What I read there basically says both numbers, doe weight and antler scores, have to do with nutrition, not age. So if you took one of the study sites in the Midwest, killed all the does 3 and older to keep the average body weight down, the bucks score wouldn’t drop since the nutrition wouldn’t change. So that tells me that increasing doe weight by adjusting the age structure wouldn’t affect the buck score number here in Alabama. It would affect it though if you adjusted the doe weight by nutrition.
Correct?
Yes. In areas with higher average body weights antler scores are, on average, higher as well. It has to do with habitat quality, not older does giving birth to bucks that develop into higher scoring bucks.
