You know, I lived in Clearfield 14 years ago and I drove to Clearfield as much as 30 years ago. I can tell you that on the way home at night it was nothing to see 100 deer along RT 322 from the bottom of the mountain to Mitches Restaraunt - Top of the Mountain as it is called now.

Why were they along side the road? Because there was nothing in the woods for them to eat that they liked. They liked the green grass that PennDot planted along the road there and that is why they stayed there.

If you look along the road at the top of the mountain, you can see in the woods for 100's of yards, there is no ground cover.

Where did all the deer go? Hunters - yes some - but Clearfield County was the Number 1 or Number 2 county in the State for the harvest of deer for many decades.

Coyotes - Im sure of that! They can reduce a population of deer faster than hunters ever could.

Road Kills? Maybe - but then again, there was always road kills along that road and now there is almost none.

The same with Potter County. I helped build a cabin for the people that owned Pa Pressed Metals in Emporium and can tell you that outside of their cabin - you could look into the meadow in the morning and see 20 - 30 deer grazing in their pasture. Now there are none!

In the grand scheme of things, 3 or 4 deer is nothing. You are not going to save the herd with the addition of 3 or 4 deer over an area of 20 - 40 square miles. We should have 10 deer to the square mile and not 2 to 3!

We didn't shoot all these deer in one area. On the contrary, we shot two in one place and one in another and one in another and still one in another.

The distance between any one kill and the next was no less than 3 miles!

To put it in perspective, my neighbor owns a company that sells Tombstones and he is a retired state cop. His grandfather was a higher up in R & P Coal - which owned large tracts of land in Jefferson and Indiana and Armstrong Counties.

This guy owns hundreds of acres and if I asked I could hunt when ever I wanted / where ever I wanted.

On my way to Church Saturday night there was 1 doe across from the intersection - not 10 feet off the road grazing and another than I had to stop the truck in the middle of RT 310 to let cross the road.

If either of them would have jumped out on the road, that would have been one more dead deer. There is one dead deer already laying along side of the road there right now. Which would you rather have - deer that people eat and enjoy or deer that are hit by cars and die along side the road and nobody eats them and they go to waste.

I will give you the repair bill from the last one that crossed there in front of me - $1500 to theTruck and I didn't even have the fender repainted. The fog light is still broke and the fender is bunged up. Guess when it happened - the night of the last day of deer season last year on my way home from church!

There are no more deer there now than there was 30 years ago when I was a kid and R & P coal owned the property and everybody was allowed to hunt there.

So how does your theory work where you think that if you do not shoot a doe and if you burn your tag - there will be more deer next year?

What about the road hunter that does not tag a deer and shoots more than one per a day and never gets caught. You didn't shoot it, he drives down the road and shoots it. Takes it home, cuts it up or gives it away and goes right back out and shoots another one.

With the unlimited tags, a person can get every person in their family 3 tags and shoot allseason and as long as he doesn't get caught doing it - can get away legally with shooting as many deer as they like!

Where are the deer?