When this whole deer sham got started many of us (myself included) were under the impression that all we were doing was reducing the herd to reasonable levels in areas that exceeded the CC of the habitat. We never thought that it would be a blanket whitewashing of the entire state, and we never thought that they would reduce the herd to such absurdly low deer densities, and then forget about carrying capacity altogether and start managing the deer based on the regeneration of tree species. Next they will be managing our turkeys based on insect diversity. I agree Mosse..most of the public land that I hunted in the eighties and nineties we never saw more than about ten deer a day. I can't speculate accurately on what the DD may have been at the time, but it defintely wasn't overrun. Did the deer have an impact? Sure they did. That has always been the case wherever deer have existed. Not saying there wasn't damage occuring or in some cases severe, but I never saw these mythical herds of hundreds of deer mowing down the saplings anywhere I ever hunted, including farmland. Of course we are learning from cases where even a couple of deer have enetered an exclosure, that approx 3-4 deer in a 40 acre exclosure translated to the effect of a DD of 19 dpsm can completely ravage the red oak. Of course not many hunters would consider 19 dpsm "unreasonable DD", but if that amount of deer can potentially impact regeneration to that degree, we are all fooling ourselves to think the pGC and DCNR will ever tolerate such moderate DD ever again. The days of pitiful deer densities are here to stay unless we get a complete regime change. And to add salt to our wound, the WMI audit shows little to no improvement even with the herd reduced severely. Ouch!