Can you keep horns or a whole deer head that you find from a dead deer (from road side, hiking or any outdoor activity?

I'm not a game warden but I can tell you that you can pick them up and keep them when you find them on private property if you have permission from the landowner.

to the forum.

Roadside/bar ditch no u can't

ta THF

Not from public property.

Ok thanks for the info guys.

While driving from Austin to Killeen on 195 this evening I saw no less than 6 white tail deer with 4 of them being bucks dead on the road. All 4 were either directly on the road or within 20 feet. All of them had clearly been hit by cars (leg fractures / massive shoulder trauma) and their antlers were carved from their skulls. It made me sick to my stomach that people would not even have the decency to clear them from the roadway and or call the game warden to report the strikes.

Made me shake my head in disgust. I cleared the animals from the roadway and noted their locations for the GW.

Taking the antlers, wrong, but I don't expect someone to get out on the freeway at night to move an animal that was freshly hit. Aside from the dangers of being out of your car on the freeway at night, the deer might not yet be dead. Also, you can't expect a woman or elderly person to try to move a bloody animal.

A lot of the time when you see the horns cut off the game warden has done so. I sevral of them that will do this and then call into the sheriffs office for a carcus disposal. They cut the horns off so that someone won't come along and cut the whole head off and leave a headless carcus on the road.
It is illegal for non LE to cut them off.
If someone local hits a buck in our county the game warden here will offer them their "trophy" since it probably cost them sevral thousand dollars in damage. He is a great guy!

Several years ago a guy loaded up a "trophy buck" from the side of the road in north Houston around Spring if I recall correctly. He posted pics of the horns or something of the sort and the game wardens ran him down and arrested him for stealing state property. This is a TX law.

In some states if you hit a deer with a vehicle on the highway, all you have to do is call it in and report the time, location, auto registration/tag, and DL and it's yours to keep. Just make sure you write down the case number they assign you. If not, you can then be fined/arrested.

In West Virginia, we were allowed to keep road kill.

Yes over the years of driving I have run across dead deer in the ditch's and near the road sides and thought dang I would like to keep a set, but always wondered if I would get in some sort of trouble to take them.