Old rusty scales typically weigh light, not heavy. Yes there are inaccurate scales, then again, there are a pile of well managed clubs that use digital or calibrated scales. There are plenty of 200lb bucks still being killed on well managed properties in Alabama. Now days, that number drops off exponentially when you start talking about bucks over 220lb. The key is age and nutrition. Back when most of the blackbelt was in Ag, the age structure was better and there were plenty of 220-240lb bucks killed. Anything over 250 has and always will be a sure enough toad. Note that almost all those huge bucks that were weighed back in the 70's were weighed on pretty accurate feed scales at the feed stores. Nobody was into serious management back then, they simply hunted. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of clubs back then didnt even have a set of scales. If you shot a stud and wanted it weighed, you took it to the feed scales or somewhere similar. You reference 20 lb strings of bass, there have been a pile of days that I've been at or over 20 lbs with just 2 fish. Did it twice this spring in fact and there are several on here that can attest. It's all a matter of when, how and where you fish and when, how and where you are hunting (and back then, the blackbelt was the place to be).

I fully believe these older guys like Troy and the others that hunted these prime areas back then. Back when the blackbelt was really at it's prime, I was too young to hunt seriously but I remember the deer that my dad and others killed. By the time I was old enough to start sitting and hunting on my own with a rifle, it was around 1982 and that area was already moving to pines and the body weights and inches of horn dropped off quickly after that. I remember in either 1977 or 1978, I was 7 or 8 years old and watched a deer get weighed on the feed scales in Thomaston, Alabama, that was killed off our club just up the road, That place was surrounded on 3 sides by thousands of acres of ag. Guy shot it 7 times with buckshot on a man drive and still ended up cutting its throat to finish it. It weighed 267 live weight on feed scales with 8 to 10 of us witnessing it. I remember when they skinned that deer, the buckshot sounded like rain hitting on the ground as it fell out of the tallow on that buck. Most most of the pellets had not even made it into the deer's chest. I fully believe these older guys that lived it. I caught the trailing edge of it, but was just born 10-20 years too late to really hit it right. Oh yeah, that 267 deer probably scored in the high 140's and the old man that killed it sawed those horns off with a hacksaw and threw them in the bed of his truck.