"To deny that other interests have a say is to bury your head in the sand and to play right into the hands of the anti's."

Thats not at all what Im saying. Im not saying they shouldnt have a say. Im saying imho and many others, they haveALL the say, have for some time now, and shouldnt.

" Except for those of us who own big chunks of ground, we get to hunt because the landowners need us or because they are neutral toward us. Continuing to support more deer than the owners of the ground we hunt want to have will eventually bite us in the ass. That includes timber interests, farmers and even suburban homeowners and the driving public. "

If we managed it with ridiculous numbers of the past, I dont think it unreasonable to have still been able to deal with say for example 25% less deer (just throwing a number out, any number shy of what we've reduced to) Most of the people you cite were not demanding more deer be killed. Just a couple of factions were.


"Yep, state forest belongs to every taxpayer. Hunters make up 10% of those taxpayers. As long as those 90% support us we're fine. If we fight the science we'll eventually lose much of that 90% and we'll be on the outside lookin in[:@]"

I dont think so. 90% of those you speak of havent the faintest idea alot of this is even going on and couldnt care less about science of deer management. They support our position because they support US when speaking of friends family etc...

"At 900,000 we can be a formidable force but we are nowhere near a majority. We still need to be viewed as an asset to John Q Nonhunter or we will find ourselves on the way down a slippery slope. We're already seeing the first signs with the talk of outside funding. Once that starts, nonhunters and antis will have a far louder voice than they now have. Your menatlity is like barricading the door and holing up with your deer rifle while a whole SWAT team waits outside! "

I disagree completely. I dont see the sniveling audubon yo-yos or even the somewhat formiddable dcnr as unchallengable.Their position is very weak. There is no justification for the levels of deer right now in Pennsylvania. We havent just reduced our herd, we've gone to extremes. If my position was that no reduction shouldve been done at all, id say that position would be doomed from the get go. But thats not mine.