Ohio man is one deer away from owning records in every triggered category.
Joe Schneider has one less item on his bucket list.
The retired railroad engineer from Circleville, Ohio, has now taken a record book whitetail with nearly every triggered weapon that’s legal in the Buckeye State. He’s missing only a deer felled by a rifle chambered for a straight-walled cartridge, which would fall into the BTR’s centerfire rifle category.
Rifles weren’t on the list of acceptable firearms when Joe set his sights on this goal. The rule change came in 2014.
Joe’s fifth book buck, which he shot on Nov. 29, 2016, falls into the BTR’s shotgun category. He also has entries in the pistol, blackpowder and crossbow columns.
Joe first garnered headlines — or the cover of Rack magazine — in 1999, the year after he carried a pistol afield and shot what is still the world-record Irregular in that category. Tagging that magnificent animal forever changed the former meat hunter’s mindset.
If he hadn’t jumped the enormous buck while bush-hogging one of his farms in the summer of 1998, he would’ve likely shot the first legal deer to step in front of his barrel. Knowing such an animal resided on his farm was enough incentive to be more discriminating.
After harvesting his dream buck, which has a composite score of 2216/8 inches, Joe became a big buck fanatic. And his pickiness has rewarded him with some real bruisers.
In December 1999, he used a muzzleloader to take what is now Ohio’s No. 12 whitetail in the BTR’s blackpowder category. It has a composite score of 172 5/8 inches as a Semi-irregular.
He topped that buck four years later, smoking another Semi-irregular that scored 177 6/8 inches, Ohio’s current eighth best.
Joe’s fourth record book buck fell in 2009, while he was hunting with a crossbow. Also a Semi-irregular, it tallies 190 inches (inside spread included) and is No. 18 in its class.
As of seven years ago, that was nearly 700 inches of antler divided among three weapons categories from the same Pickaway County farm. Now the tally is pushing 960 inches, and the most recent puts Joe’s name into yet a fourth antler category.
He shot his most recent trophy on an overcast and windy Tuesday, the second day of Ohio’s 2016 shotgun season. The temperature was a balmy 61 degrees.
“It was a horrible year, weather-wise,” Joe said. “It was just too hot for me to hunt more than a couple of times with my crossbow.”
As he’d done the previous afternoon, Joe went to his farm about 3 p.m. on Day 2. He parked and walked the quarter-mile to his shooting house.
Uncharacteristically, he sprayed his boots with doe-in-estrus scent about every 100 yards. A friend had given him the bottle.
“I don’t usually use that stuff,” he said. “I just thought I’d give it a whirl.”
The molded plastic stand — built on metal skids — had rested in that location for a couple of years. It’s a half-mile from where he shot his world-record whitetail in 1998.
The farm is 2 miles long.
Sitting within the box, he can monitor about 50 acres of thick grass and opposing tree lines 100 yards to each side. The previous day, he’d seen a nice 10-pointer with an unusually white rack working a scrape. He also saw an even more impressive 8-pointer he believes would’ve scored between 145 and 150.
Those are the type deer Joe routinely allows to walk out of his life.
Ten or 15 minutes after he closed the door, a deer began snorting and blowing. So sure the animal was getting a nose full of him, he uncapped some raccoon urine — something to dilute or eliminate his human odor — and poured some around the windows.
About 4:30, Joe saw a hefty 6-pointer at 150 yards, walking perpendicular to the trail he’d taken to his stand. When the deer crossed his scent line, it stopped and began following it.
“The buck followed that doe scent to within 40 or 50 yards of my blind, and then it stood looking my way for at least 10 minutes,” Joe said. “After that, it moseyed on off.”
Twenty minutes after the 6-pointer disappeared, Joe spotted another and much larger buck inside the tree line, not far from the scrape the white-antlered 10-pointer had visited on Monday.
After he decided it was a shooter that wasn’t going to investigate the scrape, Joe tried to stop the deer by bleating. When it turned to look his way, he sent a 20-gauge slug into its bellows.
The buck collapsed after running 60 yards.
“I thought it was in the 170s, maybe a 180, at best,” Joe said. “I’ve become terrible at judging them on the hoof. I was really surprised to learn it was a 196 (composite).”
This article was published in the August 2017 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.
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