I cant access that study for West Tennessee…….Isnt that area highly fertile farming country??

I think that you’re likely over estimating the coon population………I’ve trapped 40 coons and possums in ONE spot but it doesn’t mean I can take that number and extrapolate it out as if it were 40 to the acre…….The same goes for taking 3,000 acres and trying to extrapolate it out to 23,000,000…………Its overestimating to do that. You’re not trapping inside of a box. Young males travel and disperse and typically represent the biggest group in the population. Annual trapping numbers for a single property impact far more than just that property.

Also, coons mainly exist and spend the vast majority of their time in the watershed areas of the landscape and that’s also where most people trap. Taking the density inside of the watershed zones and applying it to every acre of forest land would be like counting deer in food plots and using that per acre density to extrapolate.

Furthermore, the way you take the 100K coons trapped and apply the 4% to each acre as an average is inaccurate for how coons would actually be taken out. Individual properties would be trapped no differently than the one you described in Dallas Co and it would look more like a GIS buffer map dotted with red hotspots where trapping occurred…….It would just play out a lot differently. You wouldn’t have a bunch of coons piling on corn feeders anymore without someone scooping up the extra $$$$......