Charging Buck Was Rescued From A Grisly Death

On Wednesday we found a two-minute video on Live Leak showing two men from Oklahoma using smartphones to shoot a whitetail buck at extreme close range. The clip went viral, generating lots of negative comments from hunters who thought that the men were simply too close to the buck. But it was only an excerpt from a larger video (below), one that paints a different story of the encounter.

Chad Yousey and Joey King shoot for Bow Madness Outdoors, an outdoors filming company that sells work to companies like Realtree. We spoke with Yousey last night after he asked for our help with promoting the full story of the encounter.

“This all happened by accident,” he said. “I uploaded the sample clip by mistake. We created a short video for some of our local buddies and friends because we had never seen or heard of anyone being able to get that close to a wild buck, and I simply loaded a clip instead of the entire piece. Before I could delete it, the thing went viral. It was on our webpage for probably 15 minutes, and by the time we replaced it with the correct clip, it was too late.”

According to Yousey, King was in the process of recovering a deer he had shot when he encountered two bucks with locked antlers–one of which was dead. King radioed Yousey to come help free the tangled deer, but every time they got close, the living buck dragged the dead one 20 yards in the opposite direction. When the men finally got into a position where they thought they could help, they set up their cameras.

“After we freed the deer, we shut the cameras off, but that younger buck just stood there about 10 feet away for 15 minutes or so,” Yousey says. “I told Joey, ‘I don’t know if that thing has brain damage from fighting or what, but he ain’t leaving.'”

Yousey tried time and time again to spook the deer away, but it stood its ground. That’s when he took out his phone and snapped a few photos while King filmed the two-minute clip that eventually went viral.

“I watched the clip and without a backstory or some kind of context, I can definitely see where people are coming from. So for the past two days I’ve been posting responses and links to the real video wherever there’s discussion about it to try to clear the air,” Yousey says.

“We know that with this kind of attention, we’re going to get both positive and negative feedback. We’ve been a company for a long time and we’re used to that. But in this case, we feel like people are taking the video the wrong way than what it was intended–like we were just out there harassing that deer and that wasn’t the case at all. Had we not been there, it likely would have died.”