Apparently you still don't understand that the effects of high grading have nothing to do when the when the doe are bred or a change in the gene pool The decrease in rack sizes occurred within the first five years of ARs, which is far to soon to be the result of a change in genetics.
And then this?
The deer management experts say the decrease in rack sizes was not due to changes in variables or habitat. they attributed the decrease to the effects of high grading and you can't provide anything to refute their position.
Ok which one do you want go with? In one sentence you say it was too soon to have been the affects of genetics and I will agree with you on that. But, then in the very next sentence you say the experts attribute the antler changes to high grading. Is that one of those where you can’t figure out what best suits your misguided at this minute?
If the changes in the Mississippi buck antlers was from high grading it was most likely because they were harvesting their bucks before the breeding season. Since we don’t do that in Pennsylvania the Mississippi study has no relevance anyway, so who in Pennsylvania really cares what the cause of declining antler development was in Mississippi?
It is ridiculous to assume it takes 3 years for a spike buck to make up the effects of being born 2 months later.
Ridiculous or not that is what the studies show, that those spikes will catch up, some in one year, some not for two or three years.
As you know , the B/D ratio before ARs was 1:2.1 and now it is slightly better than 1:2. But breeding rates and productivity have decreased ,so the B/D ratio was not the problem and Alt misled the hunters in order to get HR.
The breeding mature buck to breeding doe ratios are not that high and never have been. The button bucks aren’t breeding mature while a high percentage of the juvenile does are or at least should be if their mothers got bred when they should have.
No breeding rates and productivity have not declined. The STATEWIDE data declined, but only because the sample sizes changed in the various areas of the state and shifted from the best areas providing the highest sample to now the worst areas of the state providing the highest samples. Most of the individual area breeding and reproductive rates have either improved or stayed the about the same. Some areas, like this area, have seen greatly improved breeding rates since antler restrictions improved the buck/doe ratio.
That is nothing more than PGC propaganda. the fact is the PGC issued more antlerless tags in 1998 and 1999 than they did in 2000 and 2002. For decades hunters harvested as many deer as the PGC would allow and to blame the hunters for the current mismanagement is irresponsible on your part.
Though hunters bought the antler less license and harvested deer the fact still remains that the hunter and political pressures were nearly always put into play to force the Game Commission into reducing the allocations every single time the harvests started to get even close to be affective at protecting the deer food supplies. That went on for decade after decade and has been going on for well over fifty years in the northern tier areas of the state.
I know if has been going on because I have been there to hear high powered politicians tell the Commission that if they didn’t reduce the antler less allocations they would never get a license increase. I have been there to hear the politicians say that their constituents wanted fewer antler less license and if the Game Commission didn’t reduce the allocations they would take the regulatory powers away from the Commission and they would decide how many license to issue. I have seen first hand the public (hunter) and political pressures that absolutely forced the professional deer managers into do what they knew to be the wrong thing for the future of the deer, their habitat and the future of hunting.
The thing is I saw those things occurring twenty years ago and now I see the same tactics in play once again. It will not work to have more deer for the future this time any more then it worked the last time. It is the exact opposite of what will result in having the best possible deer management for the future. History has proven that over protection doesn’t result in having more deer for anything more then short term periods of ideal environmental conditions. Yet hunters refuse to learn that lesson and fight to keep repeating that same STUPID mistake over and over and over.
R.S. Bodenhorn