Cutting antlers

Last year, during the last few days of August when we had cool mornings I ran all my bucks that weren't going to the preserve in the barn and cut their horns. They were all still in velvet but the velvet was dry. I would stage around 10 of them up in a pen the night before where they could easily be run in the handler early in the morning. Their neck muscle hadn't developed from rubbing and they were surprisingly easy to hold onto while cutting in the handler compared to later. They didn't fight one another in the barn or in the tunnel system. I have a papa deer handler but the rest of my handling system is very humble. I had never tried to cut horns this time of late summer. This worked very well for me. There was very little bleeding when the horns were cut even though the bucks still had velvet. I will definitely try it again this year. It has been much more of a pain to do them later in years past .I could never do this 3 weeks later if they were in hard antler. It would be a gruesome blood bath if 10 hard antler buck were run in the barn together. I ran the first ones in with the intent to only drench w/ Cilence and give the DBC EHD vaccine. Then with my tourniquet handy I decided to cut one off and it barely bled. Dad & I had all 40+ cut in just a few mornings. In 2004 we had a huge yearling named Stump Jumper who broke his antlers the end of July and got an antler infection. I cut into his antler and blood was instantly shooting everywhere. This put the fear of God in me to ever cut into velvet antler. If anyone else has tried to cut all their antlers this early successfully or unsuccessfully I would like to read your input.

Thanks

Not sure why this got passed up? But I have taken note of it!

I cut two last August 29th.  One hardly bled and one...let's just say scared me to death.  He bled quite a bit even with a tourniquet, blood stop, and heat used to cauterize the arteries.  The one had just started to shed naturally while the one that bled had no signs of shedding.