CRAWFORD COUNTY, Mo. — A lucky Missouri hunter harvested a rare kind of deer during the most recent hunting season: An antlered doe.
The hunter, Rebecca White, shared pictures of her kill out of Crawford County with the Missouri Department of Conservation. Department officials say they usually get two or three reports a year of antlered doe out of the hundreds of thousands of deer harvested statewide each year.
Antlers are usually produced only by bucks, or male deer, and experts aren't yet sure why does, or female deer, rarely produce antlers. But, they have some theories.
"It’s unknown what initiates antler development in these deer but could be caused by a tumor or cyst on an ovary or adrenal gland causing an increase in testosterone, or the doe could have been partially masculinized from sharing testosterone while in the uterus with a male twin," MDC said in a Facebook post.
"True" antlered does, according to MDC, have functional reproductive tracts and never shed their antlers. Another kind of antlered doe are considered "pseudohermaphrodites," or deer that have the external genitalia of a female, but have male sex organs internally due to a recessive genetic defect.
The deer White bagged was reportedly the former kind of antlered doe, as no internal male organs were found on the deer, MDC officials said.
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