I can't believe this is still going.....

Pennsylvania WILL NEVER produce the quality of bucks you see in the midwest. Isolated cases, sure, they happen every year where someone takes a big animal. It happened before and after AR was implemented.

PA has several things working against it. For one, we have too many hunters. Many of these hunters are "grocery shopping" when they hit the woods and as long as that buck is legal, they'll shoot it. Secondly, and this relates to the number of hunters, is that these bucks, even with AR, are not reaching the age needed. Some do, but a lot of them don't get past 2 1/2 years of age. Most importantly, in most places of this state, the food is not nearly as good as it is in the mid western states.

You give a buck age and quality food and you'll see them reach potential. PA is not suited in most cases to do this. We're mostly mountains where very little good feed is available, especially during the winter months.

The property I hunt is a perfect example. It's intensively managed for bucks. We plant lots of plots, have quite a bit of ag ground for them to eat. We also don't shoot anything less than an 8pt. But we also have quite a bit of mountain ground too. We do see some big racks every year. Some in the 140-150 range. But no where near what they see in the mid west.

But bluebird, this nonsense of AR actually producing smaller bucks is ridiculous. How can it? If we save a few bucks every year to allow him to get a little older, he's bound to be a bit bigger the following year. Even if the mystical spike is just that, a deer that is inferior, you're still, on average going to see larger bucks.