Abby Wilson was thrilled on Saturday when she shot what she believed was a huge white-tailed deer. The Missouri teen quickly called her dad who was hunting nearby to inform him of this shot of a lifetime.
But, it wasn’t a deer. The girl downed a bull elk with a single shot from her .243-caliber rifle. Donald White immediately called the Department of Conservation to report the mistake. Agent Adam Doerhoff was surprised to get the call and initially thought it was a case of misidentification.
Missouri doesn’t have a hunting season for elk. MDC reintroduced a herd of elk into their native habitat at Peck Ranch Conservation Area in 2011. That was 200 miles from where Abby shot this elk.
The elk was so large that five men were needed to load it into the MDC truck so it could be tested for a number of things, including Chronic Wasting Disease. The elk will also be tested to see where it came from.
“Our elk biologist wants some parts to figure out where it may have come from,” Tom Strother, protection regional supervisor for the Missouri Department of Conservation said. “There are no reports of elk in this area. It was kind of a surprise to us. There was no evidence of any ear tags or collars on this one.”
It’s easy to see how this honest mistake was made. Elk aren’t expected to be in this area. Even the conservation agent was surprised to get this phone call. But, that hasn’t stopped animal activists from attacking Abby online.
“There’s no sense in it, people doing that,” Abby’s father said. “Don’t come at my daughter saying lock her away. Wow. If my daughter gets fined, I’ll pay it and move on. So be it. We’ll deal with it.”
Abby has passed a hunting education class and is able to hunt on her own. The shooting is being investigated, but it sounds as though authorities understand that this was an innocent situation. “She saw antlers, she saw the body. She thought it was a deer and took the shot,” Strother said. “This young girl probably had never seen an elk in the wild before. The dad certainly did the right thing by immediately calling us.”
The elk carcass is being stored until it passes testing. Abby’s father was hoping the elk would be returned to them, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. The meat might be donated to a needy family by the Department of Conservation. The antlers would likely be used for educational purposes to teach hunters the difference between an elk and a deer.
Whatever the outcome is, it is unacceptable to bully a 14-year-old girl for shooting an elk that authorities don’t even understand the origin of.
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Source: USA Today