I also won't hunt for "trophy deer" because I think it is a cancerous approach to hunting. I don't hunt for bragging rights.
This is one snippet I wanted to pull out, from a long post I otherwise largely agree with wholeheartedly, for a little perspective sharing.
As a broad generality, the bigger and older the animal, the bigger the rack - and the more difficult of a hunt it will be. That animal will usually just be a lot more cagey, wily, and evasive, at least with pressured public-land animals. So in a sense, the rack is simply a proxy measure for both difficulty of the hunt, and one's own skills and accomplishment.
For me personally, the more I know about a species, and the more experience I have with hunting them, the more interesting a larger, harder to find animal is. I know almost nothing about elk hunting, and just a little more about antelope hunting, and with both of those I'm more aligned with your disinterest in going after a trophy - it's more about the satisfaction of getting an animal down and enjoying that meat with the family. If there's a lot of opportunity, I
might pass on a dumber and younger one if there seems a reasonable chance for a bigger, older one, but it's just not a big deal to me.
With mule deer though, it's a different story. The tags are hard to get here - once every 3-6 years for a rifle hunt, roughly. I'm obsessed with those amazing animals, trying to understand everything I can about them as a species and in the regional ecosystems I hunt them in. And, I want to make the absolute best out of every hunt I so rarely get to enjoy. Weeks of scouting, just to find a couple of the best individual bucks I can, to know exactly where I'll be on opening morning, and hope nobody got either of them during bow or muzzleloader season. Muleys older than about 4 or 5 on public land are almost an entirely different species - they just get vastly more intelligent, and super cagey. And I'm absolutely willing to exchange weeks of my life, in order to earn that hunt. In doing so, sometimes you eat those tags if you've got a high bar set, or are hunting a specific buck that keeps eluding you.
And, frankly, I don't give 2 $h*ts about what other people think, unless they have a deeper, experienced understanding of how difficult it is to get a really big, old mule deer buck on the ground - I'm not doing this for the approval of others.
But that's the big difference - the people who go cancerous over trophies, they're doing it for the approval of others, and the perceived status they think it gives them. In a way, it's a little analogous to stolen valor - its parading around markers of status that were not earned within the rules others performed under. Shooting a town buck is practically stealing, like shooting a pet. If I share, it's because I'm sharing the experience with someone the same way I'd pull out an old antique gun for a person whom I know will actually, personally appreciate it. It's not for just anyone.
If I could get 2 or 3 deer a year, it may not be this way for me. If I were obsessed with elk the way I am with mule deer, it'd be less of a basic hunt and more of a challenge pursuit. But with mule deer, it's about understanding them at the deepest levels, for the love of animal and of the pursuit, at the hardest levels.
I hope the context and nature of all this makes sense. People can go malignant over trophies, but I know I'm not alone in appreciating what goes into a trophy mule deer like this. It's not the same thing.
