ST Croix, you are right in that we have to live with it. But hopefully there will be enough of an uproar over this to make it short-lived.

Like you, I also shoot my share of does. To truly engage in QDM you have to. So in that regard, I have no problem in plugging a few does. The problems I DO have are two-fold:

1) To have EAB and a special antlerless hunt at the end of October is a bunch of bulls#&!. Really ruins the best part of archery season. Basically, you can shoot a doe opening morning in September, and no matter what one of the peak periods for buck movement is STILL taken away from you.

2) With regard to the deer population, you are absolutely right. It is not to say that some areas may have too many deer, but to cook up numbers...and that is what they are, COOKED UP!...to show that more than half the state has an overpopulation of deer is nonsense. Remember early in 2003 when the DNR's own SAK formula indicated that the deer population was actually lower, since one of the main determinants in population for SAK is previous years' buck harvest? Remember what the DNR did in that case? Simply ignored what SAK was telling them and just assumed that the population was higher anyway. What a beautiful formula! When it agrees with the preconceived notion that the deer population is too high, then they use it to justify their rulemaking; when it doesn't agree, they simply throw it aside and chalk it up to statistical abnomality.

Again, the notion that the vast majority of the state is overpopulated is also due to playing with the overwinter goals, i.e. lowering them.

So how did it get to this? We have a bunch of bureaucrats with a vested interest in telling us that there are too many deer. Think about it. From the standpoint of job security, how would the Wildlife Management division of the DNR be more likely to have job security?: a) if they go to the legislature and the governor and tell them about the "complexity of managing the burgeoning Wisconsin deer population", or b) if they tell them "crop damage claims are down and it appears that deer/vehicle collisions are more likely the result of more vehicles in rurl areas".

Enough already! We have to make sure that this is the last year of this nonsense!