Pus Pockets and the Like

I shot a whitetail with a funky antler one year, he had an infection near his pedical that went down through his skull and into his brain cavity- an actual hole in his skull. He looked healthy other than that but I dont think he had much time left.
 
My wife’s bull last year had numerous cuts and a couple small puss pockets on its butt, looked to be from getting into it with another bull

Dug a 22 bullet out of the butt on my dads Idaho moose
 
My Last Wyoming bull had a big swollen knot on his knee that felt like it had fluid in it. Was able to skin around it without it erupting.
 
I shot a whitetail buck 2 yrs ago that had a few hundred fibromas growing all over him some were about 2 inches like a golf ball and some like a softball size must of had 1 to 200 of them
I knew what they were when i saw him and put him down for mercy the local warden gave me another tag due to this guy being so bad
 
Shot a bull 4 years ago that had an abscess on the top of his shoulders. I assume it was from the rut. Too bad because it ruined one of the prettiest capes I’ve ever seen.
 
Found an old abscess with a broad head in it from a bull a few years back. A muley buck from a long time ago had a .243 bullet lodged against the neck vertebrae, all sorts of calcified scar tissue around it. I’ve seen some pretty nasty abcesses around bone breaks as well.
 
I killed a bull elk one year that was blind in one eye and half of his lung was between his ribs and the skin. Most of his ribs had been shattered and healed with the lung on both sides.

I had a friend killed a nice old bull one season. In cutting it up he picked 10 slugs out of it that ranged from .223 to 45 something. I would label that as one tough old bird or damn unlucky.
 
The first elk I ever shot (5 x 5 bull) had a cyst-like growth high on his drivers side shoulder. Being curious, after skinning that front quarter I cut into it and thick pus oozed out of it. A little further investigation revealed a three-blade broad head stuck in the shoulder blade. I shot the bull on Oct. 25 and it was obvious he had been shot sometime in September during the archery season. The area around the broad head was totally encapsulated and he was doing fine until he walked in front of me.
 
We took this out of my buddy's bull last year, it was stuck through the backstraps above the spine. It was completely encased in scar tissue that was so tough our Havalons could barely slice through it. On the same hunt, we're reasonably sure we met a guy from Wisconsin whose friend put it there the year before when they hunted that area...
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Several years ago my supervisor with the Forest Service and another co-worker were out looking at a new job site when they saw a huge buck slowly walking. Then it bedded down. They decided to see how close they could get and started walking towards it. It never got up, it was dead. It was hunting season so they checked for bullet wounds. None. My boss decided to gut the der and if it looked OK he would go ahead and tag it. But when they looked at the heart it was completely encased in a two inch thick puss pocket. So he didn't tag it. He said the meat was probably good but he wouldn't be able to eat it because visions of that puss pocket would enter his mind with every bite.
 
I guided for a couple of years in a really heavily hunted unit in CO, it blew me away how many elk were packing around bullets or arrows...
some memorable ones were a bull that had a broadhead in the shoulder and a second, different broadhead in the spine, at least one that had a bullet and a broadhead, a full length, intact arrow lying along the top of the spine, multiple bulls with bullet holes in the antlers...
for all of that I only saw really bad pus pockets on maybe two? most were well scarred but not infected.
 
I once shot a buck with 3" of wood in his backstrap, like he'd jumped over something and speared himself. I also shot a bear that had about half of a 12 ga. old-school slug in it's back, right over the spine between the skin and the body. It was one of the cap with fins type slug. There was no evidence of a wound in the meat and 3 white hairs where the slug must have entered. The bear aged out to 12.5 years and weighed about 180-200# The rug is on my wall as it was a beautiful chocolate brown.
 
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