Good post, Alan.

Rifles? I saw a guy hunting one day with a telescope on a rifle. There were plenty of deer when everyone used a shotgun and ran them with dogs. I guess rifles are to blame for the low deer numbers. Best go back to dogs and shotguns.

If everybody simply only took what they needed, and only took good clear ethical shots, there wouldn't be any kind of a shortage on anything.
I hunt public land... WMA's and Naional forrest land. I see deer nearly every time I am in the woods. I dont get to sit on greenfields in a shooting house. I stalk hunt.
Now, I have been in clubs and I have sat in a shooting house on a green field. It is nice to be able to do that.
But, I don't want the government stepping in and telling me how, when, or how many deer I can kill when I get to go hunting. They already have their hands in my pocket, keep up with what I watch on TV, and tell me how many hours in a day/week that I can drive a commercial vehicle.
If we police ourselves, then the police won't have to.

lets just do away with all hunting regulations. We don't need no G-men telling us how to hunt. Merica

You are hunting land that is already regulated by doe days.

The government is regulating the way you hunt. You just don't realize it. Or are a law breaker.

You are right. The land that I hunt is heavily regulated, but it shouldn't have to be.
I'm not going to kill 20 does a season simply because I can. I put a few in the freezer and leave the rest alone.
Some folks don't have the common sense to regulate themselves. There are a lot on here that do, but, there are some who don't.
It's like the dog hunting debate. Some do, some don't. I just feel like there has to be some self dicipline.
I don't need to whack a doe every day of the season.
This is the primary reason that I like this board... Free exchange of ideas.

i see now i'm gonna be a outlaw one day . oh wellllll !!!!

Crap post....
If they change any limits or seasons Clem thinks the big bad government is intruding on his rights.....so in that case they intruded on my rights by mismanagement of the resources by increasing the bag limits! There you go Clem we agree the big bad government ruins everything...

yep, I can still hear them in WI from 6 years ago

Having state-wide universal doe harvest regs is about as impossible to defend as this whole goofy-butt extended season thing in S. Alabama. What does the DCNR actually do? Serious question. It feels like they spend an awful lot of time answering questions that nobody's asking. The extended season bologna was low priority stuff in my opinion. Getting county-specific doe harvest regs, based on CURRENT "boots on the ground" intel would be a high priority task. Developing a plan to eradicate coyotes would be a high priority task. But instead they're all back-patting each other over giving half the state 10 more days to hunt a period that can't be defined, and happens multiple times seasonally.

Glad we can agree.

i was with you until you got to this, you must not hunt in south bama

I find it ironic that this post was started by a guy whose handle is deerslyer86.

That's right

You are 100% correct Sir Clem

Anyone who argues that the state should stay totally out of the deer management business because they "know whats right" and "manage their own land" may be 100% correct and manage perfectly, but the fact is laws aren't for responsible, intelligent people. I shouldn't have to tell any of you to not break into my house, yet that is a damn important and often broken law.

At one point elk and moose walked the sacred ground of Alabama, and people with no regulations killed them all. Personally, I'm for an effective tagging system based on the county or counties you hunt. I guess in rare cases maybe they should issue more tags to certain land owners. I knew of one owner who got rid of his "extra" does by allowing disadvantaged kids from a home in the area come hunt from time to time.

Goodman, if you look at the LFTT threads, 90% of them are griping that the rut ain't happening, or it was on two weeks ago, or it won't happen for two more weeks. All these hunters who creamed their shorts to hunt this first few days of February are realizing it's impossible to time it, it didn't matter. And I want to repeat my broken-record comments. I have hunted from Eufala to Huntsville,and everywhere I've been there'd be minor signs of rutting ALL SEASON LONG, then people swear they're missing it, then others swear they're chasing in Spring turkey season, etc adnauseum. We already had from Oct 15 till Jan 31st to kill a deer anywhere in the state, so that's why I said that changing the season dates FOR A SPECIFIC 10 DAY PERIOD was low priority. Lot more pressing issues our DCNR could've worked on. Better staffing to maintain current local deer surveys, so as to propose local-specific harvest regs, would've been FAR more worthy in my opinion. If I can kill a good buck in October, November,December, or January, I don't care if he was chasing does or not. But if I don't have sufficient deer to hunt period, I care about that!

If we went back to the 80's and everybody was planting soybeans, that would increase the population and we could go back to the 1 buck and 2 does a day! How's that sound?

Oh,and why do we still need to kill does to collect fetal data? My God, there have probably been 1000's of does killed for collection purposes. How much more info do you need to gather to know when a doe was bred? I doubt any more significant information is forthcoming than what the state already has. I think the biologists have figured out by now what the breeding dates are in most every county. Don't shoot the does at night during the summer and I bet you see a surge in deer populations as well.

Dr. B

We didn't convert our good Tennessee River Valley row crop land to pines up in the North end of Alabama. Pines .

I don't think killing a deer to do a fetal study is very smart? Couldn't they keep a camera's out and get the data? Hell, I saw 2 tiny spotted fawns on April 19th last year, and another covered in spots the week after Christmas last year. I don't think there is, or ever will be a defined rut in Alabama. I've hunted places where it was '' hot '' during certain weeks every year, but I've killed and seen buck chasing does hard from the end of October through the first week of May in a lot of different counties.