I always plant bulbs with my fingers crossed.  After all, every time you plant a bulb, you are taking a leap of faith.  Nobody other than a gardener would buy a lifeless looking brown or gray thing, bury it under four or six or eight inches of soil, mark the spot (or not), ignore it up to six months and then expect spectacular results.  Not only are those unborn tulips or daffodils or crocuses on their own, but during a portion of that time the soil will probably be hard as a rock and covered with snow, sleet or ice.   Even when the ground isn't frozen, the slumbering bulbs will be at risk of being eaten by a hungry bunch of predators including mice, squirrels, groundhogs, and, if the bulbs last long enough to sprout, rabbits and deer.  

But watching new life arising from the earth is one of the great joys of spring, so I, like many people, try to improve my bulbs' chances of survival.  We don't have deer in my neighborhood yet, but we do have all kinds of other bulb-loving beasts.  To foil them, I usually dig trenches, rather than individual holes, and interplant the tulips with daffodils or alliums, which the plant predators find distasteful.  I sprinkle chopped mint leaves or chives or cayenne pepper over the tops of the filled-in trenches because the same animals reputedly don't care for the strong scents of those herbs.  If I am planting in a part of the garden that is heavily browsed by digging animals, I even cover the newly dug area with a temporary blanket of landscape cloth or wire mesh, weighting it down and leaving it in place for a few weeks until the animal-magnet smell of fresh earth subsides.  In the spring I spray my sprouting treasures with a deterrent spray to make them less desirable.

Of course, depending on your circumstances, you may also have to plant your bulbs in specially made critter-proof boxes, include sharp gravel in the planting holes, or put all your bulbs in an area that is completely surrounded by both a deer fence and a barrier that extends a foot down into the ground.  Just as the animals are impelled by a biological imperative to seek out food, plant lovers are impelled by the psychological need to make things grow.  In the end, a gardener's just got to do what a gardener's got to do.