Deer Piss and Duck Calls

I was working from memory on that deer piss case, and it must have been at least a decade ago that it happened. The trial didn't make our local news, so all I've got to go by is what Fred said about it on his show. If he made as good a case in court as he did on his show, he should have won.

The company didn't just claim that their product was genuine deer piss, they claimed that it was deer piss collected from does in heat. There is no way that they could have collected it from wild deer, so it must have come from a captive herd. Does only come into heat (estrus) for a few days each year, so it would have taken a lot of does to produce enough piss to fill all the bottles the company had been selling. Then there's the problem of actually collecting the stuff. What did they do, have a bunch of people follow the does around the farm holding buckets under them? They couldn't let any bucks be in the same pen, because they surely would have taken exception to that. If the bucks and does were kept separate during the does' estrus period, no breeding would have occurred, so the producers would have had to buy new deer from time to time. It's doubtful that a few buckets of piss would have generated enough income to justify feeding a doe all year and, if she wasn't allowed to breed, there would be no other way to make money off of her.

With any kind of livestock, you can only economically feed them for so long, and then you have to either sell them or have them make a baby that you can sell when it grows up. I don't know what the window is for deer, but with cattle it's about two years. Deer are biologically closer to sheep than they are to cattle, and I used to live next to a sheep farm. Sheep are generally bred when they're at least year old and, if they don't produce a lamb, it's off to the slaughter house for them. Wild deer breed at a year and a half, and it's not uncommon for them to lose their first fawn due to inexperience. Deer bred in captivity probably have a better success rate, but I'm sure that no commercial producer could afford to keep a doe more than two and a half years if she didn't produce a fawn by then.

I seem to remember that Fred reported consulting with a chemist about this. The chemist told him that you probably could come up with something that resembled doe in heat urine by mixing up some chemicals, and Fred concluded that was probably what the deer piss company had done. I don't remember anything about cow piss, but a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age. I don't know the details of the trial, but the company must have presented some kind of evidence. I'll have to look that up this weekend. Where did you find it, on Wiki?

Like I said, I haven't seen the Duck Dynasty show, but I'm inclined to believe it's a work of fiction. If somebody had gotten rich by inventing a vastly superior duck call, I'm sure it would have been mentioned in one of my hunting and fishing magazines.