ORIGINAL: bluebird2
Why didn’t you post all of the information? didn’t the rest of it fit your misguided agenda?
Because it was just as meaningless and irrelevant as the rest of the data you posted. IMHO it is simply outrageous for an employee of the PGC to portray the deer management personnel of the PGC as liars for claiming the antlerless harvests have reduced the herd, while you claim that environmental factors are actually controlling the herd. You claim to support scientific deer management while denying the very basic principle that antlerless harvests are used to control the herd and the antlerless allocations determine the antlerless harvest.
Why I would guess that anyone that has a lick of commonsense would look at the harvest FACTS as evidence. In this case the FACTS, or evidence, very clearly prove that hunters have NOT harvested anyway near as many deer in units like 2G, and those other red areas, in recent times as they were fifteen to twenty years ago.
I believe those facts pretty much shot a huge hole in your nonsense theories about how the low deer numbers of today is because hunters over harvested the deer though. After all the high doe harvests occurred fifteen to twenty years ago instead of during recent times.
I don’t believe I have called anyone in the Game Commission a liar either, though I might very well point out something others hadn’t realized on an occasion or two. Sometimes other people within the agency do tend to worry about being more politically correct with their statements then I think they should be. I tend to just tell the real truth instead of telling people what they like to hear or what is politically correct.
The fact is that the real evidence just keeps mounting that the deer numbers are much more controlled by the environmental factors then they are by the hunter harvests in many if not most areas of the state. Of course hunters still play a huge role in the total picture, especially when and wherethey fail to harvest enough deer to keep the deernumbers within the limits of their habitat and food supply.
The evidence pretty clearly proves that the most assured way to have fewer deer in the future is to try keeping more deer then the habitat can long term sustain. That facts say that if the deer herd could have increased from harvesting fewer deer it surely would have done so after fifteen to twenty years of lower doe harvests. After all deer living in suitable habitat can very nearly double their own numbers each and every year. If they aren’t then there is something very wrong besides just hunters harvesting deer, especially when the population keeps declining following reduced doe harvests. Even the village idiot should be able to figure that out.
R.S. Bodenhorn