Things were looking up long before 2002, for the deer in PA, I retired in 2007 and antler restrictions and herd reduction were in effect for quite a while before that. In fact our problem was not, not enough deer, contrary to what hunters wanted, we had far too many deer and we needed to kill doe Prior to antler restrictions we killed 3/4 of our bucks when they were a year and a half old. Young deer do not make big deer. We had far more doe than we had buck. Once we concentrated on reducing the doe numbers and achieved a balance between buck and doe and allowed our buck to live longer, the health of our herd started improving greatly.