No one has ever known how many deer there were in any state at any given time in history and if they did it would be changed within about five minutes anyway.
But the PGC claims they can calculate the change in population from one year to the next,so they are in fact claiming they have population estimates just like they have in the past,while at the same time they claim they don't know how many deer we have. That is simply impossible.
deer give you those answers when you monitor them. It makes much more sense to listen to what the deer and habitat have to say then to listen to what hunters have to say. They listen to the hunters so long we have many areas today with very low deer numbers. Listening to the deer works much better because deer don’t have anything but real facts to present while hunters present lots of opinions with almost no supporting facts.
If the PGC listened to the deer , they would increase the antlerless allocations and reduce the herd even more, since the breeding rates decreased by 5 % and productivity also decreased. The deer have shown that the herd was below the MST carrying capacity when we had 1.6M deer and that is why breeding rates decreased instead of increasing as you predicted. LISTEN To The DEER RSB!!