The bucks do have a higher mortality rate. 50% of the fawns are bucks. But a natural whitetail deer herd would have a ratio of 1-2 does per buck. That's just fact. If you didn't shoot anything and left them alone that's what you would have. Thinking that you have to shoot the does back or you would have a natural balance of 5:1 is NOT accurate. Facts. They get in the way of a good theory sometimes.

But we aren't raising deer in a sanctuary somewhere so let's move on to what's really happening in Alabama:

If you have 1 deer per 10 acres (which is considered good) and you have 500 acres you have 50 deer. If you start out with a 3:1 buck/doe ratio that's probably close to realistic at the beginning of hunting season. 15 bucks running around. Then you shoot 2-3 bucks each for 5 hunters on 500 acres. You have killed 20% of your overall deer population. The bucks have a higher mortality rate in general..... Whoops.... Now you have essentially wiped them out.

The result - Does are all you have left. Should sound familiar.

So this is what you do..... Shoot a bunch of does. Have less deer. Still have no bucks. Wonder why.

This is a simple concept some of y'all can't grasp.

I am not against managing does by shooting some of them. But the scenario above is what happens in Alabama and is exactly why people "think" they have too many does and need to shoot them. You don't have a doe problem you have people blasting small buck problem. If you shoot a bunch of the does you have less deer next season and even fewer the next and you still don't have a healthy deer herd with any age structure.

Should sound familiar because this is the deer herd in Alabama and doe shooting has done ZERO to help this. We've been doing this for 25 years show me where it has worked. It hasn't.

Shooting does is not the real problem and is definitely not the solution to having a better deer herd with better age structure. It just simply DOES NOT WORK as a blanket overall state wide management plan.

That's why if you only have 500 acres to hunt, you should never take more than 3 bucks year off of it (if it is very good habitat) and preferrably no more than 2 bucks (if it's only avg habitat). Do this and take no more than 5 or so does for meat, given it is only 500 acres. If you have bad neighbors that shoot everything they see, then you'll probably need to reduce these numbers down even more, as appropriate.

It's a real simple concept that you cant seem to grasp, or maybe you do, I just couldnt tell from your post above. Overharvesting and non-selective harvest is a major problem across most of AL. A 5 member club on 500 acres generally means at least 12-15 guns actually hunting it (kids, wives and guests) and everyone of them wants to kill a deer. That right there is the problem. If you've only got 500 acres to hunt and it is average land, average density, and average fawn recruitment for AL, you shouldnt be killing more than 6-8 deer total, off of it in any given year and for every buck killed, you need to kill 2-3 does to account for the 1:3 sex ratio and the fact that the bucks have a significantly higher mortality rate than the does.

If it is done right, it works very well. Problem is, to do it right, you have to have a very large tract of land and good neighbors.

I'll tell you a first hand experience with aggressive doe killing. I hunted a 2000ac piece of property at Lock 7 in Greene Co, right along the river. Three hunters could each see 20-40 deer in an evening sit. Landowner joined the DMAP program first year it was available. We killed prolly 50 does and no bucks the first year. By the end of season one could not hardly see ANY deer at all by any method. Waaaayy too much hunting pressure. Next year was worse, deer sightings were way down. After season, in late Feb we started seeing deer. They were there but we in non stop hiding, moving at night.

I said this on the other doe killing post and I will elaborate on this one. On our Illinois lease I personally (and I am not the worlds greatest hunter) managed to see in a weeks time several 120-130 inch deer, and piles of young bucks. On the other hand I think that I saw maybe 12 does the entire time I was hunting. The deer I saw cruising the cut corn fields were all bucks. The largest group of does that I saw was 3 antlerless deer. This is on about 500 acres of land 300 of which is hardwoods surrounded by ag fields. My take away from my first time up there aside from the fact that there were bucks everywhere, is that I see far more does here in Alabama on food plots than I did up there. Were the does locked down? Are there less does? Are there far more bucks than does? I am not real sure but I found it odd.

I agree but yet its still an unsolved issue moving forward.....

Never made any difference. We have the exact same size bucks and length and duration of rut now not hardly shooting any does as we did for a decade when we shot 20 or so every year. The only difference we noticed was we saw fewer deer when hunting whem we wacked the does

Yep