Back around the early to mid 90’s my family went from hunting only in Jackson Co…. to traveling south and venturing into counties like Tallapoosa, Russell, Pike…..It was always fun to pack up the campers and head south. Around that same time period the state was beginning to allow more liberal doe harvesting. You had something like a 7 day doe season in North Alabama where we hunted……and around 15-20 days in the southern counties.

I think we should have left doe harvesting alone right about there. We could have adjusted the days around a little more for certain areas and slightly tweaked it here and there as time went on..... but we royally messed up when we opened up a free for all doe harvest across most of the state… The worst thing that it did was it changed the hunters’ mentalities. We could try to implement those same exact doe days across the state now and you would likely receive a lot of pushback…..”I need to be able to shoot does!!!”….some would say…..while others would talk about restricting opportunity and this and that….maybe rightfully so……but the point is that back when we had doe days folks were just happy to have them……now they feel like the same thing would be taking something away from them.

So you are saying that only people who can take off x-day to y-day should be allowed to shoot does ........

Are we talking rifle only? Y'all still want season long bow harvest of does?

Was there less pressure in the 90's when you could shoot a buck a day. If there was I didn't notice. I remember seeing lots of does and a few spike and basket racked 2 year olds. I don't think I saw a buck over 4 years old with my own eyes until about 2002. Did we only hunt on doe days because I recall differently. I think we may be conflating the allowance to take does at, and this is important, the hunter's discretion, with the abuse of the regulation by those individuals who treat the doe-a-day rule as a personal challenge. It is the same flawed concept as punishing law abiding firearms owners because some asshole misused a firearm on the other side of the country. Doe days didn't keep poachers and night hunters from killing does at will in the 80's and 90's anymore than it will in the future.
If you want to see a change of value, we'd be better served by adapting the culture surrounding hunting as a whole. As long as some people see numbers like they are scoring points, the abuse of the resource we all share won't end.

A doe is just as dead if shot with a rifle or a bow. There are plenty of greedy ass bow hunters.

It’s a lot harder to overharvest with a bow though…..You’re just not gonna get nearly as many shot opportunities…….. and folks will likely only bow hunt during gun season if they’re on a good piece of property that is likely to give them a shot on one. That’s what I’ve seen through tracking for folks anyways. There are folks out there bow hunting during gun season but it’s pretty much only in the most heavily populated areas. The less opportunities someone has on deer….the less likely they are to take the gun out of their hand and use a bow.

Yes…..Doe days worked just fine the first time we did it. Folks found a way to go on those hunts. Those were even special hunts for most folks. This is part of what I’m talking about with the mentality change. Does went from being sacred to being target practice. We’ve went from being happy with a conservative doe harvesting period that favored the resource….. to folks thinking that we are all now entitled to a season long free for all that favors the hunter’s convenience and deep freeze.

We should have never even went there with doe harvesting. If we could go back in time now to the early 90’s and foresee the real impact that coyotes were about to have on the deer populations……we would have been much more conservative with any changes made......If we would have left doe days in place and just tweaked them a little….. then the pendulum would have likely settled out a little smoother and we would likely be in a different place today.