The John Holmes Signature Collection

“Around September, mating season begins, and bulls use their antlers to spar with one another when vying for breeding rights with cows. ‘There’s a relation between antler size and sperm counts,’ Matthew Metz, a wildlife biologist and research associate with the Yellowstone Wolf Project, told me. ‘It’s an honest advertisement.’ When bulls are done breeding, their testosterone levels fall, and so do their antlers. In the spring, the bones are cast off, leaving behind bloody pedicles. The wounds heal, regrowth begins, and people start searching for the antlers that have been shed. The bones are valuable: last summer, top-grade elk antler sold for sixteen dollars a pound. (A large shed antler might weigh ten pounds.) Collectors are known to pay upward of fifteen hundred dollars for a particularly desirable pair of antlers, and tens of thousands of dollars for deadheads—skulls with the antlers still attached.” Abe Streep in The New Yorker: The Great American Antler Boom.

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