Never Known Marsh to stir chit, but here lately that seems to be all you like to do. Carry on now......

I like the diversity on this place. 😊

And you know this how?

In my bussiness I deal with plenty processors and they all say the same thing. Don't Take a genius to look at a set of backstraps and tell the don't belong to a doe.

Sounds like the processors you're dealing with are part of the PROBLEM, and not the solution.

It is not the processors job to enforce laws.

Never said it was (or nor should it be) But if that's folks justification for knowingly/continuously letting folks break the law and steal from us then so be it....

I give my opinion and I’m stirring chit? Just because I think some of what you are pushing is is dumb as hell ain’t stirring chit!! It’s just telling it the way I see it!! If the people around you are killing to many deer for your liking then fight to get changes for your area. Some areas need to be left alone. I admire your passion and sometimes I do just poke the fire and stir chit but I also have a strong passion for deer hunting and with the way the season is set up now we can try to control what needs to happen on our place. Ok I’m going back to planting potatoes!!

I agree with creating more zones. The state is trying to paint too broad a stroke on too big of a canvas.

And add one more to the final tally. Had a doe get caught in the pig brig last night and broke its neck trying to get out when we attempted to release it

the reason for more different zones, as stated by DCNR, is that we, the people, are too stupid to hunt by zones.....

I don't understand how you can claim the game check numbers are total garbage b/c 50% of people aren't even using it and then in the same sentence rely on it for some kind of hardcore evidence of anything.

^^
Not a bad point 🤣🤣

Any system we hav here for bama - folks will be pissed off and rules always will be wrong regardless if you feed corn or law says cant - etc etc 😀

THANK YOU, SIR !

The same way a timber cruise only samples 10% to get an estimate for the entire stand.....You dont have to sample 100% to get a good idea of what is occurring.

Sounds like we may have identified one of them ^^^^^

Uhhh, but a stand of timber is pretty consistent throughout. What numbers and type of deer various types of hunters that aren't reporting are killing across the state are not.

This year I only killed two bucks.

Just because you do not have the property to support more than 3 bucks per person is not a reason to tell someone else how many to shoot. So GTFO on with your tag BS.

Ummm, doesnt work that way. When you cruise a property, you make estimates but your basing it on what you see with your eyes and measure and it is far more scientific than anything the state is doing with deer data. Areas for the cruise are established, plots are designated, BA and TPA are determined as well at the timber type make-up and age. Then that is statistically extrapolated across the different plots to determine the merchantable value. LOL It's a whole lot different and a whole lot more accurate than what the state does with our deer.

I'll summarize it for you. How scientific and accurate does this sound?

Question: How many deer to we have?
State Answer: Plenty
Question: How do you know?
Answer: Well hunters kill them all the time so there must be plenty of them around.
Question: How many deer are killed illegally or by unlicensed hunters?
Answer: Well we dont really know but we dont think that it is very many
Question: Well why do you think that?
Answer: Because there are not a whole lot of tickets written for that
Question: Okay, well do you think that you catch the majority of people breaking the law
Answer: Oh no, there's just no way. The state has 67 counties and we only have about 60 GWs for the entire state. That would be impossible. Just too much land and nowhere near enough manpower to patrol it. We'd need probably 250-300 GWs to do it effectively.
Question: Well why dont you hire more GWs and enforce the rules that are on the books
Answer: Dead silence. Crickets chirping quietly in the background.
Question: What % of hunters actually participate in checking deer?
State Answer: Well.........we really have no idea, but we think it's somewhere between 40-70%
Question: Why do you think it is that much?
State Answer: Because that is our best guess and that's what we think it is
Question: How many deer were killed this year?
State Answer: Game Check says 200,000 were killed
Question: Well if Game Check says 200,000, why does the annual harvest report produced by the state say over 300,000 were killed?
State Answer: Well we know that not everyone participates in Game Check so we just arbitrarily add some additional kills to the total actually reported to get it to where we think it should be.
Question: So you dont know how many deer are available for harvest and you just admitted you really dont have any idea about how many are actually being harvested. So how in the hell do you make your wildlife management decisions
State Answer: Well we have this thing called the CAB. It's made up of a bunch of political appointees. Mostly elites and politician's friends that dont have wildlife biology degrees or any formal wildlife training and they vote on the rules.

Thank you for making my point for me.

Most hunters are a 0, 1, 2 or 3 when it comes to buck harvest…….There’s really not a whole lot of variance. You don’t have to count that many to get a good rate for each of those categories. I bet by the time you survey a 1000 people you already have a good ballpark figure……With a few hundred thousand hunters out there, sampling 65% like we’re doing probably gives a pretty accurate number……Accurate enough anyways……it’s the change from year to year that were really watching anyways……”trends”.

Apples and oranges.