Obviously the deer themselves disagree with how many deer you think there should be. If they agreed with you their numbers wouldn’t have been on nearly a stead decline over the past twenty years or have crashed following a couple of hard winters.
Well, I think that qualifies as #14 on your long list of failed claims and theories. After the herd crashed in the northern tier in 1978 we harvested around 116 K buck in 1979 . From 1979 to 2000 the buck harvests increased ,with small fluctuations until we harvested 203K in 2000 and 2001, which is a clear indication the populations were increasing not decreasing. Then in just seven years the buck harvest dropped to 109K in 2007 as a result of successive years when the harvests exceeded recruitment.