Most significant change to game laws in my lifetime( even more significant than going from "doe days" to the free for all death to all does we have now). is legalizing baiting. It isn't feeding, it is baiting.
SO... baiting would be the most likely reason in my non scientific opinion for this or any change. to what we saw 3 years ago.
We do not bait, kill about as many bucks as does( avg. about 10 each between 12 members) per season and the herd is healthy as they can be this time of year. I didn't read all 7 pages so I may not fully get this gist of this thread.

We use to Kill way more deer back in the 90’s and early 2000’s without corn than we do now with it.
We hunted pretty hard though. Now, we’re lazy….er
It’s way easier for the novice hunter to kill one now though so I guess that’s good.

Its been an evolving gist.....

I guess you could look at the data, if there is any, from other states that started to allow baiting and see if they had the same decline. Since Mississippi legalized baiting quite awhile before Bama did, they probably almost out of deer.

I believe being able to hunt over bait and being able to keep tabs on the bait with cell cameras combined with a 3 buck limit is having or is going to have a negative impact on our deer herd…. whether we want to believe it or not. I know It’s a touchy subject for the ones who hunt over a corn pile. I know ppl this season who killed several bucks over corn piles using cell cameras monitoring corn who probably would not have otherwise killed those bucks…… not to mention the countless does that get harvested over a corn pile.

It's possible you can draw some conclusions about the affect of baiting by looking at Lauderdale and Colbert counties since baiting has been banned there. Although, I'm sure it's still widespread. Of cours,e that affect is probably hard to see given the relaxed regulations in the CWD zone.

Deer will quit coming to corn in daylight if they are constantly being shot over it. A pile of corn is a guarantee to not see deer on heavily pressured properties. Getting all that calorie dense food in one spot means they don't need to spend as much time foraging, which means they can travel far less in daylight.

I've hunted properties like this before. Bait will make the deer harder to kill if it's overdone. I don't think it will do much to lower the overall population, but I could see bait and cameras leading to more mature bucks getting killed.

This is why, on my little patch, I use spin feeders away from the house. And I only throw about 3.5# per day split between a morning and afternoon spin. It’s regular enough to keep the does coming by but not enough for them to gorge themselves. We don’t shoot our does.

Been a lot of deer killed in the last two days........

Harold I appreciate all your time and effort and I know that you only want what’s best for deer hunting statewide.

A TON. Been a substantial amount of shed bucks shot for does up here the last two days. Absolute incompetence.

My buddy and I added a couple bucks two the totals in Madison county today.

When we first started hunting in Alabama we had a place in Georgiana. We were surrounded by big dog hunting clubs. I can promise you from what we saw and the stories they told us about the number of deer they’d kill in a season, a corn pile has nothing on them. I can promise you there is no longer the 300+ deer a year being killed on those properties like then if the stories were true.

Over 180k with a good few days of nice weather to go.

So we killed 195,000 deer the first year baiting was legalized……That was also the first year they started making folks have a GC number for the processor and so it’s basically where our current game check trend data starts that we can compare future years to. But if that was a 14% increase over the previous years harvest as mentioned in the article tradbow posted…. then that means that the state estimated we killed around 168,000 deer the year before legalization…..I assume that's using the old sampling method…..

So its been 168K…….195K………186K………and now this year will top 180K again…….basically putting us killing an additional 10-14% for three years now over what we were killing prebaiting……Is that sustainable or are some areas gonna take a drastic down turn when the population gets thinned out enough??......It would be interesting to see the harvest trends for the previous 5-10 years before baiting was legalized……Were we already trending downward???

I would like to know the numbers for the years that 2 does a day was made legal. The does got hammered in our area. Some of us were guilty the first year. I killed my 2 doe limit in one hunt as did a couple other members. It didn’t take long for us to notice the drop in sighting on our place. Back then all our neighbors were hunting and laying them down. Took about 4 years to recover.

What year was that made legal??....Late 90's??

Here's the graph the state put out back years ago……I extended it to current times but that doesn’t show the individual up and down of each year…….If you look at the green line though which is doe harvest, you see it start going up pretty dramatically in the late 90’s and peaking around 2005 before starting a downward trend……I’m guessing that peak and downward trend started because we got to a point where we we thinned out the population enough that we couldn’t sustain that type of harvest anymore……At some point hunters likely have eased up by choice but you still have some people promoting the slaughter…..

2009/2010 was the first year we hunted in Alabama. I think the 2does were already legal. We moved to Monroe County in the summer of 2012. I know it was still legal to kill 2 does a day during the 2012/13 season. I think the 2013/14 season was also still 2 does a day. I’m not sure after that because that was when we cut way back on doe killing. I know the first 2 years in Monroe co we killed 22 does total off our place. That was way to many. We got way to greedy!!