If you look at that chart Swampy posted you’ll see that prior to the doe killing we were averaging killing about 225-250K bucks per season. Then we ramped the doe killing up and the number of bucks being killed drastically declined to about half that number….. That’s when they enacted the 3 buck limit to try and divide up the fewer deer. Why?.....Because we drastically reduced the overall population and there wasn’t as many for folks to kill anymore…..and we are still on a slow downward trend….We’re at 88K bucks killed right now and will be lucky to make it to 100K by seasons end so extend your yellow line on out to current day and you’ll see we’ve trended further downward.
This is exactly why I want to kill some spikes and not kill doe's.
Something needs to be done in my opinion. Just not sure what the answer is. We have heavily managed a 600 acre tract for 8-9 years now. LOW density area, around 15-20 deer/sq mile when we got it. We haven’t shot a doe on the property the entire time we’ve had it. There MIGHT be 30 deer on that sq mile now. We did have sone pine wastelands but thinning has significantly helped those areas (thinned last winter).
We can’t really do much else.
