"The pleasure they give [trophies] is, or should be, in the seeking as well as in the getting. The trophy, whether it be a bird's egg, a mess of trout, a basket of mushrooms, the photograph of a bear, the pressed specimen of a wild flower, or a note tucked into the cairn on a mountain peak, is a certificate. It attests that its owner has been somewhere and done something - that he has exercised a skill, persistence, or discrimination in the age-old feat of overcoming, outwitting, or reducing-to-possession. These connotations which attach to the trophy usually far exceed its physical value."
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press 1949, page 168-169