personally i'd rather have hunters taking young bucks for food than see trophy hunters that could care less about meat. i've lots of trophy bucks that were hauled around till they spoiled. where we hunt on farm land the landowners will want you to take a as many deer as you can. they only let you hunt to thin the population because of crop damage. there are plenty of va. trophy bucks. fact is the state is producing better bucks every year. i live 1 mile from the shenadoah national park ,and there will never be any shortage of deer or bear here and with so many people complaining about the crop damage they just ,must be killed. we don't kill every small buck we see ,but we do kill what we want to eat. and i process all my own deer, i wouldn't even think of letting someone else do it.

the pressure that has been put on young hunters to kill trophy racks eveytime you hunt ,is in lots of ways hurting our sport. we hunt for the fun of the hunt ,not the kill and if a trophy comes along ,thats fine. but if not i'll eat the little ones. i've seen young hunters stop hunting because of this pressure. i just not right ,this trophy thing will kill our sport in the long run.

there are plenty of land management programs on land near us. they are growing bigger bucks, but most hunters here are not trophy hunters.

i would guess that half of the trophy deer killed near me are not killed legal anyway. they either die at night or over bait. and now with the new callin game checking you can kill them a month before the season and nobody will ever know.