guppie9
New member
Fairbanks hunter bags ‘three-horned’ Dall sheep
By Tim Mowry
Published Thursday, November 6, 2008
FAIRBANKS — Walking up to the trophy Dall sheep ram he shot on Sept. 12, John Keech wasn’t as impressed by the massive size of the ram’s two full-curl horns, both of which measured more than 40 inches, as he was by a third, smaller horn growing out of the middle of the sheep’s nose.
“When I got up there and saw it,
I said, ‘Holy cow, what the heck is that?’” Keech said.
Perched on the bridge of the sheep’s nose, just below its eyes, was a chunk of horn roughly the size of a charcoal briquet.
“I thought it was a wart or something from a nose injury, but it’s actual horn material,” Keech said.
Keech hadn’t seen it when he was looking at the sheep through a spotting scope to make sure it was a legal animal — one with “full-curl” horns or the tips of both horns broken off. It may have been that the tip of the sheep’s horn hid the growth, or that Keech wasn’t paying attention to the sheep’s nose.
“I was concentrating on making sure it was legal,” he said.
The 38-year-old Keech has been hunting sheep for 15 years and said he has never seen anything like it.
“I’ve never heard of anything with a third horn,” Keech said. “I thought it was pretty interesting.”
So did experts at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks when Keech took the horns and skull in to be sealed.
State wildlife biologists, including Keech’s younger brother, Mark, gathered round to examine the growth and speculate about what it was and how it got there.
Unlike a normal horn, the third horn on Keech’s sheep had no bone structure underneath. It is attached to the skull only by soft tissue.
Steve Arthur, the department’s Dall sheep expert, has seen and heard of similar growths on sheep but said they are rare. The third horn on Keech’s sheep is “definitely not the usual state of affairs,” Arthur said, and is probably a genetic anomaly.
Sheep horns are different than moose or caribou antlers. Unlike antlers, which grow and are shed annually, horns are permanent. Horns consist of a bony core covered by a sheath of keratin, a fibrous protein forming the main structural component of hair, feathers, hooves, claws and horns.
Horns can develop odd growth patterns resulting from injuries to the bone core, which has a blood supply and living cells, Arthur said. He has seen sheep horns that appear to be twisted, like a piece of licorice.
“If you damage the horn core you can cause an infection, which causes a weak spot in the horn, which can cause a growth pattern or cause it to break off,” Arthur said.
He recalled a photo a sheep hunter brought in a few years ago with a similar growth as the one on Keech’s sheep “about the size of your thumb” in the same place.
That incident prompted Arthur to look into horn abnormalities. The unusual growths are similar to what is known as a scur in livestock, he said. Cattle that have been dehorned as young calves sometimes grow a partially developed horn if all the horn growth cells are not removed, he said. But scurs typically grow where the horn was removed, not in an entirely different place.
“It’s a fairly complex process growing these horns,” Arthur said. “I guess it’s not surprising things go haywire every once in a while.”
An injury suffered while ramming heads with another sheep during the fall rut could have contributed to the growth of the third horn, Mark Keech speculated.
There also is speculation that the abnormality is related to age. Based on the number of growth rings on its horns, biologists estimated Keech’s sheep to be 13 or 14 years old, which is extremely old for a wild Dall sheep.
Everybody has a theory on where the third horn came from, John Keech said.
“We were sitting around camp after I got it, and one of the guys wondered if it got gored in the nose by another sheep in a fight and the horn tip on the other sheep broke off,” he said.
John Keech declined to say where he shot the sheep, only that it was in a mountain range in Alaska. Truth be told, Keech wasn’t even sheep hunting.
“We were kind of hunting moose and I said, ‘I’m tired of hunting moose; I’m going to go and see if I can get a sheep,’” Keech said.
He walked about 15 miles over two ridges to get to an area where he knew there might be some sheep. The first day he spotted the ram, it was with three other rams but he was never able to get in position for a shot. The next day, he found the ram with only one other ram. He stalked them as they alternated between feeding and bedding down and crept within about 50 yards of the sheep.
“There was no cover; I was lying on the side of the mountain,” he said. “Five minutes later, they got up and started feeding, and I had a shot.”
The size of the sheep’s horns surprised him.
“It wasn’t like we knew there was a trophy sheep up there,” he said.
As it turns out, the sheep’s horns — the two normal ones — may be worthy of the record book. The sheep’s horns measured 41 1/2 and 40 1/2 inches, respectively, and they had 14-inch bases. Keech rough scored it at 170 1/8 points, a little more than the 170-point score needed to qualify for the Boone and Crockett Club record book. The horns and skull must dry for 60 days before they can be officially scored.
“If they shrink at all, they probably won’t make it,” he said. “We were joking that maybe that extra inch of horn would add to the Boone and Crockett score. Then they would definitely be in the book.”
There’s no way that will happen, said Jack Reneau, director of big game records for Boone and Crockett.
“Under no circumstances would the length of the third horn be included in the score,” Reneau wrote in an e-mail from B&C headquarters in Missoula, Mont.
Boone and Crockett’s scoring system is based on animals with a right and left horn. Scores are based on massiveness and symmetry. The third horn is not symmetrical and therefore is not included, Reneau said.
“To include the third horn in the score would be recognition of a rare anomaly and would give such an animal an unfair advantage over normal animals,” Reneau wrote.
“In fact, it is conceivable that a sheep with a third horn or a deer with a third antler could be a world’s record if the measurements of the third horn or antler were included in the score,” he continued. “Such a world’s record would not be representative of the norm.”
Currently, Boone and Crockett rejects antlered trophies, such as deer and elk, if they have a third antler, he said. In the case of horned animals, such as pronghorn, which sometimes have an extra pair of horns, the extra horns are ignored because they are usually much smaller than the main set.
“Since we ignore the extra horns on a pronghorn, I assume that’s what we would do with a sheep,” Reneau said.
Keech has a knack for killing unusual sheep. Of the eight sheep he has taken throughout the years, half have been broomed, including one that has little more than stubs remaining for horns. The longest horn on that sheep is 9 inches long, he said.
“John has shot more mutant sheep than anyone,” Mark said.
John Keech plans to have a European mount — horns attached to the bleached skull — made from the sheep’s horn and skull and he would like to keep the third horn on, though there’s probably a good chance it will fall off when the skull is boiled, he said.
“I think once it gets boiled, it’s going to come off,” he said. “I’ll definitely have them put it back on when it gets mounted.”
