I didn’t read through 5 pages of responses but I will tell you what the highly educated and professional biologists that worked with us told us on the subject when we had to report this info for our management program. First off, in a healthy herd virtually all of the breeding age does will have milk. There can be a few exceptions, but very few. Secondly, you can’t always look and tell if they are dry or not. They may look dry but cutting into the bag will show the truth. A lot of people just look and declare them dry when a cutting will show otherwise. If you do have a doe that is truly dry, in a healthy herd she should be so old that she is beyond breeding age. That is the perfect cull deer.

If you have more than a rare dry mature doe, you’ve got problems. I’m not claiming to be an expert but we did work with experts and we did have an overpopulation problem and worked hard for a number of years to get it in check.