Does need to be managed on a county level in my opinion….……Really if each county was divided up into four quadrants and you managed it at a ¼ county level that would be more optimal but we can make it work on a county level scale and it doesn’t even require the government to do anything…….Landowners could group together and do it on their own……Here’s the idea……
Many counties are only in the 400-500K acre range……Its basically like each county is its own Texas Ranch from a size perspective……And just like if we were going to manage that Texas ranch we would have a goal number of does to come off of that ranch each season for “population control” and we wouldn’t be too picky about taking them out perfectly evenly across the whole range……We would want to make sure that we take out 1500 or 2000 or whatever number keeps the deer herd at our goal level overall…….As long as the doe harvest is somewhat semi evenly spread out across the range then that would be plenty good enough……The same concept really applies to each county as well…..We need to take out “X” amount within each county and it doesn’t really matter so much that every individual 100 acre or 500 acre parcel is micro-managed…..
So if we look at each one of our 67 counties as if each one is its own “ranch” then we see that many of them are having issues with needing to kill 2000 does and instead their killing 2900……..or they’re needing to kill 1200 and they’re killing 1800 instead….etc…etc..……The point being that a lot of our counties are NOT having a problem with hunters killing too few does……….Many are having an issue controlling folks killing too many and keeping populations below what they should be……
Therefore an easy way to correct that issue is to start getting landowners to form cooperatives within each county where they “don’t shoot does” until the numbers go back down to the range where we want it for each county……The cooperative controls the harvest from the other end of the spectrum so to speak to prevent too many from being killed…..As long as other folks are shooting the “X” number that’s the goal for the county then the cooperative continues to not shoot any does……It would just about put “population control” for each county completely in the hands of the cooperative landowners and prevent overharvest from occurring….You could simply watch the state’s Game Check data each year along with local county level observations to make decisions for the group……I think this is basically what’s occurring in the plantation belt right now……
