I don't think you need to know an exact number of live deer. But I think you need to know how many you have in certain areas... mainly due to creating "zones". I'm not really sure how you create zones and start dictating bag limits in certain areas when you don't really know for sure how many deer you actually have in those areas.
They say we kill 300,000 deer. But we only report 75,0000. They say 1/3 of the people are actually reporting. Is that really true? I don't know.
They say we have 3 million deer or whatever the number is. They say there are plenty in ____ area Zone C.
Do they really know that?
I believe that they think they do. I would have to disagree but only because I think 75% of what they do is back of the napkin work with fuzzy numbers created by Statistics.
Statistics can be manipulated to tell you whatever you need them to tell you in particular if there is any political agenda involved.
I'd like to see something published:
How many deer per county estimated
How many deer killed per county estimated
How many deer per WMA or Public Land area
How many deer killer per WMA or Pulic Land area
I want to know how they got to the numbers
I want that broken down into whatever zones they want to have.
I want to know see what kind of conclusions they are drawing from these numbers and how they got there. I want to see the math or the logic used to determine their conclusion based on the data they present to us.
I then want to see how they determine appropriate seasons and bag limits based on their numbers for both private and public land. (I think they should be individually considered). Every WMA should have it's own season and bag limits and not just what they've been doing since 1972.
Basically I want them to publish the road map behind what they are doing so that all of us can understand what is going on and I want to know who's got a political agenda. I want a dern report published to the public. It would be published yearly BEFORE the next season's bag limits and dates are determined.
I don't think they'll do that because I don't believe they have good data to work with. This is why I am Pro Game Check. But Ultimately - They don't share a dern thing and that opens the door to a lot of "I think we should do _____" which is BS. Chuck thinks we should have 4 months long season because he is out of town a lot during December and he want to make up some time at the end of the season (I agree hunting FEB btw so this is not the point). Or he's got season tickets to the football games so he doesn't want Bow Hunters to start hunting in early October because he can't go hunting or doesn't want to bow hunt, etc. He doesn't want those pesky bow hunters to get the drop on any of his deer. Or his buddy doesn't bow hunt and in his buddy's club there are a few bow hunters. He listens to his buddy who doesn't want them at all period to be able to hunt before he has a chance.
That is the kind of BS I believe really goes on.
Y'all don't pick this apart because I'm just talking out loud here.
