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?
How many times do I have to explain to you that high grading has nothing to do with when the doe are bred, it has nothing to do with a change in the gene pool and it has nothing to do with a change in any other factors. It is simply the result of harvesting the best buck in each age class and leaving buck that are inferior for the rate of antler development to advance to the next age class.
idiculous 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.
But the studies don't prove that the spikes are the result of being late born and there is no study that shows late born fawns take 4years to catch up with fawns that are born 2 months earlier.
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.
Once again you are intentionally trying to mislead hunters by trying to define the B/D ratio in a way that fits your agenda. The B/D ratio is defined the ratio of adult males to adult females. No where is it stated that a high percentage of female fawns should breed the first year. Besides Alt said we needed ARs to correct the problem of late breeding but it had no effect.
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
Try getting your propaganda right. Twenty years ago the PGC implemented bonus tags and the harvests for the next ten years kept the herd relatively stable. Alt created a crisis that didn't exist and as a result now we have politics more involved than in the last 30 years involved.