‘Don’t you worry, it’s only money’: Two days at a Texas whitetail deer auction
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‘Don’t you worry, it’s only money’: Two days at a Texas whitetail deer auction
The auction begins with a prayer.
A short invocation, spoken over the sounds of country music in the background, to open what is in some ways like any other livestock auction.
The cowboy hats and belt buckles, the bidding on live animals, the nonstop chatter from a trained auctioneer.
Except this auction, part of the Deer Breeders Corp. annual winter event in January, is at the Horseshoe Bay Resort. The bids are flying through a room that the resort calls the Granite Ballroom. The bid spotters are wandering, eagle-eyed, over hotel-style carpet with wide swoops of gold and blue.
And while the bidders are sparring over deer — does and fawns, plus sperm from bucks — the animals aren’t actually present. “Delivery Information: Arrange At Sale,” the auction book specifies for many of the animals.
After a handful of general items, there’s 24 lots up for bid tonight. This first night of the auction is the warm-up round for the bigger auction on the second night, but still there’s thousands of dollars changing hands.
A straw of semen from a buck named Perfect Dream, sold for $2,500.
A doe fawn from Shiner, Texas — the same town where Spoetzl Brewery makes Shiner beers — sold for $6,500. “Like Our Beer Buy Our Deer!!!” the seller wrote in the auction book.
A bred doe for $19,000. “This young lady is packed with power and is sure to produce!” the auction book assures.
Two men in cowboy hats, the bid spotters, wander through the tables as each lot comes up, pointing into the small crowd and holding up their hands in a form of sign language: three thousand? Three and a half?
And then, a signal from one of the audience members: a head nod, a hand raise.
In the same moment that one of the men sees the signal, he turns on his heel, a sudden pivot, and yells back at the auctioneer on stage. The sound is drowned out, nearly, by the stream of chattered numbers from the auctioneer.
The lots move quickly, propelled along by the rapid, rhythmic shouts from auctioneer Steve Chupp. From his perch on the stage, above the small sea of round tables, he pauses his nonstop spiel from time to time to egg on the buyers.
“Don’t you worry, it’s only money!” he croons at the beginning of the evening.
“Is anybody in here paying attention?” he asks when the bids roll in too slowly.
“Go ahead and buy her,” he urges when a bidder hesitates.
Catlin Dutschmann — the ranch manager over whitetails at Hatada Ranch, which is outside Waco in the city of Valley Mills — said that deer breeders focus on each animal’s pedigree when they’re deciding which ones to bid on and how much to spend. Breeders may be aiming to cultivate a different look in their herd, or to build on an existing profile.
“A lot of that is to do with pedigrees,” Dutschmann said. “If you’re buying a doe, and you know ... she’s out of this kind of genetics and stuff like that, that has a lot to do with what’s in your herd already.”
Dutschmann said it’s not quite an exact science — just like human siblings may look similar in some ways and different in others, it can be difficult to predict which genes a deer will pass on to its offspring.
“As a whole, you know what you’re going to get, but every once in a while you’ll have something that, ‘Hey, these two are brothers, these deer, and they don’t look nothing alike,’” Dutschmann said.
While the Deer Breeders Corp.’s auction sells mostly does and fawn does, their value is defined by the bucks in their lives — the bucks in their pedigree, the bucks they’ve birthed, the bucks they’re somehow related to.
A breeder’s goal, after all, is to breed better and better bucks.
The auction book’s description of each doe is filled with the names and pictures of her most impressive male relatives.
On night two of the auction, one doe fawn, not yet a year old, is related to Blue Chip, Unforgiven, Freeze Frame and Sudden Express. “One of the stoutest little ladies in existence,” the auction book says, with “a pedigree 2nd to none in the nation.”
“Go ahead and buy it, go ahead and buy her,” croons Chupp, the auctioneer.
And she’s sold, $42,500 for the doe fawn, the biggest sale of the weekend.
